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Ronald Bailey listens to a learned anthropologist wax nostalgic for the days of hunter-gathering pre-agriculture, and says pass the corn.
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|6.9.06 @ 2:51PM|#
I love listening to people yearn for the days when a minor injury could cost you your life, when there was a question of whether humans were more important in the ecosystem as predators than as prey.
That they do so from the comfort of a climate-controlled building, using a global telecommunications network and with a meal in their bellies that did not involve anything more strenuous than shouting their order into a drive-through mic -- well, that's just funny.
|6.9.06 @ 3:00PM|#
True, many of these people wasted a lot of effort on religious mumbo jumbo, but some spent their time inventing pottery, writing, weaving, metal working and so forth.
Ironically, the latter frequently did these things in support of that, um, mumbo jumbo.
|6.9.06 @ 3:01PM|#
Fagan must be correct. There were just so many more hunter-gatherers than agriculturists.
Not!
|6.9.06 @ 3:38PM|#
Evolutionary stability is the proportional to environmental stability. Stability is measured, per species, by successful proliferation. Farming introduced a new, more effective type of proliferation that directly facilitated population growth. Our genes don't care if we die young or suffer through famines so long as we are more likely with one behavior (such as farming) to successfully rear young before we die. It is not always a survival advantage to avoid suffering, so we suffer sometimes.
Any analysis that compares the severity of current climate disasters to past climate disasters must take into account that we have more to lose today. Joe Caveman 15,000 years ago doesn't have to worry about his beach house getting washed away, or even worry about losing as many close relatives in a disaster: many of his relatives have already died by other causes.
The death of a million people to a drought or a tidal wave proves two general tendancies. One, we are vulnerable to high death rates during disasters, and two, our species as a whole is less vulnerable to extinction because of these same behavior choices that once in a while leave us to die like lemmings.
|6.9.06 @ 3:51PM|#
>Our genes don't care if we die young or suffer through famines so long as we are more likely with one behavior (such as farming) to successfully rear young before we die.
True. There's no reason why farming couldn't support an increase in the human population yet lead to a general decline in health, so long as people tended to stay healthy long enough to successfully reproduce.
|6.9.06 @ 4:07PM|#
Don't care if it's off-topic, but:
IT'S ON, BABY!
World Cup 2006!
6 goals in the opener. Suck on it, "nil-nil" idiots.
|6.9.06 @ 4:12PM|#
Any analysis that compares the severity of current climate disasters to past climate disasters must take into account that we have more to lose today.
On an individual basis, we have more things to lose, but we are much less likely to lose our lives to any climate event than our ancestors were due to modern technology.
On a species level, of course, we are increasingly less vulnerable to any kind of climate change.
I think, then, that Brad's is an argument, then, for caring less about "climate change".
There's no reason why farming couldn't support an increase in the human population yet lead to a general decline in health,
I think this may be an oxymoron, since it is hard to increase the population without also reducing mortality, which in turn is inconsistent with a general decline in health.
It may be pretty close to a tautology that population increase = general increase in health. Can anyone think of any counterexamples, where a society actually grew its population at the same time that its mortality rate was increasing?
|6.9.06 @ 4:26PM|#
Well as Ron noted, many anthropologists do argue that the general health of horticultural and agricultural populations was less than that of hunter-gatherers, yet we know that population size has increased since the development of farming. I was speaking of relative differences in health above a threshold level of mortality, I suppose. Plenty of people live long enough to pass on their genes without ever achieving an optimum level of health due to poor diet, "lifestyle" choices, etc.
|6.9.06 @ 4:33PM|#
reminds me of a cartoon I saw recently.
Caveman1 says to Caveman2:
"I don't get it. We have clean air, clean water, all our food is 'organic', and we get plenty of exercise, but STILL everyone dies before they're 30"
Jake
(who lives a simple life standing on the shoulders of industrial giants)
|6.9.06 @ 4:34PM|#
I find it ironic that the same people who denounce GM foods are the ones who spout the horrors of global warming.
Humans continue to conquer obstacles with technology. The cultures that are afraid of technology are the ones that fade. But I suspect that for whatever reason, environmentalists have an anti-human streak in them. Such a pity.
|6.9.06 @ 4:44PM|#
FPC,
how is that 'ironic'. At worst it's 'internally consistent'.
Whether their fundamental reasons are 'all works of man are bad' or 'all science is bad' or 'things I don't understand scare me', they can be applied equally to the spectres of GM food and global warming ( to say nothing of nuclear power and bioengineering humans and space travel and fossil fuels and chemistry and....)
Jake
(who figured it was obvious)
Larry A|6.9.06 @ 6:06PM|#
There's no reason why farming couldn't support an increase in the human population yet lead to a general decline in health,
I think this may be an oxymoron, since it is hard to increase the population without also reducing mortality, which in turn is inconsistent with a general decline in health.
Well, not in this case. A major feature of the agrarian lifestyle is a permanent residence. That?s a necessary ingredient for care of the less-than optimally healthy.
Individuals in a hunter-gatherer society are going to be healthier simply because every time the animals wander off or all the local berries have been plucked, the tribe has to pick up and walk over the horizon. Anyone too sick, old, crippled, hungry, pregnant, etc. to keep up gets eliminated.
Not a health plan I'd want to participate in.
|6.9.06 @ 6:17PM|#
It's ironic because, despite claiming the scientific mantle, they try to push a viewpoint that may eventually lead to extinction.
Global warming in and of itself won't lead to the demise of humans. (Any more than any other variable will.) Rejecting advancements in food production might.
|6.9.06 @ 7:31PM|#
RC Dean,
You are right that modern technology, which exists in direct consequence of farming, makes us individually more immune to disaster.
Fagan's reasoning seems to have a similar flaw to the reasoning used to support government interference in the private sector. He assumes that the selfish choices of individuals, when combined into a society or group, usually act in opposition to the 'interests of the group.' Therefore the primitive man who settles to farm is acting in his immediate best interest, but this choice spread across the group would be self destructive.
This reasoning is flawed because the group has no interests. We say groups have 'interests' because applying anthropormorphic terms to explain group dynamics makes them seem logical and accessible. I think this convenient use of language gets people assuming group interest is not logically self-contradictory. Groups have no progeny to defend, no choices to make and therefore no definable evolutionary selection criteria. An individual may perish because of group failure, but it still individually failed because it 'chose' that group. What it comes down to is the question, individual per individual: will farming make me more likely to survive, or less?
This same reasoning is also applied to markets. Statists assume that our individual selfish decisions usually result in negative consequencies for the group, so they are always looking to create top-down solutions.
|6.10.06 @ 12:44AM|#
I enjoyed and agree with the post, but I do have one minor quibble. Pottery and weaving were invented long before agriculture. The oldest pottery from 11,000 years ago and the oldest weaving (green cloth found in Jordan) is from 9,000 years ago. In both cases the associated cultures, which existed in stable, year-round villages, did not have domestic plants. Jared Diamond in fact credits the existence of pottery storage vessels with making the transition to a farming economy quicker in the Fertile Crescent than anywhere else.
Oh, and for the record, I am completely in favor of the industrial revolution and its delightful consequences, like eyeglasses and indoor plumbing.
|6.10.06 @ 12:22PM|#
Good thing not too many cavemen were luddites or extreme environmentalists. Fire would have been the GM foods bugaboo of the day.
|6.10.06 @ 1:02PM|#
I am completely in favor of the industrial revolution and its delightful consequences, like eyeglasses and indoor plumbing. (My emphasis)
Indoor plumbing probably did more than anything else to expand the human lifespan. I currently am trying to remove "crap" from my vocabulary, as it's horrible that the way we remember the man who invented the flush toilet is to make his name a synonym for shit.
|6.10.06 @ 1:33PM|#
The legend of Thomas Crapper, is unfortunately (or fortunately for his descendants) just that, a legend. He was a sanitation engineer, true but he didn't invent the flush toilet. That honor goes to Albert Giblin (so I guess we should be saying I need to take a 'gib' or 'I don't give a gliding gib...'). Possibly Crapper bought the patent rights from Giblin. 'Crap' comes from the Old French 'crappe,' which means husks of grain or chaff. Originally it descended from the Medieval Latin, 'crappa' (and perhaps even goes back to something in Indo-European or some time during the invention of agriculture). Like all words, it drifted in meaning, from chaff to refuse and leavings and eventually to...crap or excrement. Apparently the earliest written record of 'crap' to mean excrement dates to 1846 when Thomas Crapper was just a wee lad of 9, so the word couldn't have come from his name. But Crapper's plumbing company undoubtedly helped to spread the use of the word, especially since his plumbing company manufactured thousands of toilets. As David Wilton says, author of "Word Myths" where this information is gleaned from, Crapper's company helped to strengthen the connection between excrement and crap. Hey, I looked it up in a book, it must be true. Better than looking 'it up in my gut' as Colbert would say.
|6.10.06 @ 6:26PM|#
I enjoyed Mr. Fagan's courses that he did for the Teaching Company. But then he tended to stay on the topic and not stray too much into opinions of modernity in his lectures.
The Professor Fagan who did the History of Rome courses was the better Fagan though. If I had to choose a Fagan.
|6.10.06 @ 8:41PM|#
Ah, there is nothing like the nostalgia for the good old days, by people who enjoy indoor plumbing and pizza take-out... I suspect that their version of the simple life includes those two commodities.
As for the evolutionary advantages of lifestyles, the question revolves, I suspect, less on the added lifespan of the individual as the probability of his/her offspring reaching reproductive age. It does not matter how fit you are nor how long you live, if your children do not grow up to reproduce. After your allotted time you die, and if you have no descendents, then you are a loser at the evolutionary game.
So, let's look at the social construct that maximizes childhood survival, and we can predict that it will be prevalent a couple hundred years from now.
|6.13.06 @ 1:43AM|#
"Statists assume that our individual selfish decisions usually result in negative consequencies for the group, so they are always looking to create top-down solutions."
And libertarians assume that top-down solutions result in negative consequencies for the group, so they are always looking to create bottom-up solutions.
In fact, for most complex systems a combination of top-down and bottom-up is optimal. The trick is finding the right balance.
|6.13.06 @ 7:44AM|#
Mainstream man:
You are right that you need a mixture of the two. But the rule is, look to individuals and bottom down approach to solve immediate problems, because they are closer and understand it better. Look to the State for long term problems, because it is the nature of the State to worry about them. The State's lifespan is much greater than the individual and so is its memory, which means that it has a biological imperative to think long term.