The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

I love Jared Diamond's work, but I think that this essay is incomplete at best and only raises more questions.

If agriculture was a last-resort method, why didn't smaller fractions splinter off from the groups and continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle?

Diamond writes, "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to." I don't think that's true. Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops. And while great sculptures may have arose 15,000 years ago by hunter-gatherer societies, no violins or pianos certainly came about. I think he is downplaying the effect that art and engineering have had here.

In the last paragraph Diamond calls the hunter-gatherer lifestyle the "longest lasting" lifestyle, which is trivially true (it was there first). But he also calls it the "most successful in human history."

Successful how? In terms of happiness? In terms of overcoming various maladies? If they were almost all completely crushed by agrarian societies, as he illustrates in Guns, Germs & Steel, wouldn't that be considered unsuccessful?

Life expectency is now 67 years. I'll take the extra 40 years and deal with the lack of "essential" amino acids.

Of course the real problem with this essay is the nonsensical premise. Agriculture can't be a mistake because it wasn't a decision. There may have been some individual people who decided to switch from hunting to agriculture, but there was no species-wide vote. There is no reason to imagine that there could've been such a vote, or that today there could be a decision for humanity to switch back.

Of course individual people can decide to embrace the hunter gatherer life. I find it interesting that the author is reaching for pen & paper and not loin cloth & spear.

e.g. I went to a public school, worked for 2.5 years out of college, then saved enough to pay off debts and take a year and a half off to go travel. I'm in great health, I have a beautiful wife that I love dearly, my house is never cooler than 65 degrees, and when it rains I don't have to get wet. You can keep your hunting and gathering.

Just because most people now are suckers doesn't mean you have to be one. Smart fiscal and dietary choices open a world of possibilities totally inaccessible to pre-agrarian (or even pre-industrial) humans.

A charming thought perhaps, but not literally true.

Trying to compare the happiness of cavemen with modern people demolishes whatever vague definition of "happiness" we might already have. And if we fall back on "do modern people want to be cavemen?" then the answer is no.

Agriculture has profoundly changed every aspect of human existence many times over. Can we label the last few millenia of human history collectively as "good" or "bad"? Compared to what?

You could interpret a pre-industrial economy as working on a flat per-capita capital increase. People grew as fast as capital, so there was little opportunity for accumulation (outside the very small ruling class). That is no longer the case, although there are powerful ideologies that would undo it.

The writer talks about deaths caused by disease and overcrowding from agriculture but he neglects to mention that those people would not have been born in the first place because there wouldn't have been enough food to support them using the hunter-gatherer model. If agriculture causes + 1k births and -100 deaths then it's still net beneficial. This may seem like callous mathematics but would it not be even more cruel to deny existence for those other 900 souls?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory#Overview

>"How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?"

there is no "better" in progress. Using the same analysis, the Industrial Revolution made working peoples life worse than lives of farmers. So what? It isn't about better. It is about species survival and dominance.

Humans are predators with extremely high killing instinct. Wait until the interstellar space annihilation drive invented. Any intelligent species which doesn't have photonic torpedoes may start learning history of Incas and Native Americans. It is easy to imagine how human emission of green house interstellar dust will increase the ratio of Galaxy kernel's X-rays kept inside the Galaxy and causing global galaxy warming and slow down of its rotation.

when considered as an alternative to sudden, significant population decline as a result of collapsing prey biomass rather than to a literal (and possibly the mythological origin of) eden, the choice to live agriculturally is the best mistake we've ever made.

To back his claim, he puts forth arguments ranging from absurd

"As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to."

to anecdotal, i.e. no proof at all

"Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well... Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip ..."

And the final stroke, the masterful FUD-laden last paragraph:

"As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us? "

Setting aside that there is no global shortage of food (does not mean that nobody's is hungry, but the reasons are complex and food shortage is not one of them), most of this is, at best speculative.

If you liked his point of view, than you may also like Prof. Eric Pianka's thesis that there are too many people on earth and if an airborne Ebola virus kills 90% it would be a good thing (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html).

The problem with these views is that they resonate with a certain mindset, people who think we have too much science and technology in our lives and it would have been better to live like the "so-called" primitive people. One recent example that comes to mind is the movie Babies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020938/). Here, the life of the two babies living in primitive (not so-called, really primitive) conditions in Africa and Kazakhstan is discreetly shown to be better and more free than their counterparts in the US and Japan.

I understand where the author is trying to go and I was rooting for him, but it looked like he lacked the depth to do the analysis, so he kind of meandered around. Some parts were better, some parts were worse. This kind of counter-factual discussion (what would the world be like if Hitler had won? How about if the Neanderthals hadn't died out?) has a tendency to get fluffy pretty quickly. Fun for a paragaph or two, or a tweet, but very tough to pull off in essay or longer format.

In addition, be careful to use the word 'evolution' with timeframes as miniscule as 200,000 years - the author correctly uses the word 'adoption'.

Progress isn't always a straight line. Early automobiles were poor replacements for horses or horse-powered vehicles, but the potential was there.

http://www.amazon.com/Civilizations-Culture-Ambition-Transfo... (Not an affiliate link.)

Is there a term that describes a typo like this, wherein a word relevant to the context is used instead of the "correct" word for the sentence?

In the 1960s Henry Kissinger completed National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), which is more commonly referred to as the "Kissinger Report" (http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PCAAB500.pdf). Kissinger says that the greatest threat to America is not the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but the overpopulation of third-world countries. NSSM 200 discusses several mechanisms that control population growth, such as war, famine, disease, pestilence, poverty and immigration.

Dr. Al Bartlett's (http://www.albartlett.org/) says, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" (you can watch his famous lecture on population growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU&playnext=1...). He then goes through the stark reality of what will happen if we continue our exponential growth against finite natural resources.

Research by economists John Donohue and Steven Levit at the University of Chicago (http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittT...) showed that the legalizing of abortion started to reduce violent crime by the 1980s because would-be impoverished people weren't growing up to be criminals. You may have read about this is Levit's book, Freakonomics (http://freakonomicsbook.com/).

Abortion, one of our most controversial issues, is primarily about population control, but this rarely gets talked about. It's the establishment's pink elephant that's been sitting in the room since the 1970s (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html...). We argue about "right to life" and "right to choose" and most have never even considered the bigger issue because that's the way the issue has been framed.

The question we should be asking is, "Do you believe that population control is a good thing or a bad thing?"

At the end of Dr. Bartlett's lecture on population growth, he presents the "Great Challenge." He asks, "Can you think of any problem on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted or advanced by having larger populations at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?"

My answer to his challenge is: Yes, larger populations mean we have more of our greatest resource -- ourselves. Our creativity and ingenuity has developed solutions to our greatest problems, but we need true and accurate information so that we make better decisions and work toward a solution.

Agricultural peoples simply out-populated their nomadic, hunter-gatherer brethren. Both groups of populations stole from the other (and within their group) but agricultural people could raise more soldiers. Nomadic warriors were individually superior (better nutrition, more battle experience, more likely to have up-to-date battle technologies due to mobility) but were no match when outnumbered 20:1 by armed peasants. Also, to rob a farming population, one has to leave some of them alive, and that means that, 14 years later, they have a fresh crop of soldiers.

It's (probably) true that the average quality of life declined during 15-4k BC as agriculture spread throughout Eurasia and North Africa-- agriculture made severe and persistent social inequalities possible-- but the quantity grew, as did "energy capture", or the ability of humans to draw energy out of the environment. Thus, agriculture won. It couldn't have happened any other way. Also, it wasn't a single choice that happened suddenly. The transitions from nomadic to semi-nomadic to semi-agricultural to fully agricultural lifestyles happened over centuries. Agriculture probably began as a "last resort" in event of an ecological catastrophe (Younger Dryas) that depleted game but, as rising human population became a "constant catastrophe", overtook hunting and gathering outright.

At any rate, until one has agriculture (and religion, as a motivating force) one is very unlikely to see the written word, which is a necessary precursor for modern society. Whether one is better off in 15000 BC vs. 1500 AD, I would honestly call a toss-up, but I'd much rather be alive in 2011 AD than 15000 BC.