The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race – Agriculture
discovermagazine.com
discovermagazine.com
Science, astronomy, biology and archaeology -- all advanced culture -- cannot happen without the critical mass of population provided by cities, fed by agriculture. This article is such nonsense.
As the article says, if you chose to be born twenty thousand years ago, there's a good chance you would be born in a tribe with a reasonably stable social and cultural structure that rarely lacked for any major needs. Today, you would most likely be born as one of the masses of poor subsistence farmers throughout the world, but most likely in China or India, who's life and work is miserable/back-breaking enough that they'll choose to make our electronics for 10 or 12 or 14 hours a day and consider it an improvement.
It seems that only in the last decade has modern technology reached the point where it can be provided to the masses and begin what might be a global transformation that leads to better lives for all - rather than better lives for a few at the expense of the many.
If you survived your first year of life, then your first 5 years of life, etc
Then you would have to hunt or do dangerous stuff with precarious tools, no health care in case of accident, etc
Oh and you would probably die by your 30s.
Makes the chinese factory kind of look good.
Average life expectancy at birth is heavily influenced by infant mortality. Most people didn't really die in their 30s.
Not sure about the actual figures for that time period, though.
Average: 30 years.
I oversimplified a bit, but you can see the overview of the statistics misinterpretation.
Further, while infant mortality was a problem (and has continued to be up until the last hundred years), you would probably not die by your thirties (life expectancy calculations are throw off precisely by infant mortality rates - the life expectancy for a person in almost any society goes up to at least 50 if you discount deaths of those under a year of age or so.)
Is there something wrong with hunting, or difficult about it? I'm fairly sure we were good enough to wipe out a few species before the rise of agriculture. As for "dangerous stuff with precarious tools"... by all means, enlighten me. I'm having a hard time thinking of anything more dangerous than a sharp edge in any non-technologically advanced society. The number of dangers we have today from our tools (heard about a car crash on the radio recently?) and the lethality of them (how many people die from gun accidents? from mixing bleach and ammonia? electrocution? power tools? industrial machinery?)
Do I even need to cover healthcare? Or how the vast majority of the world doesn't have it? Or how the majority of medications we develop don't demonstrate a greater effect than a placebo?
" Or how the vast majority of the world doesn't have it? " You are very removed from reality.
The majority of people, even in very poor countries have access to aspirin, antibiotics. As tragic and cruel and "modern", kids that lost limbs to landmines are, they would have died without 20th century medical care, and they are alive today.
I don't see your point about visiting a farm, or your point about landmines; there's no lack of people around the world that die from things as simple as lack of drinking water and malnutrition, which I would consider the absolute minimum any kind of health care could provide.
It is beautiful, magnificent and utterly capricious - inured to cries of mercy, fairness or justice.
If you have ever been camping or in a forest or walked through shrubland this fact will be made abundantly clear to you.
Immobile things like plants have edged leaves, burrs and seeds to sink deep into furs, thorns to prevent casual damage, let alone poisons and allergens. Forget mention of the thousands of insects and their colonies.
The environment is inimical to today's civilized primates we call man.
Hunting IS difficult, as is building tools without things like muscle force multipliers. Sharp edges? Want to beat stones together to get edges? Or do you want to move up to the Iron age? Now you have the option of living long enough to die of dysentery.
What you further ignore is that even accrued tribal knowledge is slowly lost if populations don't achieve a certain concentration. Imagine rediscovering the "art" of smithing, only to lose it by the third generation.
Whats dangerous in that society isn't the sharp edges, its the lack of anything else. Sick? Can't hunt? Good luck. Artery sliced open? Sepsis? Need antibiotics? Lets hope the witch doctor has good juju.
No. It doesn't make the Chinese factory look good. [edit: removed because it sounded too mean to me]
I suggest watching some documentaries about Asian nomads or other indigenous peoples. They live a primitive life, sure. But they seem pretty content and stress free. I'm not even sure if I prefer my own pampered life to theirs.
I'd rather kill myself than work in a Chinese factory. From what I hear on the news, I'm not the only one who thinks that way.
And you heard about the Chinese factories on the same documentaries right?
But the Chinese workers have a choice, most of them came from the Chinese countryside willingly.
Now, why did they choose that instead of having a simple, stress free life in the Chinese countryside? It's probably "easier" than being an Asian nomad, and some may have that exact background.
The biggest failure should be to look at why we haven't leveraged automation in agriculture to a point where one shouldn't have to work just to survive. But the way I see, in another coming decades this is something which is going to be inevitable.
In my country(India), it suggested all along the years that the biggest struggle for resources is going to be for water. In fact we are already facing a massive water crisis. It is believed there will massive riots, big war like stand off between states and mafia like control over water resources very soon. Much of this is a result of reckless mismanagement of water resources Eg: Waste dumping(both industrial and civic), turning lakes into sites for real estates in cities, over consumption of ground water. Some more time from now and India is all set for a major water crisis.
The miserable back breaking 12-14 schedules making electronics for you, is far better. The alternates are far worse. I can tell you it was more worst in India even in the past. There was rampant caste system. If you weren't born a male in a high caste warrior or priest family you were essentially screwed. And yes at least now people can chose some alternatives, back then it was slave labor bonded through generations. All you could do was slog in the fields for a rich landlord/king and hope you could eat bread twice a day. Or at most die building structures like the Taj Mahal or The Giza Pyramid. And yes there were famines, plagues and epidemics. In short, life in the past was scary.
I would say we are far better off then what we were before.
And my point about the endless hours making electronics is that if this is the best we can do for the majority of people in the world today, which is an improvement on the miserable times of earlier civilization/agricultural society, how pathetic is that compared to times of tribal societies when things were much more equal and life (on average) was much better?
And I think you answer your own question about automation - our economic system is the reason we have people starving even when we have enough food to feed everyone. Automation won't change that by itself.
Of course they didn't have medicines, shelter to protect themselves from epidemics that wiped out their whole tribes. Which I also think kept their population growth in check. Imagine getting your hand or a limb fractured then! Or catching dysentery. I am sure when things went fine, they went fine- The problem is basically when you get into a trouble which doesn't a solution at the present.
Agriculture seems to be a inevitable step for any intelligent species to take if they want to live in organized ways like societies, states and countries.
Its difficult to say what is better. Agriculture is basically is mass production of a basic element for survival called food .I would consider pharmaceutical companies as mass producers of another (now) basic necessity called health care. What ever you could say about agriculture you could also say about medicine.You could say people with cancer 1000 years back war far better off, at least they would just die instead of spending their life savings on fighting a disease they can't get cured off.
> epidemics that wiped out their whole tribes.
These things were supremely rare. As the article notes, the rise of death by disease at scale was a direct result of higher population and density, as well as likely poorer sanitary conditions.
Let us presume a disease randomly shows up and infects a tribe, killing all of them. Now what? The disease dies out. In fact, our tribal nature is in effect a preventative measure against precisely this, as it causes most human societies to develop boundaries with each other. A deadly disease survives by spreading, which is a difficult thing to do in a world of tribal societies.
> Which I also think kept their population growth in check.
All animal populations are kept in control by basic ecology - when there's enough food to support a larger population, the population grows; when there is not, it does not. Humans are no different (until modern times with birth control/women empowerment/etc.)
> Agriculture seems to be a inevitable step for any intelligent species to take if they want to live in organized ways like societies, states and countries.
This is an interesting point. Agriculture has allowed larger societies (tribes are organized societies, and good ones), but not better ones (yet). I don't find this particularly surprising - a highly refined technology or method is almost always better than a newer one, even if the newer one eventually equals and surpasses it. The gun took hundreds of years to replace the sword, the car decades to replace the horse, and today we see new forms of energy production gradually moving to replace oil. Humans and developments in human society are no different - agriculture is the only way to support larger societies, but we have yet to correct for all the problems it brings that tribal societies had long since solved.
This is not hope or optimism, it's merely following the trends that have been consistent for the last 2 centuries.
We develop one advance and instead of using it to be happier, we use it to be just more people, and poorer.
Seriously, we need to stop being more and more just for the sake of it.
I don't think most people would appreciate the demand to stop having children because infant mortality these days is so low.
I'm glad I was born into my time, in a rich country. And why shouldn't I? I live like a king and don't have to put any real effort into anything to maintain my status. All my problems are literally first world problems. But on a global scale agriculture fucked us up something fierce. And while I take a lot of pleasure in the nicer aspects of advanced culture, I wouldn't just assume that it justifies the horrible things that would never have come to be if we would have kept on living in a healthy symbiotic relationship with our natural environment.
Or as Louis CK said at the Beacon Theater (I'm paraphrasing): "God: I gave you everything you need. Why did you put that shit there? Guy: So I can go faster!"
Er, is this true? Birth-control seems a relatively modern thing... Even if a H-G society might be less inclined to have lots of children (I dunno, really), did they actually have the knowledge and/or wherewithal (e.g. to purposely refrain from sex) to achieve that?
Edit: poking around on the internet, it looks like infant mortality is the big differentiator. In hunter-gatherers it's rather high, at around 1 in 3, which is nearly double the infant mortality you'd expect even in primitive agrarian societies. That's going to have a tremendous impact on the population growth.
[Which makes H-G society sound rather less peachy than the original article seems to have been claiming...]
I'm sure this would seem like a much more profound statement if I hadn't yet learned ecology.
Not surprising, "controversial" claims often require selective myopia in order to make claims that counter how the world works.
"We eat what we need. We protect what we need." seems pretty profound to me.
- population crowding is no longer necessary as telecommuting is a viable way of doing most jobs (hopefully the naysayers will be "silenced" in a few generations... like Moses's people that had to die in the desert before reaching the "promised land" as their mentalities were not compatible with it)
- we're becoming "hunters" again, as we engage in competitive activities to earn more "game" (money), dedicating more resources to this "hunting" than to actually "producing things"
- we're "gatherers" again - only that we gather from the supermarket instead of the bushes and we gather from the fruits of mechanized agriculture and industry instead of the fruits of the land
...but better still, we may soon be able to have the cake and eat it too: space colonization, ocean colonization, even higher yield concentrated agriculture via new biotech breakthroughs and "too cheap to meter" energy via large scale thorium reactors deployments and later fusion will allow even faster exoponential continuous population growth.
Let our Zerg (err... Human) swarm grow exponentially and engulf the universe! :)
[1] http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277
That said.. he is right, but from the vantage point of someone in this day and age, who loves science and technology, who has benefitted from the efforts of the billions of post-agricultural humans, I selfishly prefer this outcome to sitting around gathering nuts in uncomfortable underwear, waging endless war with neighbouring bands and tribes.
Sure, agriculture produced a Long Dip in living standards, with population increases outstripping any gains made in production. But the whole point of a large population - perhaps the only redeeming feature of civilization - is that one can trawl the probabilistic waters and produce the few very mad, very interesting geniuses who make it all worthwhile.
I've always thought that the Matrix really came about due to the natural tendency of civilization to increase population density. From the open savannah to cubicles, cars and capsule hotels.. the Matrix is just highly aggressive telecommuting.
And it worked, too. Humans maintained ever higher population densities, produced lots of crazy geniuses who kept improving the interfaces, until significant bits of personalities could jump across from brain to brain. "AIs" were nothing more than mobile multiple-personality disorders. Morpheus' crowd were basically scavengers, helping keep the Matrix clean of dangerous personalities while maintaining a reserve pool of free-range human at Zion, in case the Matrix needed to be repopulated... which it did, from time to time, after epic meme-virus infections which killed off most of the existing inhabitants. The whole "AI vs humans" story and attempts to kill Morpheus & co was a big piece of drama to keep them righteously motivated rather than relaxing with the blue pill.
I'm not sure we would reach the same level of a sophisticated society that we enjoy today. Would the writer of this article have time to dedicate to writing, if he had to hunt for food, instead of having it ready in a dish in a few minutes? I highly doubt it.
I also think there's an evolutionary benefit that came out of agriculture. As the complexity of our behavior towards dealing with an agricultural system increased, so did our intelligence.
What I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure we would reach the same level of intelligence - through natural evolution - that we have today, if we didn't build highly complex systems that required lots of logical thinking (agriculture). If we were all still hunters, we would not be as intelligent.
There are 3 levels on which we can think about survival.
1. Population level
On this level, agriculture is clear benefit as it provided stable microenvironment to practice abstract sciences that led us here.
2. Individual level
On this level, we clearly lost it. Degenerative disease, particularly dental one and so called diseases of civilization. It may or may not reflect on u as individual depending on ur environment and genetics, but it reflects badly on majority of people. So this is middle ground heading bad way ATM and in what direction will it go depends on how fast we can adapt (epigenetics etc.)
3. Cell level.
Ask your enterocytes how they feel about glutens and friends. Ask your neurons how they feel about sugar surge and Coca Cola. Its total disaster here. Way to much for adaptation. Thats why we have rogue cells converting to metazoa 1.0 software (i.e. cancer).
Is this true? (The bit about cancer)
It's fascinating to me how some of the most liberal folks can idolize some of the most regressive and socially conservative lifestyles and cultures in history.
Did anyone else envision an awesome zombie movie while reading this?
And at 11:59pm we adopted the Enlightenment, egalitarianism, scientific method, self-determination. Just because something was the case for a long time doesn't mean it was by default the best case.
That's got to be a logical fallacy.
A single farmer with modern tools can feed hundreds of people.
As much as I disagree with the OP, I viscerally hate crowded cities, having more than 2 people per sq km population density, oversocialization of human beings and social hierarchies everywhere and all the other crap we had to put up with to get to the current level of progress in science and technology, but I hate it even more when people forget that it is only worth putting up with all this crap because of the goal of progress in science and technology and the hope that it will in the end set us free from the "slavery" of biological mortality and of biologically limited brainpower!.