From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 22:52:20 MDT
> At 05:35 PM 9/11/03 -0700, Robbie wrote [lots of plausible
> stuff, but]:
>
> >Plenty of genocides year
> >after year, century after century demonstrate that STATES - not
> >religions, not hordes, not cave-people, etc. - are the truly
> dangerous
> >elements in human lives.
>
Damien B wrote:
> Nah. Pinker and other sources indicate that the risk of being
> murdered in
> pre-state cultures is *outrageously* high. An American male
> has 1 chance in
> 200 of being murdered (this clearly elides location and
> sub-culture, but
> still). Check out the graph in Pinker's THE BLANK SLATE,
> chapter 3: the
> Jivaro, 60% chance, the Huli a mere 20%.
In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jarod Diamond makes an argument at one point that
"primitive" societies actually select better for intelligence because of,
among other things, the high likelihood of being murdered (and so,
presumably, the usefulness of intelligence in avoiding murder). He posits
that hunter gatherers are probably more intelligent on average than
sedentary 20th city folk, as a result.
I'm not sure if I buy the argument, but hey :-)
Emlyn
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