5 ms·

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987)

15 points by GuiA 11y ago

x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
If humans had never invented agriculture, we would have never gone to space and invented ways to track and prevent catastrophic asteroid impact. Plenty of non-human species will benefit from that, but I don't think this is a result the author predicted given this was written in 1987. IMHO, that trumps all of the ills mentioned in the paper as now we are talking about the future existence vs non-existence of the human race.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  I don't think we've invented a way to prevent catastrophic asteroid impacts yet.
  - x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
    We've definitely designed them and done most of the difficult research. [1][2] Even though it's not fully realized, it's an entirely likely and plausible outcome of agriculture. [1] http://www.universetoday.com/90798/every-way-devised-to-deflect-an-asteroid/ http://www.universetoday.com/90798/every-way-devised-to-defl... [2] http://www.space.com/21333-asteroid-nuke-spacecraft-mission.html http://www.space.com/21333-asteroid-nuke-spacecraft-mission....
  - nine_k 11y ago
    I suspect that detonating a few nuclear warheads at the right point relative to an asteroid would evaporate enough matter from its surface to change its course without breaking it into small uncontrollable pieces. This is, I suppose, well within means of current space technology, provided that we have enough time, e.g. several years or at least many months, to get the rockets to the asteroid.
- PeterWhittaker 11y ago
  we would have never gone to space Interesting conclusion. Can you elaborate how you got there? Did you perhaps fall victim to the "no free time" fallacy, that somehow agriculture gave us more time for leisure, study, etc? Diamond writes modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers - and this in land that is marginal, since we farmer-society-types have pushed them there. A more intriguing line of argument might have to do with settled communities, etc. Regardless of your line of argument, please ensure you do not succumb to survivor bias (because we got here this way we could only have gotten here this way, because no hunter-gatherer society got here, none can). I look forward to rigorous reasoning.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Obviously, because most of us are neither hunters nor gatherers today. One modern farmer can feed 10's of thousands of people. Those people can specialize e.g. engineer, astronaut, teacher. Hunter societies could never, ever have become this productive. There's just no leverage there. And ultimately, the local environment has a strict limit on supporting apex predators (hunters), which is orders of magnitude smaller than the environment 'tamed' and groomed for agriculture. The whole hunter-is-better argument is silly, from a civilization point of view.
    - PeterWhittaker 11y ago
      I don't believe anyone has argued hunter-is-better. The question is whether or not agriculture is better, and the jury is out. That is the point of the article. They may be equivalent. Tough to tell. One may be better than the other. Tough to tell. But to assume that just because we have agriculture and just because we did all this cool stuff the two are necessarily related is to make a logical error of the first order. History is contingent, not inevitable. After all, how many thousands of years did we have agriculture with only the slowest of overall technical progress? Consider that life in the 18th century was, but for gunpowder and the printing press, essentially the same as life 18 centuries before the modern era, and about the same as life about 18 centuries before that. Find the contingencies that caused rapid technical advancement starting roughly at the end of the 18th century, find the contingencies that made the last two (2!) centuries so much different that the 100 centuries that preceded them, and you might be on to something. Now demonstrate that those contingencies simply could not have happened with the leisure time available to the hunter-gatherer. I'm not saying one is better than the other. I simply refuse to make any assumptions. Survivor bias is a bitch.
danharaj 11y ago
Time to move beyond private property, hierarchies, and rule by force.
- unchocked 11y ago
  How would you possibly move beyond rule by force?
  - x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
    I don't think you can. Rule by force permeates the entirety of nature.
    - danharaj 11y ago
      That's what they said about the rule of gods and kings.
      - Turing_Machine 11y ago
        God-king is a pretty good way of describing the current leader of North Korea. Please note that the Roman Empire came after the Roman Republic, the French Empire (which, granted, didn't last all that long) came after the first French Republic, and Nazi Germany (another god-king situation) came after the Weimar Republic. History doesn't run just one way, unfortunately.
      - x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
        Unless you want to consider the alpha of any pack animal a "king", I think we can easily agree that "gods and kings" came out of human civilization. Rule by force is much older, though.
        danharaj 11y ago
        http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/01/11/the-alpha-wolfe-is-an-outdated-myth/ http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/01/11/the-alpha-wolfe-is-an-ou...
wpaladin 11y ago
Nary a mention of the much higher levels of violence in hunter-gatherer societies, past and present.
- pluckytree 11y ago
  Where are you getting this data from?
  - wpaladin 11y ago
    Much has been written on the topic. Here's a fairly decent book. http://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savage/dp/0195119126 http://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savag...
Asbostos 11y ago
Those non-working "parasites" include most of the people how made the important scientific discoveries of the previous couple of centuries. You can't do that if you've all got the same job and live in a society that can't sustain progress of any kind.
- iofj 11y ago
  The thing I don't get about these articles is their author's complaints. They're complaining people ... don't kill themselves. But obviously they themselves don't suicide either. So as I see it, they may have 2 intentions : 1) actually suicide themselves. But then why are they writing articles and also, no suicide ... So while this is their declared intention, it can't be their real intention. 2) increase their own success and, therefore increase their own environmental impact, success (and therefore kids) and all they say is evil. This would also make them lying hypocrites : they're not looking to improve the environment, they're looking to make it worse.
jqm 11y ago
"modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors..." Given that "Turks" proper are a Central Asian people and not the original inhabitants of Turkey I have to wonder exactly what ancestors he is referring to. Another point... maybe the skeletons before agriculture were taller, could be, but I'm guessing there are many more skeletons available from the agricultural period, so if the goal is maximum net skeletons, the agricultural period takes the prize (can't support a lot of people hunting gathering). There are probably plenty of tall skeletons from this period as well. Rulers who had the malnourished masses doing their work for them. But a malnourished skeleton still has more mass than a skeleton that just plain isn't there because the lifestyle never would have brought it into existence. I've never been a fan of Jared Diamond. I think his analysis is too one dimensional and neglects myriads of factors in his quest for "the reason". I realize he is very popular and he does raise some somewhat interesting points at times. He just gives them too much credit for causing everything. Frankly, this piece sounds like it was written by a guy who wants to have a life a little bit freer than it is right now.
unchocked 11y ago
I'm pretty sure that most of the 7.3 billion of us wouldn't be alive without agriculture. So if agriculture was a mistake, does that mean most of us shouldn't be alive?
- x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
  Some people believe that but wouldn't try to argue it with you.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Isn't it a bit off point ? The article implies distribution of quality of life, not population count. 1 mostly happy billion versus 7.23b struggling and 0.07b accumulating wealth (if I subscribe to the 1% thing), which one do you prefer ?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
lovemenot 11y ago
I'd agree that a hunter/gatherer lifestyle may provide a local maximum in some regions, at some points in time. For instance, in Japan, the Jomon hunter/gatherers persisted long after they might have been supplanted by settled agriculturists just across the water. According to Jared Diamond in his later edition of Guns, Germs and Steel, the sheer fertility of Japan's land and seas allowed the Jomon people to maintain a relatively sophisticated culture, mitigating advances which might otherwise have arrived from the fertile crescent via Korea.
carsongross 11y ago
Always fun to enjoy a curmudgeon rant, but if you are honest and empirical about it, communism takes this black prize.
ethana 11y ago
It's ironic how there's a strain of progressives that want nothing to do with human progress.
agumonkey 11y ago
> Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers The article doesn't give any reason why this would be the case, and it seemed a little stretched, anyone know why would farmers really want to kill hunters ? ps: >Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. This feels naive at best. Biology creates classes, strong, witty, devious, etc etc

15 points by GuiA 11y ago

If humans had never invented agriculture, we would have never gone to space and invented ways to track and prevent catastrophic asteroid impact. Plenty of non-human species will benefit from that, but I don't think this is a result the author predicted given this was written in 1987. IMHO, that trumps all of the ills mentioned in the paper as now we are talking about the future existence vs non-existence of the human race.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
I don't think we've invented a way to prevent catastrophic asteroid impacts yet.
- x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
  We've definitely designed them and done most of the difficult research. [1][2] Even though it's not fully realized, it's an entirely likely and plausible outcome of agriculture. [1] http://www.universetoday.com/90798/every-way-devised-to-deflect-an-asteroid/ http://www.universetoday.com/90798/every-way-devised-to-defl... [2] http://www.space.com/21333-asteroid-nuke-spacecraft-mission.html http://www.space.com/21333-asteroid-nuke-spacecraft-mission....
- nine_k 11y ago
  I suspect that detonating a few nuclear warheads at the right point relative to an asteroid would evaporate enough matter from its surface to change its course without breaking it into small uncontrollable pieces. This is, I suppose, well within means of current space technology, provided that we have enough time, e.g. several years or at least many months, to get the rockets to the asteroid.
PeterWhittaker 11y ago
we would have never gone to space Interesting conclusion. Can you elaborate how you got there? Did you perhaps fall victim to the "no free time" fallacy, that somehow agriculture gave us more time for leisure, study, etc? Diamond writes modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers - and this in land that is marginal, since we farmer-society-types have pushed them there. A more intriguing line of argument might have to do with settled communities, etc. Regardless of your line of argument, please ensure you do not succumb to survivor bias (because we got here this way we could only have gotten here this way, because no hunter-gatherer society got here, none can). I look forward to rigorous reasoning.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Obviously, because most of us are neither hunters nor gatherers today. One modern farmer can feed 10's of thousands of people. Those people can specialize e.g. engineer, astronaut, teacher. Hunter societies could never, ever have become this productive. There's just no leverage there. And ultimately, the local environment has a strict limit on supporting apex predators (hunters), which is orders of magnitude smaller than the environment 'tamed' and groomed for agriculture. The whole hunter-is-better argument is silly, from a civilization point of view.
  - PeterWhittaker 11y ago
    I don't believe anyone has argued hunter-is-better. The question is whether or not agriculture is better, and the jury is out. That is the point of the article. They may be equivalent. Tough to tell. One may be better than the other. Tough to tell. But to assume that just because we have agriculture and just because we did all this cool stuff the two are necessarily related is to make a logical error of the first order. History is contingent, not inevitable. After all, how many thousands of years did we have agriculture with only the slowest of overall technical progress? Consider that life in the 18th century was, but for gunpowder and the printing press, essentially the same as life 18 centuries before the modern era, and about the same as life about 18 centuries before that. Find the contingencies that caused rapid technical advancement starting roughly at the end of the 18th century, find the contingencies that made the last two (2!) centuries so much different that the 100 centuries that preceded them, and you might be on to something. Now demonstrate that those contingencies simply could not have happened with the leisure time available to the hunter-gatherer. I'm not saying one is better than the other. I simply refuse to make any assumptions. Survivor bias is a bitch.

danharaj 11y ago

Time to move beyond private property, hierarchies, and rule by force.

unchocked 11y ago
How would you possibly move beyond rule by force?
- x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
  I don't think you can. Rule by force permeates the entirety of nature.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    That's what they said about the rule of gods and kings.
    - Turing_Machine 11y ago
      God-king is a pretty good way of describing the current leader of North Korea. Please note that the Roman Empire came after the Roman Republic, the French Empire (which, granted, didn't last all that long) came after the first French Republic, and Nazi Germany (another god-king situation) came after the Weimar Republic. History doesn't run just one way, unfortunately.
    - x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
      Unless you want to consider the alpha of any pack animal a "king", I think we can easily agree that "gods and kings" came out of human civilization. Rule by force is much older, though.
      - danharaj 11y ago
        http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/01/11/the-alpha-wolfe-is-an-outdated-myth/ http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/01/11/the-alpha-wolfe-is-an-ou...

wpaladin 11y ago

Nary a mention of the much higher levels of violence in hunter-gatherer societies, past and present.

pluckytree 11y ago
Where are you getting this data from?
- wpaladin 11y ago
  Much has been written on the topic. Here's a fairly decent book. http://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savage/dp/0195119126 http://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savag...

Asbostos 11y ago

Those non-working "parasites" include most of the people how made the important scientific discoveries of the previous couple of centuries. You can't do that if you've all got the same job and live in a society that can't sustain progress of any kind.

iofj 11y ago
The thing I don't get about these articles is their author's complaints. They're complaining people ... don't kill themselves. But obviously they themselves don't suicide either. So as I see it, they may have 2 intentions : 1) actually suicide themselves. But then why are they writing articles and also, no suicide ... So while this is their declared intention, it can't be their real intention. 2) increase their own success and, therefore increase their own environmental impact, success (and therefore kids) and all they say is evil. This would also make them lying hypocrites : they're not looking to improve the environment, they're looking to make it worse.

jqm 11y ago

"modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors..." Given that "Turks" proper are a Central Asian people and not the original inhabitants of Turkey I have to wonder exactly what ancestors he is referring to. Another point... maybe the skeletons before agriculture were taller, could be, but I'm guessing there are many more skeletons available from the agricultural period, so if the goal is maximum net skeletons, the agricultural period takes the prize (can't support a lot of people hunting gathering). There are probably plenty of tall skeletons from this period as well. Rulers who had the malnourished masses doing their work for them. But a malnourished skeleton still has more mass than a skeleton that just plain isn't there because the lifestyle never would have brought it into existence. I've never been a fan of Jared Diamond. I think his analysis is too one dimensional and neglects myriads of factors in his quest for "the reason". I realize he is very popular and he does raise some somewhat interesting points at times. He just gives them too much credit for causing everything. Frankly, this piece sounds like it was written by a guy who wants to have a life a little bit freer than it is right now.

unchocked 11y ago

I'm pretty sure that most of the 7.3 billion of us wouldn't be alive without agriculture. So if agriculture was a mistake, does that mean most of us shouldn't be alive?

x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
Some people believe that but wouldn't try to argue it with you.
agumonkey 11y ago
Isn't it a bit off point ? The article implies distribution of quality of life, not population count. 1 mostly happy billion versus 7.23b struggling and 0.07b accumulating wealth (if I subscribe to the 1% thing), which one do you prefer ?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

lovemenot 11y ago

I'd agree that a hunter/gatherer lifestyle may provide a local maximum in some regions, at some points in time. For instance, in Japan, the Jomon hunter/gatherers persisted long after they might have been supplanted by settled agriculturists just across the water. According to Jared Diamond in his later edition of Guns, Germs and Steel, the sheer fertility of Japan's land and seas allowed the Jomon people to maintain a relatively sophisticated culture, mitigating advances which might otherwise have arrived from the fertile crescent via Korea.

carsongross 11y ago

Always fun to enjoy a curmudgeon rant, but if you are honest and empirical about it, communism takes this black prize.

ethana 11y ago

It's ironic how there's a strain of progressives that want nothing to do with human progress.

agumonkey 11y ago

> Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers The article doesn't give any reason why this would be the case, and it seemed a little stretched, anyone know why would farmers really want to kill hunters ? ps: >Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. This feels naive at best. Biology creates classes, strong, witty, devious, etc etc