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>Farming developed so recently The jury is still out on how recently agriculture was developed by human cultures. We are still discovering our history - its n

>Farming developed so recently The jury is still out on how recently agriculture was developed by human cultures. We are still discovering our history - its not entirely clear that it is as recent as Western academia is capable of demonstrating, empirically .. Take, for example, the as-yet under-explored evidence in Australia that agriculture extends tens of thousands of years further into our past than we currently acknowledge. Its entirely feasible we developed a sense of soil as a consequence of our technological use of it.

vikramkr 7y ago
Right ... we're still talking on the scale of tens of thousands of years. That's a blink of an eye evolutionarily. Evolving complex smell and behavior responses to something like being able to tell what soil is good for planting seeds (when, remember, we can just look at and feel the soil! Evolution isn't some force that invents new features in life for every minuscule need- natural selection is the survival of the good enough) in just a few tens or hundreds of thousands of years across the entire population is not feasible. Consider also that farming didn't just begin once, and presumably hunter gatherers can also smell petrichor. If it was tied to farming (and somehow was a life or death situation) we'd see that trait with a distribution similar to lactose tolerance, not as universal as the ability to smell petrichor.
- fit2rule 7y ago
  >tens of thousands of years. That's a blink of an eye evolutionarily. I dunno about that. It seems we can gain major advances in evolution over just a few generations. Look, for example, at the rapid changes that have occurred in the West over the last century, particularly with regards to sexual maturation of healthier classes. This is clear evidence that evolution can happen a lot faster than we might imagine, even so. I don't find it difficult at all to imagine that the human genome alters itself over a period of, even a thousand years, in order to respond to the changing environment. We see examples of these shorter orders of magnitude throughout our history ..

vikramkr 7y ago

Right ... we're still talking on the scale of tens of thousands of years. That's a blink of an eye evolutionarily. Evolving complex smell and behavior responses to something like being able to tell what soil is good for planting seeds (when, remember, we can just look at and feel the soil! Evolution isn't some force that invents new features in life for every minuscule need- natural selection is the survival of the good enough) in just a few tens or hundreds of thousands of years across the entire population is not feasible. Consider also that farming didn't just begin once, and presumably hunter gatherers can also smell petrichor. If it was tied to farming (and somehow was a life or death situation) we'd see that trait with a distribution similar to lactose tolerance, not as universal as the ability to smell petrichor.

fit2rule 7y ago
>tens of thousands of years. That's a blink of an eye evolutionarily. I dunno about that. It seems we can gain major advances in evolution over just a few generations. Look, for example, at the rapid changes that have occurred in the West over the last century, particularly with regards to sexual maturation of healthier classes. This is clear evidence that evolution can happen a lot faster than we might imagine, even so. I don't find it difficult at all to imagine that the human genome alters itself over a period of, even a thousand years, in order to respond to the changing environment. We see examples of these shorter orders of magnitude throughout our history ..