It is an article of faith that the enormous loss of Indian life after the Spanish arrived was because the Indians had no immunities to measles, smallpox, and a bunch of other diseases that had been killing people in the Old World long enough that our gene pool had selected the weak ones out. One of the student papers referenced a CDC article that I found fascinating:
Abstract
The native population collapse in 16th century Mexico was a demographic catastrophe with one of the highest death rates in history. Recently developed tree-ring evidence has allowed the levels of precipitation to be reconstructed for north central Mexico, adding to the growing body of epidemiologic evidence and indicating that the 1545 and 1576 epidemics of cocoliztli (Nahuatl for "pest”) were indigenous hemorrhagic fevers transmitted by rodent hosts and aggravated by extreme drought conditions.
Now, this was not entirely without Spanish involvement:
These infections appear to have been aggravated by the extreme climatic conditions of the time and by the poor living conditions and harsh treatment of the native people under the encomienda system of New Spain. The Mexican natives in the encomienda system were treated as virtual slaves, were poorly fed and clothed, and were greatly overworked as farm and mine laborers. This harsh treatment appears to have left them particularly vulnerable to epidemic disease.
As I continue to grade papers, I see troubling items. Sometimes not AI. From a comment on a paper:
No page numbers or headers are often signs that a student copied and pasted from an AI program. There are enough grammar errors and clumsy sentences that I doubt you used AI, unless it was developmentally delayed AI.
Another paper with AI fingerprints all over it. Some of these, even if not provably AI, are so bad that many AI programs need to go to college. Vague, general, shallow obvious statements with references to unnamed documents. Has anyone figured out where we go after AI? Assuming colleges and universities still have a use.
