From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 18:09:58 MDT
> gts wrote:
> > "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race"
> > http://www.agron.iastate.edu/courses/agron342/diamondmistake.html
> >
> > This is an excellent article by Jared Diamond that appeared
> in Discovery
> > Magazine in 5/87. According to Diamond, agriculture is the
> worst mistake in
> > the history of the human race.
> >
> > Diamond acknowledges that the pre-agricultural diet was a
> healthier diet,
> > and lists variations on this theme as the first and second
> of three reasons
> > for the poor health of early farmers. The third of his
> three reasons is
> > indeed increased disease from over-crowding, but he adds
> parenthetically
> > that arguments of archeologists who claim this as the only
> reason are really
> > just chicken-and-egg arguments, because "crowding
> encourages agriculture and
> > vice versa."
> >
> > Excerpt from the article:
> > "There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the
> findings that
> > agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers
> enjoyed a varied
> > diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from
> one or a few
> > starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor
> > nutrition. (today just three high-carbohydrate
> plants-wheat, rice, and
> > corn-provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human
> species, yet
> > each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids
> essential to life.)
> > Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops,
> farmers ran the
> > risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that
> > agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded
> societies, many
> > of which then carried on trade with other crowded
> societies, led to the
> > spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some
> archaeologists think it
> > was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted
> disease, but this
> > is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages
> agriculture and
> > vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations
> were scattered in
> > small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and
> diarrheal disease
> > had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic
> plague the appearance
> > of large cities."
>
> Let's not forget standing armies. Agriculture enabled people
> to produce
> more food than they needed to feed themselves alone, enabling
> the rise of
> a ruling class that subsisted off other people's work and
> could force them
> to work 16-hour days to feed as many boss-class individuals
> as possible.
> And of course, the transition to agriculture marks the
> transition from
> work to which we are adapted, and which we presumably found
> fulfilling or
> at least tolerable, to "work" in the sense of mental-energy-sapping,
> life-force-draining labor.
>
> Is it really worth it to be able to read the Feynman
> Lectures? I would
> say yes; your own mileage may vary. Fortunately the dilemna is a
> temporary one.
>
> --
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Hunting and gathering was a local maximum; getting out of those is never
going to be fun. I'm all for it, though.
Emlyn
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