6 ms·

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race – Agriculture

45 points by kumarski 14y ago

teffen 14y ago
So should we change our ways and embrace a simpler life? Would hunting and gathering be sustainable for our population now?
gbog 14y ago
MmHg, I like my fellow human beings, I prefer more of them than less of them, and therefore agriculture is positive, as are culture, cities, medical science, and so forth.
lalc 14y ago
I'm assuming this is being posted (from 1987!) because of how hilariously wrong it was.
- rndmize 14y ago
  I think not. This is very much in line with what I know from cultural anthropology, and the writer is Jared Diamond, who you might know as the author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse".
- tristanj 14y ago
  My guess it that the submitter found it in a response to this [1] recent article on environmentalism. The author of this touches similar themes and also mentions the same studies as the Discover article. [1] http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277 http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277
theaeolist 14y ago
"To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered." Science, astronomy, biology and archaeology -- all advanced culture -- cannot happen without the critical mass of population provided by cities, fed by agriculture. This article is such nonsense.
- wildranter 14y ago
  Exactly. But from this ridiculous scenario one good thing could have happened. We wouldn't have Discover magazine.
- rndmize 14y ago
  For all our tremendous advances and expansive knowledge, we still have some billions of people that that are malnourished or starving, some that live on less than a dollar a day, some that die by the hundreds of thousands in wars over resources or religion; we have nations and societies that collapse within a few hundred years as they generally grow too top-heavy to function without replacement; we are depleting resources at tremendous rates without care to the cost; and so on. As the article says, if you chose to be born twenty thousand years ago, there's a good chance you would be born in a tribe with a reasonably stable social and cultural structure that rarely lacked for any major needs. Today, you would most likely be born as one of the masses of poor subsistence farmers throughout the world, but most likely in China or India, who's life and work is miserable/back-breaking enough that they'll choose to make our electronics for 10 or 12 or 14 hours a day and consider it an improvement. It seems that only in the last decade has modern technology reached the point where it can be provided to the masses and begin what might be a global transformation that leads to better lives for all - rather than better lives for a few at the expense of the many.
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    "if you chose to be born twenty thousand years ago, there's a good chance you would be born in a tribe with a reasonably stable social and cultural structure that rarely lacked for any major needs" If you survived your first year of life, then your first 5 years of life, etc Then you would have to hunt or do dangerous stuff with precarious tools, no health care in case of accident, etc Oh and you would probably die by your 30s. Makes the chinese factory kind of look good.
    - netcan 14y ago
      probably die by your 30s Average life expectancy at birth is heavily influenced by infant mortality. Most people didn't really die in their 30s.
gordaco 14y ago
It's a matter of tradeoffs. Yes, agriculture had some severe disavantages, but the advantages were also huge. Without the stability that agriculture gave us, we wouldn't be what we are now.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
Funny, I like my modern, high-tech lifestyle.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  The article specifically mentions that the top X% are better off in agriculture. If you have an enjoyable high-tech lifestyle, then you are probably a part of them (as most of HN).
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    Actually, for where I live I'm pretty median by income.
    - chii 14y ago
      if you are able to comment on hackernews thru an internet connection, you are probably living within the top ~10% of the world.
seanmcdirmid 14y ago
I wonder if the evolution of agriculture has been similarly negative/positive for the other animals that do it, namely some species of ants. Ants overall make up 15-20% of this planet's animal biomass, visiting aliens wouldn't be crazy to call them one of our planet's dominant species (and completely ignore the hairless apes).
vacri 14y ago
Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. And at 11:59pm we adopted the Enlightenment, egalitarianism, scientific method, self-determination. Just because something was the case for a long time doesn't mean it was by default the best case.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  We best hope that longest adoption doesn't make for the default best case, or else the dinosaurs are a much better choice than humans.
  - zanny 14y ago
    And single celled bacterium that feed off nitrogen are the best animal ever.
- melloclello 14y ago
  It's almost as if evolution isn't teleological!!
sliverstorm 14y ago
One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" I'm sure this would seem like a much more profound statement if I hadn't yet learned ecology.
- ybaumes 14y ago
  You're right in a sense. I am trying to be controversial here: I remember high school courses teaches us that nature, through natural selection, influenced mankind. Until man empowered enough intelligence and influence back its environment, through Agriculture first, shaping the lands, steering water streams and so on. Then through industrial revolution. Generating green house gas emissions. I am not sure which one of a bushman or a agriculture lead to the best ecologic behavior then. :-/
  - illuminate 14y ago
    "You're right in a sense. I am trying to be controversial here" Not surprising, "controversial" claims often require selective myopia in order to make claims that counter how the world works.
- DanBC 14y ago
  Some forms of farming cause ecological destruction. Many species have gone extinct because of farming methods. Animals and plants have been bred to extremes; some animals are unable to breed without assistance, others have trouble walking. Huge areas of rainforest are cut down and replaced with unsuitable palm tree plantations. Humans introduce foreign invasive species as a method of "pest control". Those new species cause havoc. Farming contributes significant amounts of pollution in the form of fertiliser runoff or CO2 or slurry lakes. "We eat what we need. We protect what we need." seems pretty profound to me.
rorrr 14y ago
> It turns out that these people [hunter-gatherers] have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors That's got to be a logical fallacy. A single farmer with modern tools can feed hundreds of people.
- gushie 14y ago
  Someone needs to make those modern tools...
  - rorrr 14y ago
    Most people are not involved in production anymore, most of it is automated, and levels of automation will only increase.
- nnq 14y ago
  And because he knows he can feed hundreds of people, the farmer will have a dozen or so children, most likely erring on the side of too many and negate all benefits of this abundance! As much as I disagree with the OP, I viscerally hate crowded cities, having more than 2 people per sq km population density, oversocialization of human beings and social hierarchies everywhere and all the other crap we had to put up with to get to the current level of progress in science and technology, but I hate it even more when people forget that it is only worth putting up with all this crap because of the goal of progress in science and technology and the hope that it will in the end set us free from the "slavery" of biological mortality and of biologically limited brainpower!.
popeshoe 14y ago
Maybe in a few thousand years time people will be reading about how the widespread adoption of computers and the internet in the 20th century was actually a catastrophe because before that it was so much easier to maintain your privacy and there weren't so many goddamn robots everywhere.
nottrobin 14y ago
Jesus Christ could the author take longer to get to the point? Also, they are terribly selective of their evidence. It's perfectly possible that life expectancy decreased following invention of agriculture and that people had more stressful lives, but the other benefits of social organisation so totally make up for that, as shown by the huge increase in life expectancies since then. Do you realise just how much more peaceful we are in organised society than in hunter-gather societies? Watch the talk on "the surprising decline in violence" by Stephen Pinker: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Also, life expectancy is a tricky thing, in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would. And the end result would be that in the settlement you'd have an explosion in terms of person-years lived, even though on a per person level the life expectancy might have gone down.
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    > in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would Er, is this true? Birth-control seems a relatively modern thing... Even if a H-G society might be less inclined to have lots of children (I dunno, really), did they actually have the knowledge and/or wherewithal (e.g. to purposely refrain from sex) to achieve that?
    - InclinedPlane 14y ago
      How it happens isn't relevant, we know for a fact that hunter-gatherer tribes have low population growth rates compared even to stone age agrarian settlements. Exactly why this is so is probably an interesting question. A few things to remember: fertility is dependent on consistent nutrition, people don't necessarily have sex like rabbits all the time, and in low population tribes the ability to find a mate may be a challenge. Also, infant mortality during the winter can be a bitch, even in an agrarian society with tons of stored food. Edit: poking around on the internet, it looks like infant mortality is the big differentiator. In hunter-gatherers it's rather high, at around 1 in 3, which is nearly double the infant mortality you'd expect even in primitive agrarian societies. That's going to have a tremendous impact on the population growth.
nnq 14y ago
It's funny how technology brings us back to this "hunter gatherer heaven": - population crowding is no longer necessary as telecommuting is a viable way of doing most jobs (hopefully the naysayers will be "silenced" in a few generations... like Moses's people that had to die in the desert before reaching the "promised land" as their mentalities were not compatible with it) - we're becoming "hunters" again, as we engage in competitive activities to earn more "game" (money), dedicating more resources to this "hunting" than to actually "producing things" - we're "gatherers" again - only that we gather from the supermarket instead of the bushes and we gather from the fruits of mechanized agriculture and industry instead of the fruits of the land ...but better still, we may soon be able to have the cake and eat it too: space colonization, ocean colonization, even higher yield concentrated agriculture via new biotech breakthroughs and "too cheap to meter" energy via large scale thorium reactors deployments and later fusion will allow even faster exoponential continuous population growth. Let our Zerg (err... Human) swarm grow exponentially and engulf the universe! :)
InclinedPlane 14y ago
"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
Danski 14y ago
If anyone actually agrees with this article, I would like to invite you to forgo agricultural methods and live a nomadic life, leaving the rest of society as we strive for the 'greater good' (what ever that might be).
InclinedPlane 14y ago
This sort of paean to the "noble savage" always glosses over some of the worst aspects of such lifestyles. Such as excessive tribalism and racism, lack of individual liberty, and a stultifying lack of art and cultural refinements. It's fascinating to me how some of the most liberal folks can idolize some of the most regressive and socially conservative lifestyles and cultures in history.
bjourne 14y ago
One important difference was how society was organised. Before agriculture, hunter-gatherer groups were collaborators. They depended on each other to put down game and gather vegetables. The more individuals in the group, the stronger they were. That's a completely different situation from a farming community in which its inhabitants are in competition to each other. The more farmers on a given area, the worse for each of them. They have to compete with each other over the arable land.
scribu 14y ago
> a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. Did anyone else envision an awesome zombie movie while reading this?
sktrdie 14y ago
I'm not sure I completely agree with this view. It's not confronting the other argument: what if we were still all hunter-gatherers, and agriculture never became mainstream? I'm not sure we would reach the same level of a sophisticated society that we enjoy today. Would the writer of this article have time to dedicate to writing, if he had to hunt for food, instead of having it ready in a dish in a few minutes? I highly doubt it. I also think there's an evolutionary benefit that came out of agriculture. As the complexity of our behavior towards dealing with an agricultural system increased, so did our intelligence. What I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure we would reach the same level of intelligence - through natural evolution - that we have today, if we didn't build highly complex systems that required lots of logical thinking (agriculture). If we were all still hunters, we would not be as intelligent.
- chii 14y ago
  you mean the same level of knowledge, not intelligence - people were just as intelligent back then. Knowledge accumulation required agriculture, since it freed up time.
  - sktrdie 14y ago
    Evidence of that? I actually think that knowledge accumulation led to an evolutionary change at the gene level.
tubelite 14y ago
The author is Jared Diamond - IMHO one of the great thinkers of our time, who certainly deserves serious consideration. His books, "Guns, Germs and Steel", "Collapse", "The Third Chimpanzee" are excellent, thought-provoking (even worldview-altering) reads. That said.. he is right, but from the vantage point of someone in this day and age, who loves science and technology, who has benefitted from the efforts of the billions of post-agricultural humans, I selfishly prefer this outcome to sitting around gathering nuts in uncomfortable underwear, waging endless war with neighbouring bands and tribes. Sure, agriculture produced a Long Dip in living standards, with population increases outstripping any gains made in production. But the whole point of a large population - perhaps the only redeeming feature of civilization - is that one can trawl the probabilistic waters and produce the few very mad, very interesting geniuses who make it all worthwhile. I've always thought that the Matrix really came about due to the natural tendency of civilization to increase population density. From the open savannah to cubicles, cars and capsule hotels.. the Matrix is just highly aggressive telecommuting. And it worked, too. Humans maintained ever higher population densities, produced lots of crazy geniuses who kept improving the interfaces, until significant bits of personalities could jump across from brain to brain. "AIs" were nothing more than mobile multiple-personality disorders. Morpheus' crowd were basically scavengers, helping keep the Matrix clean of dangerous personalities while maintaining a reserve pool of free-range human at Zion, in case the Matrix needed to be repopulated... which it did, from time to time, after epic meme-virus infections which killed off most of the existing inhabitants. The whole "AI vs humans" story and attempts to kill Morpheus & co was a big piece of drama to keep them righteously motivated rather than relaxing with the blue pill.
majkinetor 14y ago
I guess some people here dont understasnd the point of the article. There are 3 levels on which we can think about survival. 1. Population level On this level, agriculture is clear benefit as it provided stable microenvironment to practice abstract sciences that led us here. 2. Individual level On this level, we clearly lost it. Degenerative disease, particularly dental one and so called diseases of civilization. It may or may not reflect on u as individual depending on ur environment and genetics, but it reflects badly on majority of people. So this is middle ground heading bad way ATM and in what direction will it go depends on how fast we can adapt (epigenetics etc.) 3. Cell level. Ask your enterocytes how they feel about glutens and friends. Ask your neurons how they feel about sugar surge and Coca Cola. Its total disaster here. Way to much for adaptation. Thats why we have rogue cells converting to metazoa 1.0 software (i.e. cancer).
- adamauckland 14y ago
  > 3. Cell level. Ask your enterocytes how they feel about glutens and friends. Ask your neurons how they feel about sugar surge and Coca Cola. Its total disaster here. Way to much for adaptation. Thats why we have rogue cells converting to metazoa 1.0 software (i.e. cancer). Is this true? (The bit about cancer)
  - chii 14y ago
    i have heard that humans didn't used to eat so much sugar. It was a desirable food, high energy concentrations. but it was "hard" to get in nature. But with modern tech, it is now so cheap that the process of evolution hasn't really "selected" for people who could cope because it happened so fast.
  - majkinetor 14y ago
    See "Cancer tumors as Metazoa 1.0: tapping genes of ancient ancestors"
digitalWestie 14y ago
If you, unlike most, don't believe modernity = progress history I'd recommend you read Ishmael. Great story which explores the cultural and environmental effect of leaving our hunter-gatherer lifestyle behind.

45 points by kumarski 14y ago

So should we change our ways and embrace a simpler life? Would hunting and gathering be sustainable for our population now?

gbog 14y ago

MmHg, I like my fellow human beings, I prefer more of them than less of them, and therefore agriculture is positive, as are culture, cities, medical science, and so forth.

lalc 14y ago

I'm assuming this is being posted (from 1987!) because of how hilariously wrong it was.

rndmize 14y ago
I think not. This is very much in line with what I know from cultural anthropology, and the writer is Jared Diamond, who you might know as the author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse".
tristanj 14y ago
My guess it that the submitter found it in a response to this [1] recent article on environmentalism. The author of this touches similar themes and also mentions the same studies as the Discover article. [1] http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277 http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277

theaeolist 14y ago

"To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered." Science, astronomy, biology and archaeology -- all advanced culture -- cannot happen without the critical mass of population provided by cities, fed by agriculture. This article is such nonsense.

wildranter 14y ago
Exactly. But from this ridiculous scenario one good thing could have happened. We wouldn't have Discover magazine.
rndmize 14y ago
For all our tremendous advances and expansive knowledge, we still have some billions of people that that are malnourished or starving, some that live on less than a dollar a day, some that die by the hundreds of thousands in wars over resources or religion; we have nations and societies that collapse within a few hundred years as they generally grow too top-heavy to function without replacement; we are depleting resources at tremendous rates without care to the cost; and so on. As the article says, if you chose to be born twenty thousand years ago, there's a good chance you would be born in a tribe with a reasonably stable social and cultural structure that rarely lacked for any major needs. Today, you would most likely be born as one of the masses of poor subsistence farmers throughout the world, but most likely in China or India, who's life and work is miserable/back-breaking enough that they'll choose to make our electronics for 10 or 12 or 14 hours a day and consider it an improvement. It seems that only in the last decade has modern technology reached the point where it can be provided to the masses and begin what might be a global transformation that leads to better lives for all - rather than better lives for a few at the expense of the many.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  "if you chose to be born twenty thousand years ago, there's a good chance you would be born in a tribe with a reasonably stable social and cultural structure that rarely lacked for any major needs" If you survived your first year of life, then your first 5 years of life, etc Then you would have to hunt or do dangerous stuff with precarious tools, no health care in case of accident, etc Oh and you would probably die by your 30s. Makes the chinese factory kind of look good.
  - netcan 14y ago
    probably die by your 30s Average life expectancy at birth is heavily influenced by infant mortality. Most people didn't really die in their 30s.

gordaco 14y ago

It's a matter of tradeoffs. Yes, agriculture had some severe disavantages, but the advantages were also huge. Without the stability that agriculture gave us, we wouldn't be what we are now.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

Funny, I like my modern, high-tech lifestyle.

gurkendoktor 14y ago
The article specifically mentions that the top X% are better off in agriculture. If you have an enjoyable high-tech lifestyle, then you are probably a part of them (as most of HN).
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  Actually, for where I live I'm pretty median by income.
  - chii 14y ago
    if you are able to comment on hackernews thru an internet connection, you are probably living within the top ~10% of the world.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago

I wonder if the evolution of agriculture has been similarly negative/positive for the other animals that do it, namely some species of ants. Ants overall make up 15-20% of this planet's animal biomass, visiting aliens wouldn't be crazy to call them one of our planet's dominant species (and completely ignore the hairless apes).

vacri 14y ago

Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. And at 11:59pm we adopted the Enlightenment, egalitarianism, scientific method, self-determination. Just because something was the case for a long time doesn't mean it was by default the best case.

sliverstorm 14y ago
We best hope that longest adoption doesn't make for the default best case, or else the dinosaurs are a much better choice than humans.
- zanny 14y ago
  And single celled bacterium that feed off nitrogen are the best animal ever.
melloclello 14y ago
It's almost as if evolution isn't teleological!!

sliverstorm 14y ago

One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" I'm sure this would seem like a much more profound statement if I hadn't yet learned ecology.

ybaumes 14y ago
You're right in a sense. I am trying to be controversial here: I remember high school courses teaches us that nature, through natural selection, influenced mankind. Until man empowered enough intelligence and influence back its environment, through Agriculture first, shaping the lands, steering water streams and so on. Then through industrial revolution. Generating green house gas emissions. I am not sure which one of a bushman or a agriculture lead to the best ecologic behavior then. :-/
- illuminate 14y ago
  "You're right in a sense. I am trying to be controversial here" Not surprising, "controversial" claims often require selective myopia in order to make claims that counter how the world works.
DanBC 14y ago
Some forms of farming cause ecological destruction. Many species have gone extinct because of farming methods. Animals and plants have been bred to extremes; some animals are unable to breed without assistance, others have trouble walking. Huge areas of rainforest are cut down and replaced with unsuitable palm tree plantations. Humans introduce foreign invasive species as a method of "pest control". Those new species cause havoc. Farming contributes significant amounts of pollution in the form of fertiliser runoff or CO2 or slurry lakes. "We eat what we need. We protect what we need." seems pretty profound to me.

rorrr 14y ago

> It turns out that these people [hunter-gatherers] have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors That's got to be a logical fallacy. A single farmer with modern tools can feed hundreds of people.

gushie 14y ago
Someone needs to make those modern tools...
- rorrr 14y ago
  Most people are not involved in production anymore, most of it is automated, and levels of automation will only increase.
nnq 14y ago
And because he knows he can feed hundreds of people, the farmer will have a dozen or so children, most likely erring on the side of too many and negate all benefits of this abundance! As much as I disagree with the OP, I viscerally hate crowded cities, having more than 2 people per sq km population density, oversocialization of human beings and social hierarchies everywhere and all the other crap we had to put up with to get to the current level of progress in science and technology, but I hate it even more when people forget that it is only worth putting up with all this crap because of the goal of progress in science and technology and the hope that it will in the end set us free from the "slavery" of biological mortality and of biologically limited brainpower!.

popeshoe 14y ago

Maybe in a few thousand years time people will be reading about how the widespread adoption of computers and the internet in the 20th century was actually a catastrophe because before that it was so much easier to maintain your privacy and there weren't so many goddamn robots everywhere.

nottrobin 14y ago

Jesus Christ could the author take longer to get to the point? Also, they are terribly selective of their evidence. It's perfectly possible that life expectancy decreased following invention of agriculture and that people had more stressful lives, but the other benefits of social organisation so totally make up for that, as shown by the huge increase in life expectancies since then. Do you realise just how much more peaceful we are in organised society than in hunter-gather societies? Watch the talk on "the surprising decline in violence" by Stephen Pinker: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

InclinedPlane 14y ago
Also, life expectancy is a tricky thing, in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would. And the end result would be that in the settlement you'd have an explosion in terms of person-years lived, even though on a per person level the life expectancy might have gone down.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  > in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would Er, is this true? Birth-control seems a relatively modern thing... Even if a H-G society might be less inclined to have lots of children (I dunno, really), did they actually have the knowledge and/or wherewithal (e.g. to purposely refrain from sex) to achieve that?
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    How it happens isn't relevant, we know for a fact that hunter-gatherer tribes have low population growth rates compared even to stone age agrarian settlements. Exactly why this is so is probably an interesting question. A few things to remember: fertility is dependent on consistent nutrition, people don't necessarily have sex like rabbits all the time, and in low population tribes the ability to find a mate may be a challenge. Also, infant mortality during the winter can be a bitch, even in an agrarian society with tons of stored food. Edit: poking around on the internet, it looks like infant mortality is the big differentiator. In hunter-gatherers it's rather high, at around 1 in 3, which is nearly double the infant mortality you'd expect even in primitive agrarian societies. That's going to have a tremendous impact on the population growth.

nnq 14y ago

It's funny how technology brings us back to this "hunter gatherer heaven": - population crowding is no longer necessary as telecommuting is a viable way of doing most jobs (hopefully the naysayers will be "silenced" in a few generations... like Moses's people that had to die in the desert before reaching the "promised land" as their mentalities were not compatible with it) - we're becoming "hunters" again, as we engage in competitive activities to earn more "game" (money), dedicating more resources to this "hunting" than to actually "producing things" - we're "gatherers" again - only that we gather from the supermarket instead of the bushes and we gather from the fruits of mechanized agriculture and industry instead of the fruits of the land ...but better still, we may soon be able to have the cake and eat it too: space colonization, ocean colonization, even higher yield concentrated agriculture via new biotech breakthroughs and "too cheap to meter" energy via large scale thorium reactors deployments and later fusion will allow even faster exoponential continuous population growth. Let our Zerg (err... Human) swarm grow exponentially and engulf the universe! :)

InclinedPlane 14y ago

"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

Danski 14y ago

If anyone actually agrees with this article, I would like to invite you to forgo agricultural methods and live a nomadic life, leaving the rest of society as we strive for the 'greater good' (what ever that might be).

InclinedPlane 14y ago

This sort of paean to the "noble savage" always glosses over some of the worst aspects of such lifestyles. Such as excessive tribalism and racism, lack of individual liberty, and a stultifying lack of art and cultural refinements. It's fascinating to me how some of the most liberal folks can idolize some of the most regressive and socially conservative lifestyles and cultures in history.

bjourne 14y ago

One important difference was how society was organised. Before agriculture, hunter-gatherer groups were collaborators. They depended on each other to put down game and gather vegetables. The more individuals in the group, the stronger they were. That's a completely different situation from a farming community in which its inhabitants are in competition to each other. The more farmers on a given area, the worse for each of them. They have to compete with each other over the arable land.

scribu 14y ago

> a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. Did anyone else envision an awesome zombie movie while reading this?

sktrdie 14y ago

I'm not sure I completely agree with this view. It's not confronting the other argument: what if we were still all hunter-gatherers, and agriculture never became mainstream? I'm not sure we would reach the same level of a sophisticated society that we enjoy today. Would the writer of this article have time to dedicate to writing, if he had to hunt for food, instead of having it ready in a dish in a few minutes? I highly doubt it. I also think there's an evolutionary benefit that came out of agriculture. As the complexity of our behavior towards dealing with an agricultural system increased, so did our intelligence. What I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure we would reach the same level of intelligence - through natural evolution - that we have today, if we didn't build highly complex systems that required lots of logical thinking (agriculture). If we were all still hunters, we would not be as intelligent.

chii 14y ago
you mean the same level of knowledge, not intelligence - people were just as intelligent back then. Knowledge accumulation required agriculture, since it freed up time.
- sktrdie 14y ago
  Evidence of that? I actually think that knowledge accumulation led to an evolutionary change at the gene level.

tubelite 14y ago

The author is Jared Diamond - IMHO one of the great thinkers of our time, who certainly deserves serious consideration. His books, "Guns, Germs and Steel", "Collapse", "The Third Chimpanzee" are excellent, thought-provoking (even worldview-altering) reads. That said.. he is right, but from the vantage point of someone in this day and age, who loves science and technology, who has benefitted from the efforts of the billions of post-agricultural humans, I selfishly prefer this outcome to sitting around gathering nuts in uncomfortable underwear, waging endless war with neighbouring bands and tribes. Sure, agriculture produced a Long Dip in living standards, with population increases outstripping any gains made in production. But the whole point of a large population - perhaps the only redeeming feature of civilization - is that one can trawl the probabilistic waters and produce the few very mad, very interesting geniuses who make it all worthwhile. I've always thought that the Matrix really came about due to the natural tendency of civilization to increase population density. From the open savannah to cubicles, cars and capsule hotels.. the Matrix is just highly aggressive telecommuting. And it worked, too. Humans maintained ever higher population densities, produced lots of crazy geniuses who kept improving the interfaces, until significant bits of personalities could jump across from brain to brain. "AIs" were nothing more than mobile multiple-personality disorders. Morpheus' crowd were basically scavengers, helping keep the Matrix clean of dangerous personalities while maintaining a reserve pool of free-range human at Zion, in case the Matrix needed to be repopulated... which it did, from time to time, after epic meme-virus infections which killed off most of the existing inhabitants. The whole "AI vs humans" story and attempts to kill Morpheus & co was a big piece of drama to keep them righteously motivated rather than relaxing with the blue pill.

majkinetor 14y ago

I guess some people here dont understasnd the point of the article. There are 3 levels on which we can think about survival. 1. Population level On this level, agriculture is clear benefit as it provided stable microenvironment to practice abstract sciences that led us here. 2. Individual level On this level, we clearly lost it. Degenerative disease, particularly dental one and so called diseases of civilization. It may or may not reflect on u as individual depending on ur environment and genetics, but it reflects badly on majority of people. So this is middle ground heading bad way ATM and in what direction will it go depends on how fast we can adapt (epigenetics etc.) 3. Cell level. Ask your enterocytes how they feel about glutens and friends. Ask your neurons how they feel about sugar surge and Coca Cola. Its total disaster here. Way to much for adaptation. Thats why we have rogue cells converting to metazoa 1.0 software (i.e. cancer).

adamauckland 14y ago
> 3. Cell level. Ask your enterocytes how they feel about glutens and friends. Ask your neurons how they feel about sugar surge and Coca Cola. Its total disaster here. Way to much for adaptation. Thats why we have rogue cells converting to metazoa 1.0 software (i.e. cancer). Is this true? (The bit about cancer)
- chii 14y ago
  i have heard that humans didn't used to eat so much sugar. It was a desirable food, high energy concentrations. but it was "hard" to get in nature. But with modern tech, it is now so cheap that the process of evolution hasn't really "selected" for people who could cope because it happened so fast.
- majkinetor 14y ago
  See "Cancer tumors as Metazoa 1.0: tapping genes of ancient ancestors"

digitalWestie 14y ago

If you, unlike most, don't believe modernity = progress history I'd recommend you read Ishmael. Great story which explores the cultural and environmental effect of leaving our hunter-gatherer lifestyle behind.