Technology isn't science. Science is a systematic discipline meant to understand the world in naturalistic terms. Technology has come to heavily rely on science, because it gives good, reliable results. Better than the hit/miss tinkering from before.
Learning from experience isn't science. Trial and error isn't science. There's more to it than that. Of course humans have been learning from trial and error since before we were homo sapiens. But we also explained things in terms of ancestral spirits, angry gods who needed to be appeased, creation stories, etc.
Along with all that learning came a lot of crazy beliefs and practices. It wasn't until science was an actual practice that we began to have systematic naturalistic explanations we could fit controlled experimental results into.
> Learning from experience isn't science. Trial and error isn't science. There's more to it than that.
Alhazen's Book of Optics is "not science" in exactly the same sense that constructions in Euclid's Elements are "not algorithms". Both claims are drawing, IMO, indefensible post-hoc epistemic lines in the sand.
> Along with all that learning came a lot of crazy beliefs and practices
I don't see why this matters.
1. Scientists, following a scientific process (perhaps not particularly well, but that's just a Scotsman argument), found themselves believing all types of crazy shit. Read about the 1950's. Science certainly dispels a lot of superstition, but it's not a bulwark against bad or lazy thinking.
2. Just because there existed supernatural explanations for e.g., crop rotation or glasses doesn't mean that the people who discovered those things weren't following a fundamentally scientific process.
> But we also explained things in terms of ancestral spirits, angry gods who needed to be appeased, creation stories, etc.
And?
Hell, there are still people who believe lightening and eclipses are supernatural events. It does not follow that we don't have a science that explains these phenomenon.
The type of article written by someone who presumably has never needed a cavity filled, never contracted any disease requiring antibiotics, and does not need glasses to get around day to day.
I'm actually sympathetic to your argument, but the author himself says this in the early paragraphs:
"but the piece of technology I would be most reluctant to give up, the one that changed my life from the first day I used it, and that I’m still reliant on every waking hour—am reliant on right now, as I sit typing—dates from the thirteenth century: my glasses."
The Pharaohs' teeth were well preserved. You can see how messed up they were with abscesses and stuff. The Pharaohs lived into old age, whereas few others did.
Wild animals die when their teeth go bad. Zoos have dentists taking care of the animals' teeth.
The Pharaohs ruled an empire built on grain, and ate a diet almost as foreign to a hunter gatherer as ours. For purposes of that comparison it was a "modern" diet.
The type of comment written by someone not bombed to shreds by a drone or being born a cow in a factory and so on? Civilization isn't the only source of progress, and it's the source of a deep alienation, too. That is, when it overdoes the turning people into cogs part. Having a cavity filled is one thing, what is done to others, what we do to each other on many levels, how we have ritualized abuse in many ways, is another. Why does that have to be a competition? Why not pick best we can grasp of all worlds we can find?
People who need glasses or medicine but can't afford them do rely on the impulse to treat others like you want to be treated and be social. Having a cavity filled is a much better experience if you're helpful to the dentist and they to you; I once worked in a hospital and a doctor put some tube into a patient so abruptly the scream made people of the other clinic building come to the windows, and I still can't tell you what is more spooky, such an action or how people just perk up and then down. Technology isn't worth much in the wrong hands, and it's the hands I'm personally more interested in than the technology. I consider technological progress a given like rain dew. It can collapse or go at different speeds but I don't think it can stop outright, not without enforcement by a dystopian "civilization", anyway.
> One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their return systems. James Woodburn uses the categories "immediate return" hunter-gatherers for egalitarian and "delayed return" for nonegalitarian. Immediate return foragers consume their food within a day or two after they procure it. Delayed return foragers store the surplus food.
Don't get me wrong, storing food is a great idea, spoken like someone who never had to starve. It seems more like as soon as we get the capacity to be jerks, we seize that. That is, I don't think those hunter-gatherers don't store food because it's more fair to eat together right away, but because they don't have the means to. Why can't we have progress and decency, i.e. be more worthy recipients of progress? The question isn't just health and longevity, but also what we do with it. I know that's banal and again I'm not claiming you disagree, it's not like I disagree with you either, after all. But the rift between what we could do and what we do do is growing in my eyes. George Carlin called it sneakers with lights in the heels, I think.
Got as far as the first paragraph and all I could think was, this author doesn't know what science is.
Or is just artificially restricting its definition for the benefit of his article using weasel phrases like, "and none historically had any connection with what we think of today as science."
"Some of the most important things we use every day were invented long before the adoption of the scientific method."
No, just no. The scientific method has been employed by humans (and animals) for as long as we've had brains. Its formal definition is only a recent development.
The scientific method in layman's terms could be written "whatever works". All the things mentioned in the article were things that worked, and were refined over time to work even better.
The scientific method isn't just whatever happens to work. It's subjecting what works to rigorous testing that's meant to overcome human bias and subjectivity inside various theoretical frameworks to provide us a better understanding of the world.
Are suggesting that trial and error, heuristics, empiricism and so on, are the basis of scientific method? You probably do, considering your mention of animals and brains.
I'm not expert in epistemology, but I very much suspect it's more complex than that.
> The scientific method has been employed by humans (and animals) for as long as we've had brains. Its formal definition is only a recent development.
Science is a discipline we've invented in fairly recent times (think on the order of a few thousand years) as a rigorous means of determining how to explain the world around us and make predictions that can be tested to be true or false.
Science isn't throwing things at the wall until you find something that sticks, or randomly stumbling upon something useful. That's just simple trial-and-error development of technology.
Science is not technology, and science is not required for technology, even though today's technological progress often leans heavily on science.
The Paleo diet is a modern creation. The paleolithic diet was probably whatever people could eat. I would think if 10% of human diet consisted of human meat then prion diseases would have been more prevalent.
> I didn't say 10% of diet. Up to 10% of protein. You don't eat only protein.
You said, and I quote:
> For record. Up to 10% Paleo diet was from humans. This is the world we would "return" to.
That is a statement I would reject without seeing very strong evidence, and I don't know that we can have strong evidence of the sources of meat in Paleolithic diets on a holistic basis. Furthermore, cannibalism is one of the most widespread taboos among diverse cultures, and thus labeling your enemies as cannibals was a good way to delegitimize their claims independent of the veracity of those claims.
Up to. Ancient diets are extremely environment dependent and variable. One week a tribe could be 100% nuts and berries, only for next week to be 100% meat, because tribe stumbled upon migratory herd of animals.
It's plausible some tribes didn't eat humans, while others ate humans after wars or on predefined occasion. Like e.g. when important person dies, or moon is full, or there isn't anything else to eat.
> But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilisation to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase ... and the coals in the coal-scuttle ... and pianos ... and policemen." The whole case for civilisation is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.
Geez. I prefer civilization because I can sit in my warm office and work on projects I like, I have good food to eat, etc.
Under savagery I'd be living mostly outside, shivering, wondering if I could get enough food to live through the winter, and would have little hope of living past 40.
I'd suffer from routine episodes of famine, backbreaking labor, and the tribe booting me out to die when I was no longer carrying my weight. I'd watch most of my children die young, and would fear all sorts of stupid mythical boogeymen.
I'd have to train with weapons constantly, and live in fear of the next tribe over attacking me and my family at any moment.
Meh, tell that to the California Indians who worked less than four hours a day, lived ten years longer than Europeans did, and had a society mostly free of violence. Thanks a lot for introducing civilization, Father Serra.
I don't wish to go full fairy tale, which is why I only mentioned facts. One of my exes did a PhD thesis on California Native Americans during the mission period. The Spanish introduced the locals to the concept of corporal punishment, which afawct was alien to them.
None of this is to say that they were without technology, because science and technology are definitively human traits. Boat tech was pretty decent for the Chumash, and they traded inland to the desert tribes.
But there's an attitude that civilization must be superior here among lots of commenters here, with an obvious ignorance of what uncivilized life was actually like. We have traded away free time, clean environments, and live with family; for medicine, safety, and iPhones. We have also traded infant mortality, exile, and ignorance; for anomie, prisons, pollution, and tyrants.
I never hear of anyone even attempting to live like a stone age person would. Nobody who romanticizes it ever seems to try it. Even people who love backpacking and camping bring along a whole pile of stuff made possible by civilization to make themselves more comfortable.
Heck, how many can make a fire without matches? Who'd give up boots? How about that parka? and that lightweight tent? canteen? cotton underwear? pots and pans? jeans? steel knife? trail mix? rain gear? toilet paper? the backpack frame and straps?
You're confusing civilization with technology. You should stop. Yes most technologies have been invented in civilizations, but that doesn't stop people outside of cities from using them. Fur trappers of the 1800s were not living a civilized life, even though they had steel knives.
I think you missed my point. Given a choice, it seems nobody actually wants to live like stone age people, including everyone who is posting in this thread. Even the people who like "roughing it" make plenty use of modern technology, all of which was invented and made possible by civilizations.
> I'd be living mostly outside, shivering, wondering if I could get enough food to live through the winter
I'm not particularly well-versed on hunter-gatherer societies in this regard, especially in Paleolithic societies rather than those that persisted to the modern day. But given that hunter-gatherers were generally nomadic and had a much more diverse source of foods than settled agriculturalists, you probably would have worried less about food lasting you through winter than if you had been in any agricultural civilization up until 100 years ago or so.
> would have little hope of living past 40
Lolnope. Hunter-gatherer societies had longer lifespans than sedentary agriculturists, and even the shortest-lived societies generally had life expectancies of over 50 years of age if you made it past 5 or so.
> I'd suffer from routine episodes of famine, backbreaking labor,
Once again, hunter-gatherers are probably more resistant to famine than settled agriculturalists. It is now well-known that hunter-gatherers spent very little time working: about 2-4 hours per day of work was required, far less even than modern society.
> and the tribe booting me out to die when I was no longer carrying my weight.
Probably not. Old people hold valuable knowledge, such as which foods are edible in extreme famine.
> I'd watch most of my children die young, and would fear all sorts of stupid mythical boogeymen.
Fewer on both accounts than you would in early settled agricultural societies.
While it used to be thought that agriculture was obviously superior to hunter-gatherer societies (not least because it was independently developed at least 9 times), more recent anthropological work has shown that on nearly every metric, hunter-gatherer societies outperform agricultural societies until about the 19th century.
"Traditional nomadic tribes often end up abandoning their elderly during their unrelenting travels. The choice for the healthy and young is to do this or carry the old and infirm on their backs — along with children, weapons and necessities — through perilous territory. Also prone to sacrificing their elderly are societies that suffer periodic famines. Citing a dramatic example, Diamond said Paraguay’s Aché Indians assign certain young men the task of killing old people with an ax or spear, or burying them alive."
Jared Diamond is considered in the anthropological field as about as knowledgeable on anthropology as Donald Trump is on economic and foreign policy.
It's also worth pointing out that modern hunter-gatherer societies are not Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies. Those that remain today generally do so in part because the land they travel is too marginal for intensive agriculture, for example.
And there were a number of other societies that didn't do anything like that because they didn't need to move around as much. Especially the ones in Africa, the Middle East, and the other places that were in very fertile locations. Like many of these pop-anthropology and evolutionary psych people, they seem to ignore how useful people in their 50s-60s can be to small groups, especially for things like child care.
Other dangers and just the toll of harsher environments did much more to lower the life expectancy than ritualized murder of old people.
> because they didn't need to move around as much.
Well, yeah, the comment applied to nomadic people.
Where I live, the coyote population comes and goes, in reverse phase with the population of rabbits and other small creatures. The coyotes hunt till the game gets scarce, then they move on. They don't have a choice. Neither did nomadic people.
> Other dangers and just the toll of harsher environments did much more to lower the life expectancy than ritualized murder of old people.
Of course - not many people lived to be old. Neither scenario entices me to give up civilization for the life of a nomadic tribesman.
But what are you, the nomadic tribesman, going to do with the old man who can't walk when you've got to follow the caribou herd or die of starvation?
Downvote me all you like, but civilization gives us the luxury of choice, ethics, morality, etc. And so I choose civilization, because I don't want to be forced to leave the old people behind.
> Fewer on both accounts than you would in early settled agricultural societies.
Especially because they had fewer children, since the human child is dependent on the mother for so long. So they focused more on getting each child to an age where they could start to take care of themselves before having another one.
And it also helped keep population low, which slowed the spread of disease and parasites, and also meant that a smaller food supply could feed people well.
The word picture you've made up doesn't remotely resemble anything I've read about a wide variety of indigenous cultures. It's as much a caricature as is the Noble Savage.
I don't have a horse in the race, which is a silly one in any case. We are where we are and global civilisation can only be unpicked via cataclysm (which is a by no means remote possibility). And one can still see the human good in other cultures without wanting to abandon your own. I personally wouldn't be of that much use in a more communal society.
But I see no harm in starting with at least a modicum of knowledge, interpretive charity, and curiosity. When did the latter in particular become so undervalued in our society, as it seems to be on HN when this subject comes up?
> Under savagery I'd be living mostly outside, shivering, wondering if I could get enough food to live through the winter
A long time ago I saw a television documentary about a tribe of nomads living on the steppe in western Mongolia. They were supposedly distant descendants of the ancient Scythians, and living very much the same lifestyle their ancestors had for centuries -- a small tight-knit community, growing up on horseback, being highly skilled at archery, and so on.
During one particularly bad winter the tribe entered a Mongolian city at the edge of the steppe to seek shelter, and they never left. The filmmakers found the old women of the tribe working in an office building, sitting in cubicles and typing on computers. The only connection they had to the old ways was a horse archery show and competition they held in the streets of the city. The filmmakers asked the old women why the tribe had done this. Didn't they miss their traditional way of life?
They told him, of course we miss some aspects of our old life, and the freedom of living on the steppe, but what we don't miss is being cold and hungry all the time.
Well, we evolved to live in the warm African climate, not the Northern hemisphere, so you may or may not be shivering in the winter. Also, they did have fire, clothing and shelter.
I think the evidence suggest hunter/gatherers lived longer than civilized people prior to modern medicine and sanitary practices, had more exercise, ate better, and didn't catch the same diseases (domesticated animals were a big source of disease).
That's not saying it's preferable. I have no way of knowing, having grown up with all the advantages of modern life. I do notice the large amount of overweight people, the preponderance of mental illness, and the various complaints about abuses from governments and corporations, the environmental impact of 7.x billion people, and the large number still living in abject poverty. Also the history of institutional slavery, war and genocide. So it's not all roses.
If I were forced to pick between medieval life in London or hunter/gather, I would pick the latter, unless I was nobility.
Sure, much like a the elite ruling class of any society. How many slaves (or near slaves) made your clothes? Picked your food? Built your computer? Recycled your old computer? What about the garbage man? Postman? Janitor? Teachers?
What is it doing to the environment to make your car? How about the electricity you use? How about the plastics/nylon in your clothes, shoes, food packaging, etc?
How about your children? What air will they breath? Water will they drink? How much more contaminated will the environment be? How many estrogen mimics will there be?
Keep in mind that the current bushmen are basically working half time jobs, are quite healthy (measuring blood values, percent fat, aerobic capacity, etc) AND they are living on extremely marginal land after been pushed out of more desirable land by cities and agriculture. If they weren't forced off the good land their quality of life would be even better.
A planet full of similar nomads (at their normal density) would likely last a billion years on the planet. Not sure the current society will last 200 years, and I'm afraid my kid is going to have a WAY tougher time of things than I had.
Sure it's great to be in the top few %, getting great health care, making over $100k, and not really having a serious unmet need. This however requires legions of poor working all over the planet and destroying it.
> A planet full of similar nomads (at their normal density) would likely last a billion years on the planet.
Australian indigenous nations managed a whole continent pretty successfully for 60,000 years. Agricultural-industrial civilisation has brought it to its knees in under 200. Our climate stability is collapsing at breakneck speed, the Great Barrier Reef is nearly dead, we have the most catastrophic mammalian extinction rate of any continent, our topsoil is being flushed out to sea, our great river systems are diminishing before our eyes.
(Though it's worth pointing out that Australian indigenous people were neither nomads nor hunter-gatherers, contrary to popular myth).
> his however requires legions of poor working all over the planet and destroying it.
I see your point, but the poor are only being used as tools by the rich. It is the rich for whom our living planet is being sacrificed. They will buy themselves comfort for another 50-200 years, as our world collapses.
> (Though it's worth pointing out that Australian indigenous people were neither nomads nor hunter-gatherers, contrary to popular myth).
Where did you get that from? Everything I've ever read about indigenous Australians says they were hunter-gatherers, with only very limited agriculture.
It was the traditional view, based on an assumed stereotype: ie. a simple hunter-gather/agriculture dichotomy that contemporary research hasn't borne out.
Indigenous Australians certain used hunting and gathering amongst a variety of food-obtaining methods like fish farming and yam cultivation (very various in the different nations). But they did so in landscapes that they actively managed through a range of techniques (including but not limited to use of fire) to make the flora and fauna of their choice readily available in their country (and to keep them available throughout good & bad seasons).
Popular accounts of the contemporary research can be found in Bill Gammage's The Biggest Estate on Earth and Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu. It's a fast-changing research landscape, though, with much left to be discovered.
Yes and no. Firstly, I don't have the numbers to hand, but I've seen economic work suggesting that the 'real' rich (ie. 'our' 1st world 10%) are responsible for grossly disproportionate resource use. Those vast houses, yachts, constant flying etc all take their toll. Secondly, although no doubt true on average, you addressed your 'if you are posting on HN' to an individual, and you're wrong in this case. I'm on less than a third of what you suggest. I live in a small forest shack, use a modest motorbike for travel, rarely eat meat, don't fly etc. Even then though I'm well off by world standards, and I'm a beneficiary of rich-world infrastructure, an expensive medical system, yada yada.
But does all that matter? Pointing out that the rich are (almost literally) eating the world doesn't give any of us the instant means to change the system we live within. We can only do what we can do, but there's nothing to do without awareness.
I think you're right about the benefits, but wrong about most of the drawbacks. The Inuit seemed to have done pretty well in a much harsher environment than most of us have to deal with. Also, for nearly all of prehistoric times, humans lived in the tropics and didn't have to worry as much about fighting the environment, especially cold.
And the thing about modern medicine versus prehistoric illnesses, is that you would nearly always be either "doing okay", or dead. And the majority of people who got past 30 had a decent chance of living to 60 in most cases. Especially since they were usually involved in child care, etc. while the younger adults did the hunter-gatherer thing.
Not sure why I was downvoted for pointing out that parasitic infections are one more negative aspect of not living in civilized society where we have the knowledge and understanding to know how important clean feet and shoes are.
Lots of stereotypes here. In fact longevity was high, for example. Labor was light the vast majority of the time (since food availability was highly variable) until agriculture came along, etc, etc. Civilization sometimes seems to mean that people just get to create whatever "facts" they please without consequences.
If you want to find out about the reality, "The Old Way: A Story of the First People" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is a fine start.
The article presents a sort of naive assumption that if we stayed primitive we may have ended up in a more egalitarian, less brutally competitive world.
Problem is, in a less developed culture, there is still competition due to human nature and due to uncontrollable factors such as natural disasters. Pre-European-Contact Native Americans often fought against one another during periods such as drought.[1][2] Ironically one of the benefits of civilization is a stronger ability to handle situations of disaster and shortage that forces populations to go to war.
I'd also add that in a "civilized world" there are probably more avenues in life open to a person who isn't bound to the responsibility of food production (which constitutes 90% of a hunter-gatherer society). Science, history, the arts? Aside from oral traditions, all are outside the reach of a primitive society.
Oh, and at least in a modern civilization such as ours we have a small fighting chance against say, an incoming apocalyptic asteroid.
It also seems to ignore the existence of war in pre neolithic species like chimpanzees. While it might be difficult to argue that a direct correlation of behavior exists, it shows a distinct seperation of war and agriculture.
Perhaps you didn't read to the end where they discussed how the bushmen got past the level of Chimps:
>>. A key to that lost or forsworn ability, Suzman suggests, lies in the ferocious egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers. For example, the most valuable thing a hunter can do is come back with meat. Unlike gathered plants, whose proceeds are “not subject to any strict conventions on sharing,” hunted meat is very carefully distributed according to protocol, and the people who eat the meat that is given to them go to great trouble to be rude about it. This ritual is called “insulting the meat,” and it is designed to make sure the hunter doesn’t get above himself and start thinking that he’s better than anyone else. “When a young man kills much meat,” a Bushman told the anthropologist Richard B. Lee, “he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. . . . We can’t accept this.” The insults are designed to “cool his heart and make him gentle.” For these hunter-gatherers, Suzman writes, “the sum of individual self-interest and the jealousy that policed it was a fiercely egalitarian society where profitable exchange, hierarchy, and significant material inequality were not tolerated.”
People who want to paint pre-civilized (or pre-industrial) peoples as egalitarians will only point to specific behaviors in specific tribes. What they won't do is refer to the rates of violent death among those peoples, which are significantly higher than what we put up with even in the worse parts of the developed world. It's noble savage mythology to the core.
And that's a lovely quote, but what does that have to do with war between groups. This might have relevance if I were discussing some sort or societal revolution, but where chimps are concerned, "revolution" is the changing of a dominant alpha, not a true societal structure change (and, yes, the same can be argued that differing forms of human government are illusory as they end up degrading to an alpha male style group, but that's a discussion for a different day). War, in most cases, involves violent conflict between disparate social groups. Maybe my comment was mistaken due to the breakdown of English in pointing to different types of conflict, where "war" has become a general phrase for conflict..... otherwise, I don't understand what this imaginary, egalitarian society phrase has to do with war. The real truth of the matter is, when food, sex and space are plenty, conflict is sparse. When any of those become scarce, conflict will happen and might will make right.
> The article presents a sort of naive assumption that if we stayed primitive we may have ended up in a more egalitarian, less brutally competitive world.
Incidentally, that was in essence the ideological basis of the infamous Khmer Rouge.
One thing that has constantly been on my mind since reading Sapiens is that no one has been able to definitively explain why men have dominated all of the positions of power in societies (up until a just a few years ago, at least). Civilizations that emerged completely independently from each other (whether in the fertile crescent, China, Mesoamerica or elsewhere), universally became patriarchies. Before the Neolithic era, and in some surviving hunter gatherer cultures today, matriarchy was not uncommon.
Women still tend to report being happier than men in survey data, and just going by the men and women I know, I think the men would prefer to abandon civilization before women. But I think if we want advance more women into positions of power in all tiers of society, then we need stop just trying to wrack it up to discrimination and sexism, stop trying to have the government regulate men and women's paycheck, and actually try to figure out why women have universally faired worse in societies.
For example (this is just a theory, I have no evidence whatsoever here), the men who tend to advance politically and in their careers are usually the ones with the best social skills. They're the ones who are the best at making advantageous alliances and forming strong relationships with those outside their family. Perhaps women are not as good at that? If that is the case, then it might be wise to try to encourage women to improve that subset of social skills. I may be way off here, but I think we need to start asking questions, coming up with theories, and testing those theories rather than settle on the one that's easiest but doesn't really get us anywhere.
>For example (this is just a theory, I have no evidence whatsoever here), the men who tend to advance politically and in their careers are usually the ones with the best social skills. They're the ones who are the best at making advantageous alliances and forming strong relationships with those outside their family. Perhaps women are not as good at that? If that is the case, then it might be wise to try to encourage women to improve that subset of social skills.
Since we're on the topic of biological determinism, it's worth pointing out that women generally have higher levels of emotional intelligence than men. Estrogen is a hormone for emotional bonding.
And for that matter, a disproportionate amount of clinical psychopaths are in positions of leadership. That probably entails a better explanation for why men are disproportionately in higher levels of management.
> women generally have higher levels of emotional intelligence than men. Estrogen is a hormone for emotional bonding.
I'm not saying women have poor social skills, just that they perhaps have a different set of social skills. Bonding emotionally with someone is important in a family setting. Less so for platonic relationships.
It's silly to say that something is "biological determinism" just because it points out differences between men and women. Almost all traits have a strong overlap between men and women, including mental/personality traits, but occupational choice tends to be driven by extremes at a personal level. In general, men and women are about equally good at math, but at the far right end of the bell curve, men outnumber women significantly. Steven Pinker cites in "Human Nature" that at 6'0, men outnumber women almost 2000 to 1. Height is one of the more substantial examples of sexual dimorphism, but study after study has found sexual dimorphism in mental traits as well. This doesn't mean people should be judged based on their group's characteristics (which would be biological determinism) but that group differences can be quite severe at the extremes.
It's worth pointing out that men also tend to outnumber women significantly at the far left end of most bell curves. Data appears to show that for many traits, men have higher variability of traits, possibly caused by the differing sexual selection strategies of men and women. (There is much more diversity among mitochondrial DNA than Y-chromosomal DNA, which is just one piece of evidence among many that a smaller number of males produce a disproportionate amount of the offspring.)
> It's worth pointing out that men also tend to outnumber women significantly at the far left end of most bell curves.
The lack of understanding around the implications of normal distributions is such a problem when discussing this topic. Another thing that most people miss is that, if you're zoomed way in on the very end of the right side, things are going to look very different than if you are zoomed out and looking at the entire curve.
It all comes down to statistical distribution, and men having a wider range of attribute distribution, so they are more likely to have the best* leadership traits. If you take the top 10 leaders in a tribal society with 150 members then quite a few will be women and they will be the leaders. The leadership positions don't scale linearly though, in a city of 10,000 people you might only need the same 10 best leaders but now most/all of them will be men.
*Best: the best traits to become and remain leaders, a selection quality not a value based one. Being narcissistic might make someone the best in this sense.
My theory is that you are never even going to ask an interesting question if you are going to remain determinedly ignorant of all the questions that have previously been asked and studied.
Maybe it's the case that societies where the women stay home have more kids. That would make them more successful from an evolutionary perspective. Those societies would be more likely to propagate and spread.
> the men who tend to advance politically and in their careers are usually the ones with the best social skills. They're the ones who are the best at making advantageous alliances and forming strong relationships with those outside their family.
I don't think this is the case at all. From my experience with politicians the most important traits are total lack of morals, unconstrained egoism and ability to sound authoritative even when lying or lacking any grasp of the topic at hand. Those also help in a corporate environment. I can't speculate whether those "skills" are more common among men.
All you need to know is that men stand to gain more, genetically, by accumulating prestige and power. This is because there is no upper limit on how many children a given male can sire, whereas women are fundamentally limited in how many children they can bear. This wikipedia page starkly illustrates this difference (it is a list of the most prolific men and women, by number of offspring):
The most prolific woman is at 69 children. The most prolific men are in the hundreds to thousands. Also, most of the women on the list are not notable aside from having given birth to many children. But the men are almost all notable primarily for things other than having sired many children (the exception being a handful of sperm donors and fertility doctors).
> women have universally faired worse in societies
Have they? While they may not inhabit positions of power, women generally survive conflicts between clans, tribes, and nation states. Look to the genocide of the Yazidi at the hands of ISIS: the women are taken as sex slaves, which is terrible, but the men are all dead. This is the fundamental tradeoff between male and female (in humans): women have a narrower normal distribution and men have a wider one. So, women rarely do great, but they also die less often. A few men do incredibly well, but many more men than women die trying to climb the dominance hierarchy.
> All you need to know is that men stand to gain more, genetically, by accumulating prestige and power.
I've thought about this too (well, not the genetic part) and I think it's a viable theory. Women's romantic ambitions are not tied anywhere near as tightly to their career success as men's are. I think this is a major contributor to a lower life satisfaction in men, at least.
I had some trouble phrasing the thing about women faring worse in societies. I didn't mean that their wellbeing is worse. I mean that they're disenfranchised and restricted from achieving positions of power.
I'm not a working evolutionary psychologist, but my understanding is that this is the most widely accepted theory for understanding this discrepancy in outcomes for men and women. If you're not already familiar with evolutionary psychology, I highly recommend taking a look. IMO, it is the best lens through which to understand human behavior.
> they're disenfranchised and restricted from achieving positions of power
I think causation runs along two paths. The first is, as you mention, that women are restricted and disenfranchised. But I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which women are evolved to simply not seek power and prestige. Seeking power is costly. It takes a lot of time and effort and, when things don't go well, you often end up dead (assassinations, coups, etc.). Whenever something is costly, it needs to have a marked offsetting benefit for it to be evolved for. Since women stand to gain less than men do by accumulating power, evolutionary theory predicts that they should be proportionately less motivated to do so.
Homo Erectus had a much smaller brain than us. And the cooking theory seems fairly well accepted these days.
Someone once made the calculus that if you had to grow and sustain your brain with just raw food, you'd have to eat like 18 hours a day or something (can't recall the exact number). That would not give you much time to actually use that brain. It's hard not to conclude on the importance of cooking in the evolution of our brain.
Of course it depends on what you eat. If you eat protein-rich food like eggs, I guess you can eat them raw and get what you need in short time.
The calculus I was mentioning was based on assumptions regarding the kind of aliments you'd typically eat in paleolithical time or something. I believe it was in BBC's the origin of us[1], but I'm not sure. They took the example of carrots but I vaguely recall they generalize to a bunch of aliments.
A diet of eggs from what farm? I don't belive you have any idea how much work it is to gather eggs when birds go to great lengths to hide them from predators. Also, eggs are very seasonal in most places. They are not a reliable food source.
(Breaking some HN etiquette here but I think a large portion of responses so far have been from people who've only scanned the introduction - there are some good bits in the article, you'll just need to skip the first few paragraphs to get to the meat)
Sorry for the cut-and-paste but it's only a fraction of a pretty long-form article:
The other conclusion we can draw from the evidence, Scott says, is that there is a crucial, direct link between the cultivation of cereal crops and the birth of the first states. It’s not that cereal grains were humankind’s only staples; it’s just that they were the only ones that encouraged the formation of states. “History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit or sweet potato states,” he writes. What was so special about grains? The answer will make sense to anyone who has ever filled out a Form 1040: grain, unlike other crops, is easy to tax. Some crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava) are buried and so can be hidden from the tax collector, and, even if discovered, they must be dug up individually and laboriously. Other crops (notably, legumes) ripen at different intervals, or yield harvests throughout a growing season rather than along a fixed trajectory of unripe to ripe—in other words, the taxman can’t come once and get his proper due. Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ” Other crops have some of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became “the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar.” The taxman can come, assess the fields, set a level of tax, then come back and make sure he’s got his share of the harvest.
It was the ability to tax and to extract a surplus from the produce of agriculture that, in Scott’s account, led to the birth of the state, and also to the creation of complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor, specialist jobs (soldier, priest, servant, administrator), and an élite presiding over them. Because the new states required huge amounts of manual work to irrigate the cereal crops, they also required forms of forced labor, including slavery; because the easiest way to find slaves was to capture them, the states had a new propensity for waging war. Some of the earliest images in human history, from the first Mesopotamian states, are of slaves being marched along in neck shackles. Add this to the frequent epidemics and the general ill health of early settled communities and it is not hard to see why the latest consensus is that the Neolithic Revolution was a disaster for most of the people who lived through it.
I think this is too complicated of an answer to the question of why cereal grains lead to the creation of city states. IMO, the reason is much simpler: grains are more economical than roots and tubers. By a lot. Based on data from my local super market, here are the amount of calories that some of these foods provide for $1:
- Flour: 4,252
- Russet Potatoes: 1,437
- Yams: 540
I don't know why this is exactly, but my hunch is that it has mostly to do with spoilage. Specifically, that grains essentially do not spoil.
The cited expert is also wrong, if I'm not mistaken, about the lack of civilizations born of on a staple other than cereal grains. The New World civilizations (Aztec, Inca, Mayas) did not have access to cereal grains. Their primary staples were potatoes (South America) and corn (Central America).
---
FYI, I've done some work quantifying food costs, which are, IMO, a fascinating lens through with to view the world. If you want to dig in deeper, here's the Google sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSo8XQrIKZ8G.... I think the tabs labeled Food Chart and Category Range Chart are the most interesting (everything else is supporting calculations).
> here are the amount of calories that some of these foods provide for $1
The glycemic index shows that calories are worth little if they blow your blood sugar through the roof and then send it crashing as flour-derived food stuffs usually do. Roots and tubers contain more complex carbohydrates and have a lower GI, providing energy over a longer period.
That said I agree with the spoilage part - grains do last longer before spoiling.
> The cited expert is also wrong, if I'm not mistaken, about the lack of civilizations born of on a staple other than cereal grains. The New World civilizations (Aztec, Inca, Mayas) did not have access to cereal grains. Their primary staples were potatoes (South America) and corn (Central America).
The author wasn't talking about civilisations, they specifically mentioned states, which I guess could be translated as empire or collection of civilisations taxed by a central authority. That said I have no idea whether their point was correct - I just thought it was interesting.
>>> The answer will make sense to anyone who has ever filled out a Form 1040: grain, unlike other crops, is easy to tax
I heard of a different reason: alcohol.
You get a consistent regular source of ale if and only if you stay in one place working on our lands (which you can call yours in exchange for taxes). Also, fermented drinks were usually safer to drink back then, so that's another bonus.
Hunter gatherers and the other crop based "states" couldn't offer that, even with a nicer life style, so they weren't as popular.
Romanticism about nature and whatnot. Regardless of the merits of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, one thing marks it far inferior: the ability of the author to make his argument and have it heard.
H-g societies lack knowledge beyond the most immediate needed to survive. The author himself probably knows more about the world and the universe (excepting the specifics of how to survive in the wild - a mundane problem) than the entirety of all hunter gatherer societies.
I'd rather drink HFCS-infused water, eat processed meat, and breathe diesel fumes than be unable to think the thoughts I think today because I lack the framework to even think them.
Unfortunately, the development of agriculture and civilization are usually conflated to mean the same thing: people predominantly contrast pre-agricultural, pre-civilization peoples against agricultural, civilized peoples. This causes confusions when people cite instances of agricultural, non-civilized peoples to support claims on one side or the other (I'm unaware of any examples of non-agricultural, civilized states; the closest examples I can think of are still nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists, which is still agricultural even if the reliance is on domesticated animals instead of plants).
Also unfortunately, it's hard to know which to prescribe the "problems" and the "benefits" of the agricultural and civilization complex to, agriculture or civilization. The existence of things like specialization and war are hard to find unambiguous evidence for in archaeology (it can sometimes be hard to remember that there are multiple plausible explanations for a find, and picking a certain interpretation may more reflect an archaeologist's biases than the actual truth), and so figuring out when in the course of human development they first appear is difficult if not impossible. I'm generally of the opinion that most of the problems postdate the development of agriculture, but I hold that position less because there's strong evidence for it, but because there's no strong evidence either way and I find it more useful to get other people to consider multiple interpretations of the matter.
Starting at 12:00, Toby Hemenway talks about agriculture led industrial culture & its problems. How we are missing a spot where horticulture can be long-term beneficial.
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." — T. S. Eliot
I've often thought that the ideal post-scarcity lifestyle would be to live in giant gardens (in giant rotating space habitats no less) where we can run around hunting, gathering, telling stories around the campfire and sleeping under the stars, and occasionally spending time in the lab or workshop or in zero-g building stuff.
i.e. hunting and gathering -> agriculture -> industrialisation -> automation -> hunting and gathering (and space engineering)
You probably would like Iain Banks' series of novels about The Culture. Some of it described the shenanigans some people got up to after getting bored of such a life.
Going full-caveman might be a step too far, but we could certainly dial-back a few things--especially in the US.
I look at my grandparents from the WWII generation, and I think their existences, as modest as they are, have been more agreeable--to both themselves and to the world--than the ones most people endure today.
There are many otherwise healthy young people who are morbidly obese who wouldn't have been so 50 years ago. There are so many otherwise intelligent people who cannot deal with other people in a social setting, and everyone's like "oh, it's autism," and maybe in some cases it is, but I have to wonder if some of it is just a case of otherwise ordinary people being raised by television, books, video games instead of other people.
I hardly know a person over 30 who isn't already on an assortment of maintenance medications. The doctors had me on two maintenance medications before I was 30, and if I hadn't figured out that hitting the gym and not eating like I was still a teenager works a hell of a lot better, I would still be taking them.
Then you look at other parts of the world--where the slaves that make our stuff live--and the rivers are choked with garbage and the smog blots out the daylight.
Then there is the nearly unavoidable proliferation of technology. In most tech and sales jobs, regardless of your own preference, you have to have a cell phone and e-mail--unless you want to lose your job. In most marketing and PR jobs, you have to contend with facebook / twitter / etc. "So what?" Neuroplasticity. "The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too strong to break." You are literally burning pathways into your brain for compulsively checking/responding to messages/likes/etc. It's like Pavlov's dog, but with humans, and it is a very hard thing to un-learn.
Then there's all the stuff Taleb goes on about like iatrogenics and hormesis.
The only good thing about the article is the analysis of grain dependence.
Anarcho-primitivism and its hunter-gatherer lifestyles would support less than 1% of current world population. "Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?" is just a myth of lost Golden Age adapted for modern audience.
Civilization enables health and comfort levels that hunter-gatherers never dreamed of: their "lifestyle" options were extremely limited and grim, geared to maximize survival of tribes instead of individual happiness and comfort.
Without civilization existing in its current technological level, most people will just die, the minority which will adapt will not live in a paleo paradise.
There is no "abundant natural resources" of paleolithic anymore, there is no skills and knowledge of wilderness survival. In the event of civilizational collapse, people will have nothing much to harvest/hunt/gather after initial plundering(long-term impact will not be a priority). The limited resources of current Earth will not support such lifestyle.
Even huntergatherers will not survive this, as they'll have to compete with armed civilization remnants searching for any resources to continue its current lifestyle.
In short, civilization has one way forward and any collapse will be fatal, a state which cannot "jump start a civilization again", with all easily extracted resources gone and natural environment plundered. The forests and jungles exist only because there are legal frameworks to ensure their continued existence inside a civilization: in case of collapse they'll be stripped for firewood and collapse in a decade.
The social structure shift is really not about preference, it is about collective power and violence. Although people may prefer the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the neighbor farm-based civilization will conquer and enslave them.
It is also the same for technology/AI. They may not improve our quality of life, but they allow more powerful armies that would defeat those who resist them.
I'm interested if we can have our cake and also eat it. Use advanced technology/manufacturing to make our communities more self-sufficient. So we are less reliant on the state.
Yeah, try convincing 8 billion people that we should all hunt for rabbits.
Case against Civilization is case for extinction of all animals 6000 years ago.
I would rather be living now and enjoying this earth, than be someone who thinks that he can take on the wild if there weren't as many other people around.
And I don't think "human" become "humans" because things were just swell. Precisely because of evolutionary pressure humans evolved. I would rather have us evolved than not.
One large factor the author misses is the staggeringly high rates of murder and violent death in non-state societies, in some instances reaching as high as 60%[1]
This is the core of Hobbes' description of pre-state societies as "nasty, brutish, and short". Prehistoric life was incredibly tough and brutal as there simply wasn't much room for error.
If someone is able to steal from you or mistreat you without repercussion you immediately become a target for every other bad actor in the tribe. In this environment reciprocal violence is rational. A neutral state actor with a monopoly on violence tips the incentives towards non-violent resolution of disputes.
In modern times if you are unemployed for a month you can collect a check from the government and move on with your life. In prehistoric times if you go a month without successfully hunting or collecting food you get to watch your children starve to death. Again, very very little room for error.
Neolithic life had it's own set of challenges namely famine, disease, and inter-state warfare. But over the long term it provided more cushion for common mistakes and the foibles of human nature. It enlarged the margin of error for survival compared to prehistoric peoples.
113 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadSaying crop rotation or glasses or fire were not science is a bit like saying ancient geometric constructions are not algorithms.
Along with all that learning came a lot of crazy beliefs and practices. It wasn't until science was an actual practice that we began to have systematic naturalistic explanations we could fit controlled experimental results into.
Alhazen's Book of Optics is "not science" in exactly the same sense that constructions in Euclid's Elements are "not algorithms". Both claims are drawing, IMO, indefensible post-hoc epistemic lines in the sand.
> Along with all that learning came a lot of crazy beliefs and practices
I don't see why this matters.
1. Scientists, following a scientific process (perhaps not particularly well, but that's just a Scotsman argument), found themselves believing all types of crazy shit. Read about the 1950's. Science certainly dispels a lot of superstition, but it's not a bulwark against bad or lazy thinking.
2. Just because there existed supernatural explanations for e.g., crop rotation or glasses doesn't mean that the people who discovered those things weren't following a fundamentally scientific process.
> But we also explained things in terms of ancestral spirits, angry gods who needed to be appeased, creation stories, etc.
And?
Hell, there are still people who believe lightening and eclipses are supernatural events. It does not follow that we don't have a science that explains these phenomenon.
"but the piece of technology I would be most reluctant to give up, the one that changed my life from the first day I used it, and that I’m still reliant on every waking hour—am reliant on right now, as I sit typing—dates from the thirteenth century: my glasses."
Wild animals die when their teeth go bad. Zoos have dentists taking care of the animals' teeth.
People who need glasses or medicine but can't afford them do rely on the impulse to treat others like you want to be treated and be social. Having a cavity filled is a much better experience if you're helpful to the dentist and they to you; I once worked in a hospital and a doctor put some tube into a patient so abruptly the scream made people of the other clinic building come to the windows, and I still can't tell you what is more spooky, such an action or how people just perk up and then down. Technology isn't worth much in the wrong hands, and it's the hands I'm personally more interested in than the technology. I consider technological progress a given like rain dew. It can collapse or go at different speeds but I don't think it can stop outright, not without enforcement by a dystopian "civilization", anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer
> One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their return systems. James Woodburn uses the categories "immediate return" hunter-gatherers for egalitarian and "delayed return" for nonegalitarian. Immediate return foragers consume their food within a day or two after they procure it. Delayed return foragers store the surplus food.
Don't get me wrong, storing food is a great idea, spoken like someone who never had to starve. It seems more like as soon as we get the capacity to be jerks, we seize that. That is, I don't think those hunter-gatherers don't store food because it's more fair to eat together right away, but because they don't have the means to. Why can't we have progress and decency, i.e. be more worthy recipients of progress? The question isn't just health and longevity, but also what we do with it. I know that's banal and again I'm not claiming you disagree, it's not like I disagree with you either, after all. But the rift between what we could do and what we do do is growing in my eyes. George Carlin called it sneakers with lights in the heels, I think.
Or is just artificially restricting its definition for the benefit of his article using weasel phrases like, "and none historically had any connection with what we think of today as science."
"Some of the most important things we use every day were invented long before the adoption of the scientific method."
No, just no. The scientific method has been employed by humans (and animals) for as long as we've had brains. Its formal definition is only a recent development.
I'm not expert in epistemology, but I very much suspect it's more complex than that.
Science is a discipline we've invented in fairly recent times (think on the order of a few thousand years) as a rigorous means of determining how to explain the world around us and make predictions that can be tested to be true or false.
Science isn't throwing things at the wall until you find something that sticks, or randomly stumbling upon something useful. That's just simple trial-and-error development of technology.
Science is not technology, and science is not required for technology, even though today's technological progress often leans heavily on science.
The Paleo diet is a modern creation. The paleolithic diet was probably whatever people could eat. I would think if 10% of human diet consisted of human meat then prion diseases would have been more prevalent.
I didn't say 10% of diet. Up to 10% of protein. You don't eat only protein.
Also some people have genes resistant to prion diseases
https://youtu.be/SXjIzDexPoU
You said, and I quote: > For record. Up to 10% Paleo diet was from humans. This is the world we would "return" to.
That is a statement I would reject without seeing very strong evidence, and I don't know that we can have strong evidence of the sources of meat in Paleolithic diets on a holistic basis. Furthermore, cannibalism is one of the most widespread taboos among diverse cultures, and thus labeling your enemies as cannibals was a good way to delegitimize their claims independent of the veracity of those claims.
Comparable cannibalism rates have been observed in other mammals. Do you assume humans are exempt of it? If so why?
Cannibalism makes a lot of sense, in hunter gatherer societies. After all one source of protein that is always present in human group is human.
Did you see the video I linked? There are links in the description.
Cannibalism is usually a taboo in modern western societies. Instance of ritualistic cannibalism mentioned in video was in 1960 in Oceania.
> Instance of ritualistic cannibalism mentioned in video was in 1960 in Oceania.
If it were an every day part of our diet then it wouldn't be so ritualistic would it?
It's plausible some tribes didn't eat humans, while others ate humans after wars or on predefined occasion. Like e.g. when important person dies, or moon is full, or there isn't anything else to eat.
- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Under savagery I'd be living mostly outside, shivering, wondering if I could get enough food to live through the winter, and would have little hope of living past 40.
I'd suffer from routine episodes of famine, backbreaking labor, and the tribe booting me out to die when I was no longer carrying my weight. I'd watch most of my children die young, and would fear all sorts of stupid mythical boogeymen.
I'd have to train with weapons constantly, and live in fear of the next tribe over attacking me and my family at any moment.
No thanks.
On average across time and space, the situation would be way less comfortable than modern life.
From what I've read about pre-contact bones, they did suffer from periodic episodes of famine.
I've read nothing specific about California Indians.
None of this is to say that they were without technology, because science and technology are definitively human traits. Boat tech was pretty decent for the Chumash, and they traded inland to the desert tribes.
But there's an attitude that civilization must be superior here among lots of commenters here, with an obvious ignorance of what uncivilized life was actually like. We have traded away free time, clean environments, and live with family; for medicine, safety, and iPhones. We have also traded infant mortality, exile, and ignorance; for anomie, prisons, pollution, and tyrants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_among_the_indigenous_p...
You're right that primitive societies did not have prisons - they could not afford them. They either killed the miscreant or banished him.
Heck, how many can make a fire without matches? Who'd give up boots? How about that parka? and that lightweight tent? canteen? cotton underwear? pots and pans? jeans? steel knife? trail mix? rain gear? toilet paper? the backpack frame and straps?
I'm not particularly well-versed on hunter-gatherer societies in this regard, especially in Paleolithic societies rather than those that persisted to the modern day. But given that hunter-gatherers were generally nomadic and had a much more diverse source of foods than settled agriculturalists, you probably would have worried less about food lasting you through winter than if you had been in any agricultural civilization up until 100 years ago or so.
> would have little hope of living past 40
Lolnope. Hunter-gatherer societies had longer lifespans than sedentary agriculturists, and even the shortest-lived societies generally had life expectancies of over 50 years of age if you made it past 5 or so.
> I'd suffer from routine episodes of famine, backbreaking labor,
Once again, hunter-gatherers are probably more resistant to famine than settled agriculturalists. It is now well-known that hunter-gatherers spent very little time working: about 2-4 hours per day of work was required, far less even than modern society.
> and the tribe booting me out to die when I was no longer carrying my weight.
Probably not. Old people hold valuable knowledge, such as which foods are edible in extreme famine.
> I'd watch most of my children die young, and would fear all sorts of stupid mythical boogeymen.
Fewer on both accounts than you would in early settled agricultural societies.
While it used to be thought that agriculture was obviously superior to hunter-gatherer societies (not least because it was independently developed at least 9 times), more recent anthropological work has shown that on nearly every metric, hunter-gatherer societies outperform agricultural societies until about the 19th century.
"Traditional nomadic tribes often end up abandoning their elderly during their unrelenting travels. The choice for the healthy and young is to do this or carry the old and infirm on their backs — along with children, weapons and necessities — through perilous territory. Also prone to sacrificing their elderly are societies that suffer periodic famines. Citing a dramatic example, Diamond said Paraguay’s Aché Indians assign certain young men the task of killing old people with an ax or spear, or burying them alive."
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/jared-diamond-on-aging-1505...
If you want to lop off 30 years of life expectancy to join your tribe, please include me out.
It's also worth pointing out that modern hunter-gatherer societies are not Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies. Those that remain today generally do so in part because the land they travel is too marginal for intensive agriculture, for example.
I've also seen other historians talk about nomadic tribes leaving the old behind to die, it's just that Diamond came up first in a search.
Other dangers and just the toll of harsher environments did much more to lower the life expectancy than ritualized murder of old people.
Well, yeah, the comment applied to nomadic people.
Where I live, the coyote population comes and goes, in reverse phase with the population of rabbits and other small creatures. The coyotes hunt till the game gets scarce, then they move on. They don't have a choice. Neither did nomadic people.
> Other dangers and just the toll of harsher environments did much more to lower the life expectancy than ritualized murder of old people.
Of course - not many people lived to be old. Neither scenario entices me to give up civilization for the life of a nomadic tribesman.
But what are you, the nomadic tribesman, going to do with the old man who can't walk when you've got to follow the caribou herd or die of starvation?
Downvote me all you like, but civilization gives us the luxury of choice, ethics, morality, etc. And so I choose civilization, because I don't want to be forced to leave the old people behind.
Especially because they had fewer children, since the human child is dependent on the mother for so long. So they focused more on getting each child to an age where they could start to take care of themselves before having another one.
And it also helped keep population low, which slowed the spread of disease and parasites, and also meant that a smaller food supply could feed people well.
I don't have a horse in the race, which is a silly one in any case. We are where we are and global civilisation can only be unpicked via cataclysm (which is a by no means remote possibility). And one can still see the human good in other cultures without wanting to abandon your own. I personally wouldn't be of that much use in a more communal society.
But I see no harm in starting with at least a modicum of knowledge, interpretive charity, and curiosity. When did the latter in particular become so undervalued in our society, as it seems to be on HN when this subject comes up?
A long time ago I saw a television documentary about a tribe of nomads living on the steppe in western Mongolia. They were supposedly distant descendants of the ancient Scythians, and living very much the same lifestyle their ancestors had for centuries -- a small tight-knit community, growing up on horseback, being highly skilled at archery, and so on.
During one particularly bad winter the tribe entered a Mongolian city at the edge of the steppe to seek shelter, and they never left. The filmmakers found the old women of the tribe working in an office building, sitting in cubicles and typing on computers. The only connection they had to the old ways was a horse archery show and competition they held in the streets of the city. The filmmakers asked the old women why the tribe had done this. Didn't they miss their traditional way of life?
They told him, of course we miss some aspects of our old life, and the freedom of living on the steppe, but what we don't miss is being cold and hungry all the time.
I think the evidence suggest hunter/gatherers lived longer than civilized people prior to modern medicine and sanitary practices, had more exercise, ate better, and didn't catch the same diseases (domesticated animals were a big source of disease).
That's not saying it's preferable. I have no way of knowing, having grown up with all the advantages of modern life. I do notice the large amount of overweight people, the preponderance of mental illness, and the various complaints about abuses from governments and corporations, the environmental impact of 7.x billion people, and the large number still living in abject poverty. Also the history of institutional slavery, war and genocide. So it's not all roses.
If I were forced to pick between medieval life in London or hunter/gather, I would pick the latter, unless I was nobility.
What is it doing to the environment to make your car? How about the electricity you use? How about the plastics/nylon in your clothes, shoes, food packaging, etc?
How about your children? What air will they breath? Water will they drink? How much more contaminated will the environment be? How many estrogen mimics will there be?
Keep in mind that the current bushmen are basically working half time jobs, are quite healthy (measuring blood values, percent fat, aerobic capacity, etc) AND they are living on extremely marginal land after been pushed out of more desirable land by cities and agriculture. If they weren't forced off the good land their quality of life would be even better.
A planet full of similar nomads (at their normal density) would likely last a billion years on the planet. Not sure the current society will last 200 years, and I'm afraid my kid is going to have a WAY tougher time of things than I had.
Sure it's great to be in the top few %, getting great health care, making over $100k, and not really having a serious unmet need. This however requires legions of poor working all over the planet and destroying it.
Australian indigenous nations managed a whole continent pretty successfully for 60,000 years. Agricultural-industrial civilisation has brought it to its knees in under 200. Our climate stability is collapsing at breakneck speed, the Great Barrier Reef is nearly dead, we have the most catastrophic mammalian extinction rate of any continent, our topsoil is being flushed out to sea, our great river systems are diminishing before our eyes.
(Though it's worth pointing out that Australian indigenous people were neither nomads nor hunter-gatherers, contrary to popular myth).
> his however requires legions of poor working all over the planet and destroying it.
I see your point, but the poor are only being used as tools by the rich. It is the rich for whom our living planet is being sacrificed. They will buy themselves comfort for another 50-200 years, as our world collapses.
Where did you get that from? Everything I've ever read about indigenous Australians says they were hunter-gatherers, with only very limited agriculture.
Indigenous Australians certain used hunting and gathering amongst a variety of food-obtaining methods like fish farming and yam cultivation (very various in the different nations). But they did so in landscapes that they actively managed through a range of techniques (including but not limited to use of fire) to make the flora and fauna of their choice readily available in their country (and to keep them available throughout good & bad seasons).
Popular accounts of the contemporary research can be found in Bill Gammage's The Biggest Estate on Earth and Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu. It's a fast-changing research landscape, though, with much left to be discovered.
http://www.globalrichlist.com/
$50K/yr -> You’re in the top 0.31% richest people in the world by income.
But does all that matter? Pointing out that the rich are (almost literally) eating the world doesn't give any of us the instant means to change the system we live within. We can only do what we can do, but there's nothing to do without awareness.
And the thing about modern medicine versus prehistoric illnesses, is that you would nearly always be either "doing okay", or dead. And the majority of people who got past 30 had a decent chance of living to 60 in most cases. Especially since they were usually involved in child care, etc. while the younger adults did the hunter-gatherer thing.
If you want to find out about the reality, "The Old Way: A Story of the First People" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is a fine start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
Problem is, in a less developed culture, there is still competition due to human nature and due to uncontrollable factors such as natural disasters. Pre-European-Contact Native Americans often fought against one another during periods such as drought.[1][2] Ironically one of the benefits of civilization is a stronger ability to handle situations of disaster and shortage that forces populations to go to war.
I'd also add that in a "civilized world" there are probably more avenues in life open to a person who isn't bound to the responsibility of food production (which constitutes 90% of a hunter-gatherer society). Science, history, the arts? Aside from oral traditions, all are outside the reach of a primitive society.
Oh, and at least in a modern civilization such as ours we have a small fighting chance against say, an incoming apocalyptic asteroid.
[1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/thanksgivin... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25cvxm/were_...
>>. A key to that lost or forsworn ability, Suzman suggests, lies in the ferocious egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers. For example, the most valuable thing a hunter can do is come back with meat. Unlike gathered plants, whose proceeds are “not subject to any strict conventions on sharing,” hunted meat is very carefully distributed according to protocol, and the people who eat the meat that is given to them go to great trouble to be rude about it. This ritual is called “insulting the meat,” and it is designed to make sure the hunter doesn’t get above himself and start thinking that he’s better than anyone else. “When a young man kills much meat,” a Bushman told the anthropologist Richard B. Lee, “he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. . . . We can’t accept this.” The insults are designed to “cool his heart and make him gentle.” For these hunter-gatherers, Suzman writes, “the sum of individual self-interest and the jealousy that policed it was a fiercely egalitarian society where profitable exchange, hierarchy, and significant material inequality were not tolerated.”
Incidentally, that was in essence the ideological basis of the infamous Khmer Rouge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
One thing that has constantly been on my mind since reading Sapiens is that no one has been able to definitively explain why men have dominated all of the positions of power in societies (up until a just a few years ago, at least). Civilizations that emerged completely independently from each other (whether in the fertile crescent, China, Mesoamerica or elsewhere), universally became patriarchies. Before the Neolithic era, and in some surviving hunter gatherer cultures today, matriarchy was not uncommon.
Women still tend to report being happier than men in survey data, and just going by the men and women I know, I think the men would prefer to abandon civilization before women. But I think if we want advance more women into positions of power in all tiers of society, then we need stop just trying to wrack it up to discrimination and sexism, stop trying to have the government regulate men and women's paycheck, and actually try to figure out why women have universally faired worse in societies.
For example (this is just a theory, I have no evidence whatsoever here), the men who tend to advance politically and in their careers are usually the ones with the best social skills. They're the ones who are the best at making advantageous alliances and forming strong relationships with those outside their family. Perhaps women are not as good at that? If that is the case, then it might be wise to try to encourage women to improve that subset of social skills. I may be way off here, but I think we need to start asking questions, coming up with theories, and testing those theories rather than settle on the one that's easiest but doesn't really get us anywhere.
Since we're on the topic of biological determinism, it's worth pointing out that women generally have higher levels of emotional intelligence than men. Estrogen is a hormone for emotional bonding.
And for that matter, a disproportionate amount of clinical psychopaths are in positions of leadership. That probably entails a better explanation for why men are disproportionately in higher levels of management.
I'm not saying women have poor social skills, just that they perhaps have a different set of social skills. Bonding emotionally with someone is important in a family setting. Less so for platonic relationships.
It's worth pointing out that men also tend to outnumber women significantly at the far left end of most bell curves. Data appears to show that for many traits, men have higher variability of traits, possibly caused by the differing sexual selection strategies of men and women. (There is much more diversity among mitochondrial DNA than Y-chromosomal DNA, which is just one piece of evidence among many that a smaller number of males produce a disproportionate amount of the offspring.)
The lack of understanding around the implications of normal distributions is such a problem when discussing this topic. Another thing that most people miss is that, if you're zoomed way in on the very end of the right side, things are going to look very different than if you are zoomed out and looking at the entire curve.
*Best: the best traits to become and remain leaders, a selection quality not a value based one. Being narcissistic might make someone the best in this sense.
Men are stronger and don't have to bear children.
Those are two of the three common explanations that are debunked in Sapiens.
I don't think this is the case at all. From my experience with politicians the most important traits are total lack of morals, unconstrained egoism and ability to sound authoritative even when lying or lacking any grasp of the topic at hand. Those also help in a corporate environment. I can't speculate whether those "skills" are more common among men.
All you need to know is that men stand to gain more, genetically, by accumulating prestige and power. This is because there is no upper limit on how many children a given male can sire, whereas women are fundamentally limited in how many children they can bear. This wikipedia page starkly illustrates this difference (it is a list of the most prolific men and women, by number of offspring):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_the_most_c...
The most prolific woman is at 69 children. The most prolific men are in the hundreds to thousands. Also, most of the women on the list are not notable aside from having given birth to many children. But the men are almost all notable primarily for things other than having sired many children (the exception being a handful of sperm donors and fertility doctors).
> women have universally faired worse in societies
Have they? While they may not inhabit positions of power, women generally survive conflicts between clans, tribes, and nation states. Look to the genocide of the Yazidi at the hands of ISIS: the women are taken as sex slaves, which is terrible, but the men are all dead. This is the fundamental tradeoff between male and female (in humans): women have a narrower normal distribution and men have a wider one. So, women rarely do great, but they also die less often. A few men do incredibly well, but many more men than women die trying to climb the dominance hierarchy.
I've thought about this too (well, not the genetic part) and I think it's a viable theory. Women's romantic ambitions are not tied anywhere near as tightly to their career success as men's are. I think this is a major contributor to a lower life satisfaction in men, at least.
I had some trouble phrasing the thing about women faring worse in societies. I didn't mean that their wellbeing is worse. I mean that they're disenfranchised and restricted from achieving positions of power.
I'm not a working evolutionary psychologist, but my understanding is that this is the most widely accepted theory for understanding this discrepancy in outcomes for men and women. If you're not already familiar with evolutionary psychology, I highly recommend taking a look. IMO, it is the best lens through which to understand human behavior.
> they're disenfranchised and restricted from achieving positions of power
I think causation runs along two paths. The first is, as you mention, that women are restricted and disenfranchised. But I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which women are evolved to simply not seek power and prestige. Seeking power is costly. It takes a lot of time and effort and, when things don't go well, you often end up dead (assassinations, coups, etc.). Whenever something is costly, it needs to have a marked offsetting benefit for it to be evolved for. Since women stand to gain less than men do by accumulating power, evolutionary theory predicts that they should be proportionately less motivated to do so.
We had big brains before we discovered fire. My understanding is that it's generally understood humans traded muscle for big brains.
Homo Erectus had a much smaller brain than us. And the cooking theory seems fairly well accepted these days.
Someone once made the calculus that if you had to grow and sustain your brain with just raw food, you'd have to eat like 18 hours a day or something (can't recall the exact number). That would not give you much time to actually use that brain. It's hard not to conclude on the importance of cooking in the evolution of our brain.
There's a TED conf on the subject, if you want: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7_XH1CBzGw
A diet of raw eggs would easily sustain, for a few minutes eating per day.
The calculus I was mentioning was based on assumptions regarding the kind of aliments you'd typically eat in paleolithical time or something. I believe it was in BBC's the origin of us[1], but I'm not sure. They took the example of carrots but I vaguely recall they generalize to a bunch of aliments.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Us
Sorry for the cut-and-paste but it's only a fraction of a pretty long-form article:
The other conclusion we can draw from the evidence, Scott says, is that there is a crucial, direct link between the cultivation of cereal crops and the birth of the first states. It’s not that cereal grains were humankind’s only staples; it’s just that they were the only ones that encouraged the formation of states. “History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit or sweet potato states,” he writes. What was so special about grains? The answer will make sense to anyone who has ever filled out a Form 1040: grain, unlike other crops, is easy to tax. Some crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava) are buried and so can be hidden from the tax collector, and, even if discovered, they must be dug up individually and laboriously. Other crops (notably, legumes) ripen at different intervals, or yield harvests throughout a growing season rather than along a fixed trajectory of unripe to ripe—in other words, the taxman can’t come once and get his proper due. Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ” Other crops have some of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became “the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar.” The taxman can come, assess the fields, set a level of tax, then come back and make sure he’s got his share of the harvest.
It was the ability to tax and to extract a surplus from the produce of agriculture that, in Scott’s account, led to the birth of the state, and also to the creation of complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor, specialist jobs (soldier, priest, servant, administrator), and an élite presiding over them. Because the new states required huge amounts of manual work to irrigate the cereal crops, they also required forms of forced labor, including slavery; because the easiest way to find slaves was to capture them, the states had a new propensity for waging war. Some of the earliest images in human history, from the first Mesopotamian states, are of slaves being marched along in neck shackles. Add this to the frequent epidemics and the general ill health of early settled communities and it is not hard to see why the latest consensus is that the Neolithic Revolution was a disaster for most of the people who lived through it.
- Flour: 4,252
- Russet Potatoes: 1,437
- Yams: 540
I don't know why this is exactly, but my hunch is that it has mostly to do with spoilage. Specifically, that grains essentially do not spoil.
The cited expert is also wrong, if I'm not mistaken, about the lack of civilizations born of on a staple other than cereal grains. The New World civilizations (Aztec, Inca, Mayas) did not have access to cereal grains. Their primary staples were potatoes (South America) and corn (Central America).
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FYI, I've done some work quantifying food costs, which are, IMO, a fascinating lens through with to view the world. If you want to dig in deeper, here's the Google sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSo8XQrIKZ8G.... I think the tabs labeled Food Chart and Category Range Chart are the most interesting (everything else is supporting calculations).
The glycemic index shows that calories are worth little if they blow your blood sugar through the roof and then send it crashing as flour-derived food stuffs usually do. Roots and tubers contain more complex carbohydrates and have a lower GI, providing energy over a longer period.
That said I agree with the spoilage part - grains do last longer before spoiling.
> The cited expert is also wrong, if I'm not mistaken, about the lack of civilizations born of on a staple other than cereal grains. The New World civilizations (Aztec, Inca, Mayas) did not have access to cereal grains. Their primary staples were potatoes (South America) and corn (Central America).
The author wasn't talking about civilisations, they specifically mentioned states, which I guess could be translated as empire or collection of civilisations taxed by a central authority. That said I have no idea whether their point was correct - I just thought it was interesting.
I heard of a different reason: alcohol.
You get a consistent regular source of ale if and only if you stay in one place working on our lands (which you can call yours in exchange for taxes). Also, fermented drinks were usually safer to drink back then, so that's another bonus.
Hunter gatherers and the other crop based "states" couldn't offer that, even with a nicer life style, so they weren't as popular.
H-g societies lack knowledge beyond the most immediate needed to survive. The author himself probably knows more about the world and the universe (excepting the specifics of how to survive in the wild - a mundane problem) than the entirety of all hunter gatherer societies.
I'd rather drink HFCS-infused water, eat processed meat, and breathe diesel fumes than be unable to think the thoughts I think today because I lack the framework to even think them.
No thanks.
Also unfortunately, it's hard to know which to prescribe the "problems" and the "benefits" of the agricultural and civilization complex to, agriculture or civilization. The existence of things like specialization and war are hard to find unambiguous evidence for in archaeology (it can sometimes be hard to remember that there are multiple plausible explanations for a find, and picking a certain interpretation may more reflect an archaeologist's biases than the actual truth), and so figuring out when in the course of human development they first appear is difficult if not impossible. I'm generally of the opinion that most of the problems postdate the development of agriculture, but I hold that position less because there's strong evidence for it, but because there's no strong evidence either way and I find it more useful to get other people to consider multiple interpretations of the matter.
Starting at 12:00, Toby Hemenway talks about agriculture led industrial culture & its problems. How we are missing a spot where horticulture can be long-term beneficial.
I've often thought that the ideal post-scarcity lifestyle would be to live in giant gardens (in giant rotating space habitats no less) where we can run around hunting, gathering, telling stories around the campfire and sleeping under the stars, and occasionally spending time in the lab or workshop or in zero-g building stuff.
i.e. hunting and gathering -> agriculture -> industrialisation -> automation -> hunting and gathering (and space engineering)
I look at my grandparents from the WWII generation, and I think their existences, as modest as they are, have been more agreeable--to both themselves and to the world--than the ones most people endure today.
There are many otherwise healthy young people who are morbidly obese who wouldn't have been so 50 years ago. There are so many otherwise intelligent people who cannot deal with other people in a social setting, and everyone's like "oh, it's autism," and maybe in some cases it is, but I have to wonder if some of it is just a case of otherwise ordinary people being raised by television, books, video games instead of other people.
I hardly know a person over 30 who isn't already on an assortment of maintenance medications. The doctors had me on two maintenance medications before I was 30, and if I hadn't figured out that hitting the gym and not eating like I was still a teenager works a hell of a lot better, I would still be taking them.
Then you look at other parts of the world--where the slaves that make our stuff live--and the rivers are choked with garbage and the smog blots out the daylight.
Then there is the nearly unavoidable proliferation of technology. In most tech and sales jobs, regardless of your own preference, you have to have a cell phone and e-mail--unless you want to lose your job. In most marketing and PR jobs, you have to contend with facebook / twitter / etc. "So what?" Neuroplasticity. "The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too strong to break." You are literally burning pathways into your brain for compulsively checking/responding to messages/likes/etc. It's like Pavlov's dog, but with humans, and it is a very hard thing to un-learn.
Then there's all the stuff Taleb goes on about like iatrogenics and hormesis.
That happened before civilization. As it happens, tools are really useful.
In the modern situation where man struggles against man, you end up with many game-theory scenarios where the man is compelled to serve the tool.
Civilization enables health and comfort levels that hunter-gatherers never dreamed of: their "lifestyle" options were extremely limited and grim, geared to maximize survival of tribes instead of individual happiness and comfort. Without civilization existing in its current technological level, most people will just die, the minority which will adapt will not live in a paleo paradise.
There is no "abundant natural resources" of paleolithic anymore, there is no skills and knowledge of wilderness survival. In the event of civilizational collapse, people will have nothing much to harvest/hunt/gather after initial plundering(long-term impact will not be a priority). The limited resources of current Earth will not support such lifestyle. Even huntergatherers will not survive this, as they'll have to compete with armed civilization remnants searching for any resources to continue its current lifestyle. In short, civilization has one way forward and any collapse will be fatal, a state which cannot "jump start a civilization again", with all easily extracted resources gone and natural environment plundered. The forests and jungles exist only because there are legal frameworks to ensure their continued existence inside a civilization: in case of collapse they'll be stripped for firewood and collapse in a decade.
It is also the same for technology/AI. They may not improve our quality of life, but they allow more powerful armies that would defeat those who resist them.
It's sad but it's true.
https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/
Case against Civilization is case for extinction of all animals 6000 years ago.
I would rather be living now and enjoying this earth, than be someone who thinks that he can take on the wild if there weren't as many other people around.
And I don't think "human" become "humans" because things were just swell. Precisely because of evolutionary pressure humans evolved. I would rather have us evolved than not.
This is the core of Hobbes' description of pre-state societies as "nasty, brutish, and short". Prehistoric life was incredibly tough and brutal as there simply wasn't much room for error.
If someone is able to steal from you or mistreat you without repercussion you immediately become a target for every other bad actor in the tribe. In this environment reciprocal violence is rational. A neutral state actor with a monopoly on violence tips the incentives towards non-violent resolution of disputes.
In modern times if you are unemployed for a month you can collect a check from the government and move on with your life. In prehistoric times if you go a month without successfully hunting or collecting food you get to watch your children starve to death. Again, very very little room for error.
Neolithic life had it's own set of challenges namely famine, disease, and inter-state warfare. But over the long term it provided more cushion for common mistakes and the foibles of human nature. It enlarged the margin of error for survival compared to prehistoric peoples.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...