I was expecting the burning of the Library of Alexandria or the Library of Baghdad ("House of Wisdom").
I love Jared Diamond's work, but I think that this essay is incomplete at best and only raises more questions.
If agriculture was a last-resort method, why didn't smaller fractions splinter off from the groups and continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle?
Diamond writes, "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to." I don't think that's true. Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops. And while great sculptures may have arose 15,000 years ago by hunter-gatherer societies, no violins or pianos certainly came about. I think he is downplaying the effect that art and engineering have had here.
In the last paragraph Diamond calls the hunter-gatherer lifestyle the "longest lasting" lifestyle, which is trivially true (it was there first). But he also calls it the "most successful in human history."
Successful how? In terms of happiness? In terms of overcoming various maladies? If they were almost all completely crushed by agrarian societies, as he illustrates in Guns, Germs & Steel, wouldn't that be considered unsuccessful?
> "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to."
I think he actually mentioned a possible reason
Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others
that's engineers and artists and thinkers. They can completely specialize in what they do because they don't have to work to get food. Usually it was because they had a Maecenas who exploited legions of other people to provide (mainly) for himself and (a little) for people who he found interesting (or they provided him with entertainment). And those people created the most innovation, I believe. Innovative farmers would be concerned with how to work on the field so that their backs hurt less, but major advances required seeing the bigger picture.
In 3000 BC, artists, thinkers, lawyers, doctors and engineers (to what extent they existed) were all part of one (mostly parasitic, but in some ways quite useful) caste: priests.
People tend to think of ancient priests as charlatans, but they were also the people who held onto all the knowledge: that if you chew these "magical" leaves while tilling the fields, you don't get tired; if you plant when this "divine" star is rising, you get the best results. The emergence of artists, engineers, et al, apart from a priesthood didn't emerge until the birth of philosophy in the first millennium BC.
Successful in that humans survived that way without major issue for 98% of their existence. We've only been industrialized for a tiny period of our racial history, and we already have and had a host of problems.
(the human race is estimated to be 200,000 years old. Egypt arose at best 5,000 years ago.)
By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy. It's been shown in the past that wealth and higher standards of living do not directly correlate to greater happiness, and frankly our species would have had a hell of a problem if we were chronically depressed for 195,000 years.
I certainly don't disagree with your last point, but I take issue with your first one.
"We've only been doing this for a short while and already all these issues arose" isn't necessarily an argument against something. It could be said about a lot of things, for instance:
The early automobile was only out for a short while but already had a host of problems: It was loud, it required hard-to-get petrol, it couldn't go all the places horses could go, it was more expensive than a horse, and horses could be traded more easily than automobiles (more liquid of an asset).
And yet we worked through these problems. We built roads, autos are quieter and less polluting. They still have their problems, but they far outpace horses in utility.
I think civilization will be the same way. It has troubles at first, sure. Worse nutrition, class divisions, disease. I'll give that.
But its getting better. And my optimistic self hopes it will continue to get better as time goes on.
If industrialization has only been a tiny period of history, well, give it a while!
Certainly; it could wind up being fantastic, and we could wind up fixing all our problems and turning civilization to the best thing to happen to humanity.
It's just that, at this point, we've got 5,000 years of rocky start compared to 195,000 years of what I would like you to imagine as 'smooth sailing'. At this point, which has proven itself? Which has not? That's all the author was talking about.
By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy.
I don't think ancient people were unhappy in the modern sense of the word. Their lives were probably a lot more stressful and certainly extremely violent, but depression was probably nonexistent (a death sentence). I would argue that most modern people would consider their lifestyles undesirable.
I think people tend to look at pre-agrarian society with rose-colored glasses. Did people have better nutrition, in 10000 BC, if they were hunter-gatherers rather than farmers? Yes; that's not even debated. I don't know how much should be taken out of that. For example, there's the often made and almost certainly false claim that agriculture led to gender inequality. From a gender-equality perspective, I don't think that pre-agrarian society was the utopia some people make it out to be. Pre-monogamous societies pretty much invariably treated women as property, because access to women was the signal (and primary benefit) of a man's social status. "Alphas" had many wives, "gammas" had none and were sent off to war as soldiers (to either "take" wives or die). It was better to be a woman than a low-status man, but that doesn't mean gender equality was there. It's hard to have gender equality in that sort of morally debased culture. Monogamous marriage (which came much, much later than agriculture) was the very first wave of feminism.
Your description of human monogamy does not gel with my understanding. My understanding is that as far as monogamous relationships go, we've always been pretty much the way we are now. That is, we are a mostly monogamous species, but not completely. The benefits of social status that you describe still exist now; a middle class man cannot afford a mistress. But the elite in any society is relatively small compared to the size of the society, so most couples are mostly monogamous.
(I keep saying "mostly" because we, as a species, cheat. In "The Third Chimpanzee" Jared Diamond makes a compelling case that cheating is actually an evolutionary strategy, and that we shouldn't dismiss it as people faltering from the ideal marriage. That is, if many, many people do it across all cultures, it's probably in our genes.)
I agree with what you are saying. I think what has changed is that having a harem is no longer socially acceptable. People still cheat all the time, but the era when a high-status man can have 20 "wives", and in which a lot of low-status men (to be made soldiers) can't find any, has ended in the civilized world.
Humans are probably "naturally" polygamous and violent, and also willing to enter violence if it can increase sexual access. This is "good" for the "selfish" genes, but painful for the organism and outright bad for society, which is why societies steer toward mostly-monogamous arrangements as they mature.
I think that there still are very high status men in this world who get away with 20 "wives." Consider, for example, the royalty in Saudi Arabia. My point was it's rare now, and that it was equally rare then. Or do you have stats on it?
There certainly are such high status men. But compared to the world population, and considering they reign over only very small parts of the world, are they even statistically significant?
I don't think ancient people were unhappy in the modern sense of the word. Their lives were probably a lot more stressful and certainly extremely violent, but depression was probably nonexistent (a death sentence). I would argue that most modern people would consider their lifestyles undesirable.
I think people tend to look at pre-agrarian society with rose-colored glasses.
I agree with the rose-colored glasses. However, the post I replied to was hinting they believed it was obvious modern societies would win when compared based on happiness, and I thought it prudent to point out we can't assume that.
I think the highs and lows were a lot steeper in hunter-gatherer societies. The thrill for a 15-year-old hunter after his (or her) first big kill is probably unmatched by the smaller victory of a good SAT score or college admission... or anything we experience in our lives, for that matter. Merely surviving can give people a much stronger sense of purpose than most office jobs. On the other hand, the violent death rate was somewhere around 0.5% per year from conflict with other humans alone. Life expectancy for someone who survived childhood was probably in the mid-50s and some people definitely achieved what would be considered "old age" even today, but if you made it to 65, almost all of your childhood friends would be dead.
It's impossible to compare subjective experiences. I know that I wouldn't trade, but that's all I can really say.
"If agriculture was a last-resort method, why didn't smaller fractions splinter off from the groups and continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle?"
I think he mentions implicitly that agriculture cannibalizes resources that were once diverse and auto-regenerative, in the comment about hunter-gatherers being forced into some of the worst real-estate in the world today.
There's a secondary point that heaps of knowledge about the natural world have been lost, since even the modern, technologically advanced life sciences of today do not reconstitute the "working knowledge" that humans had of how to live off of wild plants and animals for food, medicine, and shelter.
Current events certainly bolster Diamond's argument in some ways. Look at the speculation/agriculture-driven burning of the world's rainforests, for example, for the conversion of mass tracts of biologically diverse (and productive) land into monocultures of diminishing returns.
"Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops."
"Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
Life expectency is now 67 years. I'll take the extra 40 years and deal with the lack of "essential" amino acids.
Of course the real problem with this essay is the nonsensical premise. Agriculture can't be a mistake because it wasn't a decision. There may have been some individual people who decided to switch from hunting to agriculture, but there was no species-wide vote. There is no reason to imagine that there could've been such a vote, or that today there could be a decision for humanity to switch back.
Of course individual people can decide to embrace the hunter gatherer life. I find it interesting that the author is reaching for pen & paper and not loin cloth & spear.
I have a hard time sympathizing with those pining for the days of high infant mortality and periodic semi-starvation. While I don't argue that many people now are unhappy and working too hard, if you're privileged enough to be reading hacker news in your free time you have a shot at a significantly better outcome.
e.g. I went to a public school, worked for 2.5 years out of college, then saved enough to pay off debts and take a year and a half off to go travel. I'm in great health, I have a beautiful wife that I love dearly, my house is never cooler than 65 degrees, and when it rains I don't have to get wet. You can keep your hunting and gathering.
Just because most people now are suckers doesn't mean you have to be one. Smart fiscal and dietary choices open a world of possibilities totally inaccessible to pre-agrarian (or even pre-industrial) humans.
This is a bit like saying "we are happier as babies than as adults so growing up is the worst mistake we ever make".
A charming thought perhaps, but not literally true.
Trying to compare the happiness of cavemen with modern people demolishes whatever vague definition of "happiness" we might already have. And if we fall back on "do modern people want to be cavemen?" then the answer is no.
Agriculture has profoundly changed every aspect of human existence many times over. Can we label the last few millenia of human history collectively as "good" or "bad"? Compared to what?
I have learned a great deal from Diamond's books and articles, but even he shows elsewhere that the two leading causes of death across hunter-gatherer societies are combat between tribes and homicide within tribes. Agricultural civilization didn't introduce cruelty and ignorance into the human race. As smart and creative a thinker as he is, I don't think he adequately corrects, when he compares overall human well-being today with that of 10,000 years ago, for his perspective as someone who has never gone hungry with no idea of when he would eat again, and who is able to study the sweep of human history only because of the human advances in physical and intellectual resources of the past tens of thousands of years.
The hunter-gatherers did not necessarily chose a farming lifestyle, they were likely displaced by the sheer numbers of the farmers. However, modern agriculture requires very few people (proportionally), under 5%. The second worst mistake in human history would be to stifle agricultural and industrial development. There is the great opportunity to lift the other 2/3 of the world out of "farm slavery". Not only to just feed them, but raise their standard of living too.
You could interpret a pre-industrial economy as working on a flat per-capita capital increase. People grew as fast as capital, so there was little opportunity for accumulation (outside the very small ruling class). That is no longer the case, although there are powerful ideologies that would undo it.
I'm not sure the point is to stifle industrial development as much as it's to show we've built our society on several "facts" that might not be entirely accurate. Further I think the author is trying to say people in our society don't question these supposed facts and that society is worse off because of it.
In this case his point is that modern society takes hunter/gatherer cultures that still exist and tries to change them to agriculture based cultures without questioning whether it's best for them.
In your very reply you proved the second point. Let me lay it out...
- His central argument is against the assumption that agriculture is proven to be better than hunting and gathering. He showed evidence of hunter/gatherers spending less time acquiring food and getting a better balanced diet in spite of that.
- You replied that agriculture is great without giving any evidence to refute his argument. The fact that modern agriculture requires fewer people than it once did is only relevant to his point if you have numbers that say modern agriculture's time to acquire food has fallen below that of hunter/gatherers. Otherwise it's irrelevant. Plus you didn't even address the balanced diet argument.
So you've proven the author's main point in that you fell back on the assumption that agriculture automatically equals the best solution.
The article is based on a false dichotomy. Hunter/gatherers farmed, and farmers hunted and gathered. Some did more hunting and gathering, while others did more farming, but for most early societies the labels "hunter/gatherer" and "farmer" describe the same people. See a fantastic (and fantastically short) book on this by Colin Tudge: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300080247.
Exactly. When farmers outnumber you, guess who's winning any land disputes? Even if land changes hands peacefully, a farmer can give you more food for your land than you could possibly gather on it. As Diamond points out, today's gatherers live on land that's not good for farming.
There is a very good reason why hunter gatherers never built the Parthenon, and in general why their technological development is sorely lacking: they lack specialists. Masons, blacksmiths, and later scientists, engineers, and professors are only able to make a living because other people engage in agriculture.
I'm definitely sympathetic to this argument; I might even fall into the primitivist hippie camp. Whatever. Yes, I do think I'd be happier running through the jungle naked than sitting here debugging JavaScript to pay off the insurance, banking, and real estate cartels, so I can continue to occupy a 200 sq-foot box inside an ugly human anthill in a pollution-choked, overcrowded, violence-and-poverty-plagued megalopolis.
Whereas hunter-gatherers were dependent on keeping the environment in a healthy state to survive. The agricultural lifestyle has caused many to regard nature as superfluous, unnecessary. It's the origin of "humanity is the superior race" thinking. So we can bulldoze everything, kill what we can't use and don't find "fuzzy and cute". Because it's all about the "economic value" for us...
I'm not a hippie and am not preoccupied with restoring things as they were 100,000 years ago. But I'm also not sure what we're doing now is the right way. I wish we were behaving less like a plague.
1987: simpler times. I can't help but wonder what to author would have written today given the order-of-magnitude larger mistakes we've made since then, such as reality TV.
About sexism .. there were many hunter-nomad cultures where rape and kidnapping was the normal way of acquiring a bride.
The writer talks about deaths caused by disease and overcrowding from agriculture but he neglects to mention that those people would not have been born in the first place because there wouldn't have been enough food to support them using the hunter-gatherer model. If agriculture causes + 1k births and -100 deaths then it's still net beneficial. This may seem like callous mathematics but would it not be even more cruel to deny existence for those other 900 souls?
>"How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?"
there is no "better" in progress. Using the same analysis, the Industrial Revolution made working peoples life worse than lives of farmers. So what? It isn't about better. It is about species survival and dominance.
Humans are predators with extremely high killing instinct. Wait until the interstellar space annihilation drive invented. Any intelligent species which doesn't have photonic torpedoes may start learning history of Incas and Native Americans. It is easy to imagine how human emission of green house interstellar dust will increase the ratio of Galaxy kernel's X-rays kept inside the Galaxy and causing global galaxy warming and slow down of its rotation.
what this article does not mention is that the viability of hunter-gatherer lifestyles may have eroded significantly during the (ongoing) quaternary extinction event that began in the late pleistocene. the proliferation of hunter gatherers and their comparative excellence at hunting may have in fact caused this extinction (see overkill theory). furthermore, declining game reserves places strong incentive on creating reliable alternative food sources, so agriculture may be a direct consequence of this success of our ancestors' lifestyle.
when considered as an alternative to sudden, significant population decline as a result of collapsing prey biomass rather than to a literal (and possibly the mythological origin of) eden, the choice to live agriculturally is the best mistake we've ever made.
i tend to think that agriculture was a necessity based on population density and the formation of towns/cities. too many people in one place means there needs to be a renewable source of food. hunting and gathering for hundreds would eventually result in too little to feed everyone.
perhaps i could've worded it better -- the mistake (imo) wasn't choosing agriculture, agriculture was a necessary byproduct required to facilitate living in cities.
I don't think we would have lived in cities without developing agriculture - that is, I think you're putting the carriage before the horse. Agriculture not only enables us to feed many more mouths, but it required us to settle in one place. We had no incentive to settle in one place before agriculture.
perhaps. i'd be interested to read more on the topic. but to play devil's advocate:
agriculture requires us to settle in one place for a length of time. so does building shelter. a lot of things require at least semi-permanent settling in one spot. the modern tribes mentioned in the article aren't nomadic yet they still hunt/gather. to develop agriculture far enough to be able to sustain large numbers of people, it would most likely require practice, implying they were already at least somewhat stationary.
i think its more likely that a lot of things co-developed at around the same time, but i find it more difficult to be sold on the fact that we somehow learned the skill of developing crops over lengths of time to feed many mouths BEFORE we were more permanently settling in a single location.
I think that our settlements were semi-permanent as hunter-gatherers. We could move with the seasons. In this case, agriculture would give us a reason to stay put when previously we may have moved on.
But even these are distinct from "cities." A city implies a number of people in at least a few thousand. My understanding is that hunter-gatherer tribes were in the order of several dozen. I just don't see thousands of people living in one place without agriculture.
i was just using "city" as a placeholder since it was used in the article. most of the problems mentioned in the article are perfectly capable of surfacing at a much smaller settlement size.
I don't think that's the case with disease. Diseases need to have always have some living host in order to not die out completely. I don't think groups of several dozen are large enough to support that. Further, it's possible that some of our diseases are actually from the animals we domesticated as a part of agriculture.
I think Diamond is pointing out that it may be a misconception to think of hunting/gathering as a "terrible" quality of life to indicate that population pressure might have forced us into ag. This suggests an order to the chicken/egg problem.
Basically the population grew to a large enough size where the game they were hunting and the berries they were gathering weren't enough (or went extinct) so they had to switch to a agrarian lifestyle, which needed more work and yielded less.
and i suppose what i'm trying to say is that if you have a group large enough to outgrow hunting/gathering, its likely to be large enough to generate at least some of the issues described in the article attributed to large groups of people.
The basic question, as Prof. Diamond puts it is: "How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?" One can extend this: How do you know the Industrial Revolution made people lives better (read Dickens to see the inhuman conditions), or the nuclear revolution (Chernobyl, Japan), or the Internet revolution (the ADD generation texting, sexting, etc). Prof. Diamond thesis seems to be that we made a huge mistake by moving from hunter gatherer to agricultural society, which, inevitably, brought about most of the evils we are fighting with now. Proof? Just look at the idyllic life of current hunter gatherers.
To back his claim, he puts forth arguments ranging from absurd
"As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to."
to anecdotal, i.e. no proof at all
"Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well... Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip ..."
And the final stroke, the masterful FUD-laden last paragraph:
"As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us? "
Setting aside that there is no global shortage of food (does not mean that nobody's is hungry, but the reasons are complex and food shortage is not one of them), most of this is, at best speculative.
If you liked his point of view, than you may also like Prof. Eric Pianka's thesis that there are too many people on earth and if an airborne Ebola virus kills 90% it would be a good thing (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html).
The problem with these views is that they resonate with a certain mindset, people who think we have too much science and technology in our lives and it would have been better to live like the "so-called" primitive people. One recent example that comes to mind is the movie Babies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020938/). Here, the life of the two babies living in primitive (not so-called, really primitive) conditions in Africa and Kazakhstan is discreetly shown to be better and more free than their counterparts in the US and Japan.
As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers.
I think this is actually true, in a weird way. We work, including commuting, personal errands, and house chores, about 2700 hours per year. Most pre-agrarian people did not work as many hours. Their "work" was a lot more dangerous (throwing spears at angry, large animals) and probably more intense. The stakes were also a lot higher: if they fail, they die. That said, they probably only worked about 1600-2400 hours per year because there wasn't all that much work for them to do. During the off-season (hunting-wise) and during the winter (for gatherers) it's also likely that they slept 10-18 hours per day due to low metabolism/semi-hibernation. (Many medieval people in the Alps went into semi-hibernation in the winter, sleeping 16-20 hours per day.) Whether this is to be considered "free time" is uncertain and probably somewhat subjective. It's unclear what they did. It's likely that their lives were very boring by our standards, exciting only on account of the extreme danger.
AFAIK, in hunter-gatherer sopcities people are divided into two groups: those that can hunt and those who cannot, the latter group including elderly, children, women, and very few other people, e.g. the shaman (this also disproves his point about gender equality, in such socities women are, by necessity, second class). So, it is very hard, esp. for men, to specialize in anything other than hunting, e.g. arts or crafts, unless it brings an immediate utility to the tribe.
Another point is: more people = more brain diversity -> easier for people with interesting ideas to be in the society, the intellectual gene pool, if you will. And an agri lifestyle definitely supports larger tribes.
> in such socities women are, by necessity, second class
Not necessarily. Please take into account that in all but most extreme climates, most of the raw calories in a hunter-gatherer group comes from the gathering part, which is mostly a female activity. The problem with a pure gathering diet is that it tends to be protein and fat deficient, so one strategic contribution of the male hunters is not to keep the bellies full, but the diet balanced. Neolithic farmers discovered the hard way that a belly full of grains still leads you to malnutrition.
The other big strategic contribution of male hunters to their communities is protection. The only way a bunch slow moving, child bearing women can wander safely in the wilderness gathering food and wood is to bring a couple of armed men along. This men were probably too old or too young to join the hunters, but would provide a valuable service in protecting their people of predators (human or otherwise).
Not to imply that women are unable to defend themselves... but Nature does not care about political correctness. Females are more valuable to the reproductive capacity of the tribe, so it makes more sense to have males run higher risks.
I understand where the author is trying to go and I was rooting for him, but it looked like he lacked the depth to do the analysis, so he kind of meandered around. Some parts were better, some parts were worse. This kind of counter-factual discussion (what would the world be like if Hitler had won? How about if the Neanderthals hadn't died out?) has a tendency to get fluffy pretty quickly. Fun for a paragaph or two, or a tweet, but very tough to pull off in essay or longer format.
I'd take the risks and rewards of agriculture over billions of years of repetitive nomadic hunter-gathering, where no generation does anything different than its ancestors.
If we take 'happiness' to be the fitness function of human evolution and a driver for adaption then I think it highly unlikey humans would ever change to become less happy. Infact, I might suggest that human happiness (amount of) is likely to be the one thing in common to modern civilizations as to those 200,000 years ago.
In addition, be careful to use the word 'evolution' with timeframes as miniscule as 200,000 years - the author correctly uses the word 'adoption'.
My first question upon looking at this article: is there really enough evidence available to presume the ability to make a conclusive judgment / argument?
There is enough to begin a discussion about it. What is one of the top 2-3 things everyone wishes for? Health. He makes a convincing argument that hunter-gatherers were considerably more healthy than agriculturalists.
It's funny, just a couple of hundred years ago, the belief was that the human race used to be happy and successful, and then declined. For intellectuals: Greece, Rome, even the Central/South American civilizations. For every one else: Eden or Atlantis, etc.
Progress isn't always a straight line. Early automobiles were poor replacements for horses or horse-powered vehicles, but the potential was there.
"The young people of today love luxury. They have bad manners, they scoff at authority and lack respect for their elders. Children nowadays are really tyrants, they no longer stand up when their elders come into the room where they are sitting, they contradict their parents, chat together in the presence of adults, eat gluttonously and tyrannise their teachers." -- Socrates, 470-399BC
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has a good book called Civilization: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature that talks a lot about this, among other things.
The worst mistake in human history was me reading this terrible article. The author doesn't think hierarchical societies are possible in hunter/gatherer societies?
"Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history."
And since then, all we've managed to do is construct the entirety of human knowledge. Atoms, DNA, trips to space.. I mean I'm sitting in air-conditioning write this over the Internet. On a mid-tier laptop that exceeds every scientific capability that hunter gatherer societies ever had.
But, the author makes a fair point that
"Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to."
And yes, hunter gathers did make scrimshaw and paint ochre on rocks.
This article is like a hookworm in my brain. I wish I could un-read it. So awful in so many ways.
Come now, you can provide a better analysis than this.
>And since then, all we've managed to do is construct the entirety of human knowledge. Atoms, DNA, trips to space..
What does that really do for any individual person. Does simply knowing about atoms, DNA, space make your average happiness strictly greater than that of a hunter-gatherer? Of course not. Unless you can show that technology strictly makes the average happiness for humans greater, it is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
What your post comes down to is: "I have all this cool stuff, so clearly we're better off now". How self-centered of you.
Why would I need to provide a better analysis than this? The benefits of scientific advancement to the individual are so numerous and ubiquitous that only an idiot would dismiss them.
The article was essentially asking is quality of life after agriculture better than that of hunter-gatherers. Scientific advancements themselves aren't an answer to that question. At the end of the day, the same things that mattered then matter now: health, companionship, relationships, social status. Technology does not across the board enhance these things (and in many ways it reduces the baseline of these properties). So if you want to make an argument that technology makes us strictly happier than our ancestors you're going to have to provide some kind of reasoning. Isn't that what's expected around here?
Overpopulation is the elephant in the room that no one talks about, and I believe that most of the issues today have it at its core. Much of propaganda is designed to dance around the issue of population control -- "the primary responsibility of government is to project the minority of the opulent from the majority" (listen this Harvard talk on "Propaganda and Control of The Public Mind" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0OnTHz--7I&playnext=1...).
In the 1960s Henry Kissinger completed National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), which is more commonly referred to as the "Kissinger Report" (http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PCAAB500.pdf). Kissinger says that the greatest threat to America is not the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but the overpopulation of third-world countries. NSSM 200 discusses several mechanisms that control population growth, such as war, famine, disease, pestilence, poverty and immigration.
Dr. Al Bartlett's (http://www.albartlett.org/) says, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" (you can watch his famous lecture on population growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU&playnext=1...). He then goes through the stark reality of what will happen if we continue our exponential growth against finite natural resources.
Research by economists John Donohue and Steven Levit at the University of Chicago (http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittT...) showed that the legalizing of abortion started to reduce violent crime by the 1980s because would-be impoverished people weren't growing up to be criminals. You may have read about this is Levit's book, Freakonomics (http://freakonomicsbook.com/).
Abortion, one of our most controversial issues, is primarily about population control, but this rarely gets talked about. It's the establishment's pink elephant that's been sitting in the room since the 1970s (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html...). We argue about "right to life" and "right to choose" and most have never even considered the bigger issue because that's the way the issue has been framed.
The question we should be asking is, "Do you believe that population control is a good thing or a bad thing?"
At the end of Dr. Bartlett's lecture on population growth, he presents the "Great Challenge." He asks, "Can you think of any problem on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted or advanced by having larger populations at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?"
My answer to his challenge is: Yes, larger populations mean we have more of our greatest resource -- ourselves. Our creativity and ingenuity has developed solutions to our greatest problems, but we need true and accurate information so that we make better decisions and work toward a solution.
>My answer to his challenge is: Yes, larger populations mean we have more of our greatest resource -- ourselves. Our creativity and ingenuity has developed solutions to our greatest problems, but we need true and accurate information so that we make better decisions and work toward a solution.
Exactly. Scientific and technological advancements help everyone (at least potentially) because you don't have to divvy up knowledge. Even better the rate of scientific advancement tends to increase with a larger existing knowledge base. Ultimately more population means (much) more advancement. That's the most exciting aspect of China and India's advancements in recent decades. To play amateur psychologist, I suspect that why this isn't immediately obvious to people like Dr. Bartlett is because they don't think in terms of scientific progress.
So true. As I read the article, I couldn't help thinking of the latest Less Wrong post about "Levels of Action." In particular:
Studies have shown that there is a significant positive correlation between alcohol use, and income in life. Why would that be? Drinking alcohol doesn't make you smarter. Nor does it make you work harder, or become more skilled, or gain additional knowledge. I think the reason is that alcohol is disinhibitory.
well if you sampled the 6 billion people in the world, yes, rich people drink alcohol.
I think its a bit like saying 'rich people drive Ferraris' - yes, of course! having a lot of disposable income will obviously lead to the ability to purchase luxury, non-essential items like alcohol.
That is an interesting statement. I'd estimate that the sample would show that alcohol was used by people with a broad range of income levels. However, the only way a hunter-gatherer (as described by Diamond) would obtain alcohol is to trade with a farmer or someone who can do the meta-work required for alcohol and supported by farming.
On the positive correlation between alcohol use and income: I think it's because alcohol is socially disinhibitory, and expected to be that way, and this makes it socially useful for, e.g., getting information out of people that they'd usually guard. Most office politics is learned at the bar. If you ask someone, at 3:00 pm, certain pointed questions, you're a creep and a gossip. If you ask those questions after-hours at the bar when everyone's "supposed" to be drunk and loose-lipped, no one gives a shit.
Farming beat out hunting and gathering because it was more fit. That doesn't mean it was "better". Evolution is not necessarily progressive. Evolution is "survival by that which can spread its genes", and agricultural people are better at that.
Agricultural peoples simply out-populated their nomadic, hunter-gatherer brethren. Both groups of populations stole from the other (and within their group) but agricultural people could raise more soldiers. Nomadic warriors were individually superior (better nutrition, more battle experience, more likely to have up-to-date battle technologies due to mobility) but were no match when outnumbered 20:1 by armed peasants. Also, to rob a farming population, one has to leave some of them alive, and that means that, 14 years later, they have a fresh crop of soldiers.
It's (probably) true that the average quality of life declined during 15-4k BC as agriculture spread throughout Eurasia and North Africa-- agriculture made severe and persistent social inequalities possible-- but the quantity grew, as did "energy capture", or the ability of humans to draw energy out of the environment. Thus, agriculture won. It couldn't have happened any other way. Also, it wasn't a single choice that happened suddenly. The transitions from nomadic to semi-nomadic to semi-agricultural to fully agricultural lifestyles happened over centuries. Agriculture probably began as a "last resort" in event of an ecological catastrophe (Younger Dryas) that depleted game but, as rising human population became a "constant catastrophe", overtook hunting and gathering outright.
At any rate, until one has agriculture (and religion, as a motivating force) one is very unlikely to see the written word, which is a necessary precursor for modern society. Whether one is better off in 15000 BC vs. 1500 AD, I would honestly call a toss-up, but I'd much rather be alive in 2011 AD than 15000 BC.
It's (probably) true that the average quality of life declined during 15-4k BC as agriculture spread throughout Eurasia and North Africa-- agriculture made severe and persistent social inequalities possible
I would be cautious about drawing such a conclusion. I think if you were a typical neolithic farmer you would not be looking yearningly at the hunter-gatherers living in the mountains, wishing you could live like them. You'd probably feel that their life was pretty hard.
There's a pretty lengthy section in the middle of "What Technology Wants" by Kevin Kelly that argues against romanticized portraits of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Here's the short version:
Lifespans were short, so there were basically no old people. Old people are key carriers of institutional memory. Without them, you don't have much culture, and you can't learn from the past. Every generation is forced to reinvent the wheel. That's why they didn't develop technology or art.
"Lifespans were short, so there were basically no old people."
I don't have a citation for this, but I've heard that the reason that the average lifespan in ancient times was so short was mostly due to the high rate of infant mortality.
Those people who did manage to survive infancy actually lived much longer than you'd expect. And the maximum human lifetime back then was not much different than the maximum human lifetime today.
I don't think KK is talking about averages that have been brought down by infant mortality. He's saying explicitly that among hunter-gatherers, lifespans were short. Which I believe from what I've read about them.
It's also false that people who made it to maturity in preindustrial times lived as long as people do today. It was unusual to see 70.
I would be cautious about drawing such a conclusion. I think if you were a typical neolithic farmer you would not be looking yearningly at the hunter-gatherers living in the mountains, wishing you could live like them. You'd probably feel that their life was pretty hard.
I suspect there would never be such a comparative perception. I doubt a neolithic farmer is tending a field and thinking "gosh, should I just give this up and head back into the mountains?" As little as they probably even considered hunter-gatherers, they probably considered them something "other".
Actually, evolution does tend to be progressive from the point of view of selfish genes. It's just not necessarily progressive from the point of view of things like creature comforts.
I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. Following pleasure and hedonic drives seems to lead nowhere. After all, isn't the most efficient route to happiness heroin?
Most animals spend 100% of the time conserving energy or hunting (primates and children play excluded). They don't do leisure.
Evolution favors the plentiful. Some might say the most fit to survive the earth are the roaches. We can't kill them, all our techniques fail, nukes won't kill them, they live off the scraps of crap that humans don't even think creatures can live on.
Agriculture ensured that we have an ability to feed an increasing number of people. It also means that we can settle any area, and as long as crops grow there, or crops can be IMPORTED there humans can spread to that area. With that came technology for defending it from humans and predators. From an evolutionary perspective, agriculture is perfect.
Most animals spend 100% of the time conserving energy or hunting (primates and children play excluded). They don't do leisure.
Sorry, you missed several of the essential activities. All of the important ones are summed up in the 4 Fs: feeding, fleeing, fighting and fornication.
I agree with you, but the characterization in your second paragraph of hunter-gatherers and farmers might be construed as two static ideologies battling for supremacy (which isn't true). Indeed, as you say, the transition from nomadic to agricultural was messy, happened over centuries, and was a result of many factors.
Also, once you have a permanent address you can trade. Civilization does well in places with trade routes (like coasts, big slow rivers, or well defended roads)
Great post! However, do you have any sources to back your claim on religion? Not sure if you are saying, that religion is required 'as a motivating force' for building a stable society or for writing thoughts down. Both developments can be explained well without religion, no?
For a long time people had that idea, but new findings may challenge that view. The Gobekli Tepe site, near Urfa, Turkey (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-te...) is dated to ~ 11K years ago and is thought to be the world's first temple. This pushed back the dawn of religion quite far back.
"To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies."
This view has not been accepted by all, but it had generated quite a bit of excitement and discovery.
No one knows for sure, and it's a running joke in anthropology that anything poorly understood among ancient peoples is declared "religious", but it's probable that religion emerged at the same time as law (the real motivator behind inventing writing) and that they were deeply intertwined.
Belief in the supernatural exists for genetically hard-wired reasons, but the first truly organized religions were probably not the live-and-let-live shamanic practices that began among hunter-gatherers, but ancestral cults with some coercive intent. The most important question of law has generally been: who should own what? This is where the ancestors (cum deities) come in. A king will just have you killed if you steal his possessions. What happens when he dies and his less charismatic son wants the same power and privilege? His son says, "If you don't show the same loyalty to me as you showed my father, he will possess a lion and that lion will eat you." This raises the possibility of an afterlife. A generation later, the grandson says, "If you disobey me, my grandfather will torment you forever in the afterlife." Eventually, these ancestors became gods and their accomplishments are magnified to supernatural levels of achievement. Three thousand years of oral tradition later, with a human ancestor morphed into a fictional character and no one able to determine who the "real" descendants were, priests (people of high social class) become the intermediaries. Divination, religion, and law were intertwined at this time. Law began from the question, "How do we organize our society to keep the gods happy?" And it needed written tradition to keep track of what worked and what didn't. Most of what was being divined at first was who "rightfully" owns land, possessions, and people-- and gambling, for the record, probably has the same roots: Let's ask the gods who should have these resources.
This is not to say that pragmatic, civil law could have emerged in the absence of religion, and I'm sure that half the architects of ancient law were thinking, "I don't really believe in this supernatural shit, but these ideas work", but it seems not to have happened that way. Modern philosophy didn't even exist until 700 BC at the earliest, by which point the ancestors and divine-kings and gods were well-established.
By the way, I don't mean to disparage religious belief outright with this summary. I'm a skeptic who generally finds organized religion silly, but I'm actually a deistic Buddhist, not an atheist or agnostic. That, however, is a discussion for another time.
The main thing here is that in good times an agricultural society was able to produce surplus. And the existence of this surplus made hierarchies possible: suddenly the society could afford to have a non-working ruling class.
Organized religion probably arose from the possibility of surplus combined with an agricultural society's need for having someone observe the seasons and predict weather.
It seems to me that it's quite rare that humanity addresses concerns on any scale before they actually become problems. If that's the mistake, we sure do make that mistake a lot.
By the way, the Google searches I did reveal that this 1987 essay is often assigned reading in college classes.
After edit: seeing pg's post (same reply level as this one) reminds me of a very interesting book about pre-agricultural life, based on an extensive discussion of most of the available scholarly evidence.
Guthrie is a paleozoologist, a bow-hunter, and an a visual artist, who uses his knowledge of Pleistocene times to draw a vivid picture of the life of our ancestors.
A comprehensive scan of the human genome finds that hundreds of our genes have undergone positive natural selection during the past 10,000 years of human evolution.
Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.
I wonder how long until human evolution produces humans genetically incapable of interbreeding. Wikipedia says that even some intergeneric (genus) hybrids may be fertile!
Here is some unsettling information about "humanzees" and "chumans", hypothetical intergeneric hybrids between humans and chimpanzees:
Hybrids between different subspecies within a species (such as between Bengal and Siberian tigers) are known as intra-specific hybrids. Hybrids between different species within the same genus (such as between lions and tigers) are sometimes known as interspecific hybrids or crosses. Hybrids between different genera (such as between sheep and goats) are known as intergeneric hybrids. Extremely rare interfamilial hybrids have been known to occur (such as the guineafowl hybrids). No interordinal (between different orders) animal hybrids are known.
good point - of course I absolutely believe humans (as well as every other living thing on Earth) as still evolving. And of course evolution happens all the time, with every generation evolution must be happening. And I've written genetic algorithms to find solutions to problems so I know that evolution is not intrinsically a slow process.
My point really was that evolutionary changes in these time-scales are very unlikey to significantly affect society (changing to agriculture etc).
Evolution doesn't always happen slowly. To take a well-known example: The lactase persistence gene went from insignificant levels to covering the majority of Europe and northern Asia over just a few thousand years.
Evolution usually happens slowly because usually species are already well-adapted to their environment. When an environment changes to provide a significant benefit to a particular mutation, the spread of that mutation can speed up dramatically.
That's not really a clarification, as it's misleading.
Every single child inherits traits from its parents with variation, and the frequency of their being passed on to another generation is subject to selection pressure. That's all evolution is. Biological evolution happens with every generation - hours in bacteria, decades with humans. And since we're reproducing asynchronously, it's happening second by second across the population.
This is important to understand. Evolution does NOT operate on scales of thousands or millions of years. It can not, because there are no reproduction-variation-selection operations working on that timescale in biology (that I know about). There may be large time spans between what look like interesting things - speciations, the advent of birds, etc. But this is just in the mind of the observer.
Consider that the bacteria that cause infectious disease are becoming resistant to the antibiotics we've had for only a few decades. We can see evolution happening in petri dishes.
Don't try to draw any technical insight from Ricky Gervais' comment. Chimps today, like all animals today, are are equally evolved.
Well, for any major fitness difference, evolution could happen considerably more quickly than millions of years. A 10% difference would be noticeable in only hundreds of years, and a 1% difference in thousands.
Biological evolution takes place over millions of years: actually, it's a bit faster than that and can be observed quite quickly in simpler organisms, but I agree with what you are saying. At present, cultural and technological evolution are so fast that biological evolution seems to be glacial in comparison.
I would argue that the occlusion of hunter-gatherer lifestyles by agriculture is an "evolutionary" process, even though one in the cultural rather than biological sphere (since it's unlikely that there were substantial genetic differences between the two types of people). As with biological evolution, what survives is what is most fit and not what is "best".
I love Jared Diamond's work, but I think that this essay is incomplete at best and only raises more questions.
If agriculture was a last-resort method, why didn't smaller fractions splinter off from the groups and continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle?
Diamond writes, "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to." I don't think that's true. Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops. And while great sculptures may have arose 15,000 years ago by hunter-gatherer societies, no violins or pianos certainly came about. I think he is downplaying the effect that art and engineering have had here.
In the last paragraph Diamond calls the hunter-gatherer lifestyle the "longest lasting" lifestyle, which is trivially true (it was there first). But he also calls it the "most successful in human history."
Successful how? In terms of happiness? In terms of overcoming various maladies? If they were almost all completely crushed by agrarian societies, as he illustrates in Guns, Germs & Steel, wouldn't that be considered unsuccessful?