
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race - gnosis
http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
======
simonsarris
I was expecting the burning of the Library of Alexandria or the Library of
Baghdad ("House of Wisdom").

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?

~~~
sliverstorm
Successful in that humans survived that way without major issue for 98% of
their existence. We've only been industrialized for a tiny period of our
racial history, _and_ we already have and had a host of problems.

(the human race is estimated to be 200,000 years old. Egypt arose at best
5,000 years ago.)

By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy. It's been
shown in the past that wealth and higher standards of living do not directly
correlate to greater happiness, and frankly our species would have had a hell
of a problem if we were chronically depressed for 195,000 years.

~~~
michaelochurch
_By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy._

I don't think ancient people were unhappy in the modern sense of the word.
Their lives were probably a lot more stressful and certainly extremely
violent, but depression was probably nonexistent (a death sentence). I would
argue that most modern people would consider their lifestyles undesirable.

I think people tend to look at pre-agrarian society with rose-colored glasses.
Did people have better nutrition, in 10000 BC, if they were hunter-gatherers
rather than farmers? Yes; that's not even debated. I don't know how much
should be taken out of that. For example, there's the often made and almost
certainly false claim that agriculture led to gender inequality. From a
gender-equality perspective, I don't think that pre-agrarian society was the
utopia some people make it out to be. Pre-monogamous societies pretty much
invariably treated women as property, because access to women was the signal
(and primary benefit) of a man's social status. "Alphas" had many wives,
"gammas" had none and were sent off to war as soldiers (to either "take" wives
or die). It was better to be a woman than a low-status man, but that doesn't
mean gender equality was there. It's hard to have gender equality in that sort
of morally debased culture. Monogamous marriage (which came much, much later
than agriculture) was the very first wave of feminism.

~~~
scott_s
Your description of human monogamy does not gel with my understanding. My
understanding is that as far as monogamous relationships go, we've always been
pretty much the way we are now. That is, we are a _mostly_ monogamous species,
but not completely. The benefits of social status that you describe still
exist now; a middle class man cannot afford a mistress. But the elite in any
society is relatively small compared to the size of the society, so most
couples are mostly monogamous.

(I keep saying "mostly" because we, as a species, cheat. In "The Third
Chimpanzee" Jared Diamond makes a compelling case that cheating is actually an
evolutionary strategy, and that we shouldn't dismiss it as people faltering
from the ideal marriage. That is, if many, many people do it across all
cultures, it's probably in our genes.)

~~~
michaelochurch
I agree with what you are saying. I think what has changed is that having a
harem is no longer socially _acceptable_. People still cheat all the time, but
the era when a high-status man can have 20 "wives", and in which a lot of low-
status men (to be made soldiers) can't find _any_ , has ended in the civilized
world.

Humans are probably "naturally" polygamous and violent, and also willing to
enter violence if it can increase sexual access. This is "good" for the
"selfish" genes, but painful for the organism and outright bad for society,
which is why societies steer toward mostly-monogamous arrangements as they
mature.

~~~
scott_s
I think that there still are very high status men in this world who get away
with 20 "wives." Consider, for example, the royalty in Saudi Arabia. My point
was it's rare now, and that it was equally rare then. Or do you have stats on
it?

~~~
sliverstorm
There certainly are such high status men. But compared to the world
population, and considering they reign over only very small parts of the
world, are they even statistically significant?

~~~
scott_s
Yes, that is my point: were they _ever_ statistically relevant?

~~~
nooneelse
Isn't Genghis Khan thought to have left a rather significant mark on the
genetics of a region?

------
ajscherer
_"Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-
six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was
nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease
were seriously affecting their ability to survive."_

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.

------
imcdowell
I have a hard time sympathizing with those pining for the days of high infant
mortality and periodic semi-starvation. While I don't argue that many people
now are unhappy and working too hard, if you're privileged enough to be
reading hacker news in your free time you have a shot at a significantly
better outcome.

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.

------
extension
This is a bit like saying "we are happier as babies than as adults so growing
up is the worst mistake we ever make".

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?

------
bfe
I have learned a great deal from Diamond's books and articles, but even he
shows elsewhere that the two leading causes of death across hunter-gatherer
societies are combat between tribes and homicide within tribes. Agricultural
civilization didn't introduce cruelty and ignorance into the human race. As
smart and creative a thinker as he is, I don't think he adequately corrects,
when he compares overall human well-being today with that of 10,000 years ago,
for his perspective as someone who has never gone hungry with no idea of when
he would eat again, and who is able to study the sweep of human history only
because of the human advances in physical and intellectual resources of the
past tens of thousands of years.

------
iwwr
The hunter-gatherers did not necessarily chose a farming lifestyle, they were
likely displaced by the sheer numbers of the farmers. However, modern
agriculture requires very few people (proportionally), under 5%. The second
worst mistake in human history would be to stifle agricultural and industrial
development. There is the great opportunity to lift the other 2/3 of the world
out of "farm slavery". Not only to just feed them, but raise their standard of
living too.

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.

~~~
TomOfTTB
I'm not sure the point is to stifle industrial development as much as it's to
show we've built our society on several "facts" that might not be entirely
accurate. Further I think the author is trying to say people in our society
don't question these supposed facts and that society is worse off because of
it.

In this case his point is that modern society takes hunter/gatherer cultures
that still exist and tries to change them to agriculture based cultures
without questioning whether it's best for them.

In your very reply you proved the second point. Let me lay it out...

\- His central argument is against the assumption that agriculture is proven
to be better than hunting and gathering. He showed evidence of
hunter/gatherers spending less time acquiring food and getting a better
balanced diet in spite of that.

\- You replied that agriculture is great without giving any evidence to refute
his argument. The fact that modern agriculture requires fewer people than it
once did is only relevant to his point if you have numbers that say modern
agriculture's time to acquire food has fallen below that of hunter/gatherers.
Otherwise it's irrelevant. Plus you didn't even address the balanced diet
argument.

So you've proven the author's main point in that you fell back on the
assumption that agriculture automatically equals the best solution.

------
zeteo
There is a very good reason why hunter gatherers never built the Parthenon,
and in general why their technological development is sorely lacking: they
lack _specialists_. Masons, blacksmiths, and later scientists, engineers, and
professors are only able to make a living because other people engage in
agriculture.

------
pandeiro
I'm definitely sympathetic to this argument; I might even fall into the
primitivist hippie camp. Whatever. Yes, I do think I'd be happier running
through the jungle naked than sitting here debugging JavaScript to pay off the
insurance, banking, and real estate cartels, so I can continue to occupy a 200
sq-foot box inside an ugly human anthill in a pollution-choked, overcrowded,
violence-and-poverty-plagued megalopolis.

~~~
wladimir
Whereas hunter-gatherers were dependent on keeping the environment in a
healthy state to survive. The agricultural lifestyle has caused many to regard
nature as superfluous, unnecessary. It's the origin of "humanity is the
superior race" thinking. So we can bulldoze everything, kill what we can't use
and don't find "fuzzy and cute". Because it's all about the "economic value"
for us...

I'm not a hippie and am not preoccupied with restoring things as they were
100,000 years ago. But I'm also not sure what we're doing now is the right
way. I wish we were behaving less like a plague.

------
edoloughlin
1987: simpler times. I can't help but wonder what to author would have written
today given the order-of-magnitude larger mistakes we've made since then, such
as reality TV.

------
dusklight
About sexism .. there were many hunter-nomad cultures where rape and
kidnapping was the normal way of acquiring a bride.

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?

------
duopixel
It takes me around two hours per week to put food on my table. The rest of my
money goes to splurging on the niceties of modern life.

------
VladRussian
progress is maximizing the carrying capacity in that equation:

<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.

------
dennyabraham
what this article does not mention is that the viability of hunter-gatherer
lifestyles may have eroded significantly during the (ongoing) quaternary
extinction event that began in the late pleistocene. the proliferation of
hunter gatherers and their comparative excellence at hunting may have in fact
caused this extinction (see overkill theory). furthermore, declining game
reserves places strong incentive on creating reliable alternative food
sources, so agriculture may be a direct consequence of this success of our
ancestors' lifestyle.

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.

------
noodle
i tend to think that agriculture was a necessity based on population density
and the formation of towns/cities. too many people in one place means there
needs to be a renewable source of food. hunting and gathering for hundreds
would eventually result in too little to feed everyone.

~~~
kahawe
A lot of people here seemed to have missed the fact that this was indeed one
of the points brought up in this interesting read.

~~~
noodle
perhaps i could've worded it better -- the mistake (imo) wasn't choosing
agriculture, agriculture was a necessary byproduct required to facilitate
living in cities.

chicken/egg problem

~~~
scott_s
I don't think we would have lived in cities without developing agriculture -
that is, I think you're putting the carriage before the horse. Agriculture not
only enables us to feed many more mouths, but it _required_ us to settle in
one place. We had no incentive to settle in one place before agriculture.

~~~
noodle
perhaps. i'd be interested to read more on the topic. but to play devil's
advocate:

agriculture requires us to settle in one place for a length of time. so does
building shelter. a lot of things require at least semi-permanent settling in
one spot. the modern tribes mentioned in the article aren't nomadic yet they
still hunt/gather. to develop agriculture far enough to be able to sustain
large numbers of people, it would most likely require practice, implying they
were already at least somewhat stationary.

i think its more likely that a lot of things co-developed at around the same
time, but i find it more difficult to be sold on the fact that we somehow
learned the skill of developing crops over lengths of time to feed many mouths
BEFORE we were more permanently settling in a single location.

~~~
scott_s
I think that our settlements were semi-permanent as hunter-gatherers. We could
move with the seasons. In this case, agriculture would give us a reason to
stay put when previously we may have moved on.

But even these are distinct from "cities." A city implies a number of people
in at least a few thousand. My understanding is that hunter-gatherer tribes
were in the order of several dozen. I just don't see thousands of people
living in one place without agriculture.

~~~
noodle
i was just using "city" as a placeholder since it was used in the article.
most of the problems mentioned in the article are perfectly capable of
surfacing at a much smaller settlement size.

~~~
scott_s
I don't think that's the case with disease. Diseases need to have always have
some living host in order to not die out completely. I don't think groups of
several dozen are large enough to support that. Further, it's possible that
some of our diseases are actually _from_ the animals we domesticated as a part
of agriculture.

~~~
noodle
i agree. but the paper doesn't bring up only disease. it includes other
factors that i'm not sure necessarily follow.

------
Jun8
The basic question, as Prof. Diamond puts it is: "How do you show that the
lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and
gathering for farming?" One can extend this: How do you know the Industrial
Revolution made people lives better (read Dickens to see the inhuman
conditions), or the nuclear revolution (Chernobyl, Japan), or the Internet
revolution (the ADD generation texting, sexting, etc). Prof. Diamond thesis
seems to be that we made a _huge_ mistake by moving from hunter gatherer to
agricultural society, which, inevitably, brought about most of the evils we
are fighting with now. Proof? Just look at the idyllic life of current hunter
gatherers.

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.

~~~
michaelochurch
_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._

I think this is actually true, in a weird way. We work, including commuting,
personal errands, and house chores, about 2700 hours per year. Most pre-
agrarian people did not work as many hours. Their "work" was a lot more
dangerous (throwing spears at angry, large animals) and probably more intense.
The stakes were also a lot higher: if they fail, they die. That said, they
probably only worked about 1600-2400 hours per year because there wasn't all
that much work for them to do. During the off-season (hunting-wise) and during
the winter (for gatherers) it's also likely that they slept 10-18 hours per
day due to low metabolism/semi-hibernation. (Many medieval people in the Alps
went into semi-hibernation in the winter, sleeping 16-20 hours per day.)
Whether this is to be considered "free time" is uncertain and probably
somewhat subjective. It's unclear what they did. It's likely that their lives
were very boring by our standards, exciting only on account of the extreme
danger.

~~~
Jun8
AFAIK, in hunter-gatherer sopcities people are divided into two groups: those
that can hunt and those who cannot, the latter group including elderly,
children, women, and very few other people, e.g. the shaman (this also
disproves his point about gender equality, in such socities women are, by
necessity, second class). So, it is very hard, esp. for men, to specialize in
anything other than hunting, e.g. arts or crafts, unless it brings an
immediate utility to the tribe.

Another point is: more people = more brain diversity -> easier for people with
interesting ideas to be in the society, the intellectual gene pool, if you
will. And an agri lifestyle definitely supports larger tribes.

~~~
crpatino
> in such socities women are, by necessity, second class

Not necessarily. Please take into account that in all but most extreme
climates, most of the raw calories in a hunter-gatherer group comes from the
_gathering_ part, which is mostly a female activity. The problem with a pure
gathering diet is that it tends to be protein and fat deficient, so one
strategic contribution of the male hunters is not to keep the bellies full,
but the diet balanced. Neolithic farmers discovered the hard way that a belly
full of grains still leads you to malnutrition.

The other big strategic contribution of male hunters to their communities is
protection. The only way a bunch slow moving, child bearing women can wander
safely in the wilderness gathering food and wood is to bring a couple of armed
men along. This men were probably too old or too young to join the hunters,
but would provide a valuable service in protecting their people of predators
(human or otherwise).

Not to imply that women are unable to defend themselves... but Nature does not
care about political correctness. Females are more valuable to the
reproductive capacity of the tribe, so it makes more sense to have males run
higher risks.

------
DanielBMarkham
This is not such a good essay.

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.

------
gojomo
I'd take the risks and rewards of agriculture over billions of years of
repetitive nomadic hunter-gathering, where no generation does anything
different than its ancestors.

------
tcarnell
If we take 'happiness' to be the fitness function of human evolution and a
driver for adaption then I think it highly unlikey humans would ever change to
become less happy. Infact, I might suggest that human happiness (amount of) is
likely to be the one thing in common to modern civilizations as to those
200,000 years ago.

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

------
patrickgzill
My first question upon looking at this article: is there really enough
evidence available to presume the ability to make a conclusive judgment /
argument?

~~~
hackinthebochs
There is enough to begin a discussion about it. What is one of the top 2-3
things everyone wishes for? Health. He makes a convincing argument that
hunter-gatherers were considerably more healthy than agriculturalists.

------
larrik
It's funny, just a couple of hundred years ago, the belief was that the human
race used to be happy and successful, and then declined. For intellectuals:
Greece, Rome, even the Central/South American civilizations. For every one
else: Eden or Atlantis, etc.

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

~~~
5teev
> It's funny, just a couple of hundred years ago, the belief was that the
> human race used to be happy and successful, and then declined.

This statement can be applied recursively all the way back to the dawn of
civilization.

~~~
gnosis
_"The young people of today love luxury. They have bad manners, they scoff at
authority and lack respect for their elders. Children nowadays are really
tyrants, they no longer stand up when their elders come into the room where
they are sitting, they contradict their parents, chat together in the presence
of adults, eat gluttonously and tyrannise their teachers."_ \-- Socrates,
470-399BC

------
pumpmylemma
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has a good book called Civilization: Culture,
Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature that talks a lot about this, among
other things.

[http://www.amazon.com/Civilizations-Culture-Ambition-
Transfo...](http://www.amazon.com/Civilizations-Culture-Ambition-
Transformation-Nature/dp/074320249X) (Not an affiliate link.)

------
protomyth
For an interesting historical perspective of the interaction, check "Genghis
Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford
[http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-
World/dp/06...](http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-
World/dp/0609809644/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1302795893&sr=8-7)

------
neutronicus
I don't think the mistake was agriculture _per se_ so much as breeding. The
biggest prisoner's dilemma in human history.

------
diego_moita
I liked this. The cool thing about reading intelligent people is that you do
learn a lot, even when you don't agree with them.

------
fictorial
"I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to..."

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?

------
3am
The worst mistake in human history was me reading this terrible article. The
author doesn't think hierarchical societies are possible in hunter/gatherer
societies?

~~~
3am
Gah!

"Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style
in human history."

And since then, all we've managed to do is construct the entirety of human
knowledge. Atoms, DNA, trips to space.. I mean I'm sitting in air-conditioning
write this over the Internet. On a mid-tier laptop that exceeds every
scientific capability that hunter gatherer societies ever had.

But, the author makes a fair point that

"Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they
wanted to."

And yes, hunter gathers did make scrimshaw and paint ochre on rocks.

This article is like a hookworm in my brain. I wish I could un-read it. So
awful in so many ways.

~~~
hackinthebochs
Come now, you can provide a better analysis than this.

>And since then, all we've managed to do is construct the entirety of human
knowledge. Atoms, DNA, trips to space..

What does that really do for any individual person. Does simply knowing about
atoms, DNA, space make your average happiness strictly greater than that of a
hunter-gatherer? Of course not. Unless you can show that technology strictly
makes the average happiness for humans greater, it is completely irrelevant to
the discussion.

What your post comes down to is: "I have all this cool stuff, so clearly we're
better off now". How self-centered of you.

~~~
3am
Why would I need to provide a better analysis than this? The benefits of
scientific advancement to the individual are so numerous and ubiquitous that
only an idiot would dismiss them.

~~~
hackinthebochs
The article was essentially asking is quality of life after agriculture better
than that of hunter-gatherers. Scientific advancements themselves aren't an
answer to that question. At the end of the day, the same things that mattered
then matter now: health, companionship, relationships, social status.
Technology does not across the board enhance these things (and in many ways it
_reduces_ the baseline of these properties). So if you want to make an
argument that technology makes us strictly happier than our ancestors you're
going to have to provide some kind of reasoning. Isn't that what's expected
around here?

------
ohmygodel
His arguments suggest that optimal nutrition is close to what we ate as
hunter-gatherers. I wonder if Diamond believes in the paleo diet.

------
espeed
Overpopulation is the elephant in the room that no one talks about, and I
believe that most of the issues today have it at its core. Much of propaganda
is designed to dance around the issue of population control -- "the primary
responsibility of government is to project the minority of the opulent from
the majority" (listen this Harvard talk on "Propaganda and Control of The
Public Mind" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0OnTHz--
7I&playnext=1...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0OnTHz--
7I&playnext=1&list=PL20B9B966EB3640B7I)).

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...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU&playnext=1&list=PL63DAFCD223C29352)).
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...](http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf))
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...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all)).
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.

~~~
nohat
>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.

Exactly. Scientific and technological advancements help everyone (at least
potentially) because you don't have to divvy up knowledge. Even better the
rate of scientific advancement tends to increase with a larger existing
knowledge base. Ultimately more population means (much) more advancement.
That's the most exciting aspect of China and India's advancements in recent
decades. To play amateur psychologist, I suspect that why this isn't
immediately obvious to people like Dr. Bartlett is because they don't think in
terms of scientific progress.

~~~
espeed
John Doerr agrees too -- "Entrepreneurs Are Missionaries"
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6iwEYmbCwk>) -- we're going to have to
innovate our way out of this.

------
jfoutz
In a hyperbole like this, access to alcohol, anytime you want it, should get
more credit.

~~~
adolph
So true. As I read the article, I couldn't help thinking of the latest Less
Wrong post about "Levels of Action." In particular:

 _Studies have shown that there is a significant positive correlation between
alcohol use, and income in life. Why would that be? Drinking alcohol doesn't
make you smarter. Nor does it make you work harder, or become more skilled, or
gain additional knowledge. I think the reason is that alcohol is
disinhibitory._

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/58g/levels_of_action/#more>

~~~
tcarnell
well if you sampled the 6 billion people in the world, yes, rich people drink
alcohol.

I think its a bit like saying 'rich people drive Ferraris' - yes, of course!
having a lot of disposable income will obviously lead to the ability to
purchase luxury, non-essential items like alcohol.

~~~
adolph
That is an interesting statement. I'd estimate that the sample would show that
alcohol was used by people with a broad range of income levels. However, the
only way a hunter-gatherer (as described by Diamond) would obtain alcohol is
to trade with a farmer or someone who can do the meta-work required for
alcohol and supported by farming.

------
michaelochurch
Farming beat out hunting and gathering because it was more _fit_. That doesn't
mean it was "better". Evolution is not necessarily progressive. Evolution is
"survival by that which can spread its genes", and agricultural people are
better at that.

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.

~~~
tcarnell
Just to clarify, 'evolution' is the process of change that takes many, many
millions of years - time frames of 15,000 years are not evolution.

As Ricky Gervais once desribed, in evolutionary terms, modern man is still
equviliant to a shaved chimp!

~~~
scott_s
_A comprehensive scan of the human genome finds that hundreds of our genes
have undergone positive natural selection during the past 10,000 years of
human evolution._

[http://www.livescience.com/609-hundreds-human-genes-
evolving...](http://www.livescience.com/609-hundreds-human-genes-
evolving.html)

 _Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving,
researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes
appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of
evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years._

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/science/07evolve.html>

There are many more examples that can be found through Google.

~~~
tcarnell
good point - of course I absolutely believe humans (as well as every other
living thing on Earth) as still evolving. And of course evolution happens all
the time, with every generation evolution must be happening. And I've written
genetic algorithms to find solutions to problems so I know that evolution is
not intrinsically a slow process.

My point really was that evolutionary changes in these time-scales are very
unlikey to significantly affect society (changing to agriculture etc).

Thanks for the response and the great links!

------
tomelders
Not IPv6 then?

------
mckoss
tl;dr

