Re: The mistake of agriculture (was: evolution and diet)

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri May 23 2003 - 03:27:50 MDT

  • Next message: Anders Sandberg: "Re: The mistake of agriculture"

    On Thu, May 22, 2003 at 11:01:10PM -0400, gts wrote:
    > Anders Sandberg wrote:
    >
    > > [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. As he puts it, "The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so
    > far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has
    > taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and
    > since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the
    > wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it
    > was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the
    > B-minor Mass... While the case for the progressivist view seems
    > overwhelming, it's hard to prove... It turns out that [HG'ers] have plenty
    > of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming
    > neighbors... One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring
    > tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so
    > many mongongo nuts in the world?... Gorillas have had ample free time to
    > build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to...."

    This is true, but also a bit narrow. Having leisure time (which is somewhat
    debatable in HG societies; much of the time is spent waiting) does not
    produce any parthenon - none were built by the gorillas or human HGs. That it
    is impossible to prove progressivism doesn't make it a bad hypothesis, just
    as it is impossible to prove a lot of history but it is still most likely
    true or at least a reasonable account.

    Maybe one could use Rojas negative technology determinism: technology doesn't
    determine society, but it determines the space of possible societies at any
    point in time. With agriculture larger populations, economies of scale and
    cities became possible, which in turn allow division of labor, a warrior
    class and culture and so on. These are roads that need not have been taken
    by all people, but many hold such benefits (for genes and memes) that those
    who take them will dominate the others.

    Meanwhile HGs do not have much advantages of scale and technological
    development was limited - a better way of catching food means that there will
    be less of it in the long run rather than more. Hence they are essentially
    locked into their technology as long as they retain the same lifestyle.

    I think progressivism works on the large scale, when we treat human history
    as statistical mechanics rather than look at individual people or regions. On
    the large scale we see how a growing humanity creates a situation where it
    competes with itself on a variety of levels, spurring a massive co-evolution
    of technology, culture, population and economy. Locally things are far more
    complex and can move in many different ways.

    > One might even argue that extropianism is a philosophical attempt to prepare
    > an escape from the doomed world we created at the advent of agriculture.

    That is the negative way of seeing it. The positive way of seeing it is that
    extropianism is a philosophical attempt to breach the shell of the seed-pod
    and grow into a tree.

    -- 
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
    asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
    GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri May 23 2003 - 03:34:36 MDT