From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 23:03:42 MDT
> (gts <gts_2000@yahoo.com>):
>
> > [Agriculture] also set us on the path towards culture, superhuman
> > intelligence and the stars.
>
> This is akin to the "progressivist perspective," which Diamond flatly
> rejects.
Only because he focuses on a small portion of history and a few
effects and totally sweeps the rest under the rug. Sure, early
agriculture wasn't an immediate success, and the evidence of that
is good. As he points out, the life expectancy of hunter-gatherers
was 26, while that of early agriculurists fell to 19. Well, OK,
but last time I looked we've moved forward a bit since then.
Yes, agriculture enabled population density that spread disease
and created a lot of social ills, and maybe didn't increase spare
time. But it did enable things like specialization, trade, mass
education, large-scale construction, and everything else that
got us a lot further than those early agriculturalists. And those
first few plagues killed off enough that those left (and we,
their descendents) are likely better adapted to the new lifestyle.
As was already pointed out, Diamond shows only that hunting
and gathering was a local maximum, which says nothing at all
about whether it is an optimum in the big picture.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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