
The Case Against Civilization - dsr12
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-against-civilization
======
vtange
The article presents a sort of naive assumption that if we stayed primitive we
may have ended up in a more egalitarian, less brutally competitive world.

Problem is, in a less developed culture, there is still competition due to
human nature and due to uncontrollable factors such as natural disasters. Pre-
European-Contact Native Americans often fought against one another during
periods such as drought.[1][2] Ironically one of the benefits of civilization
is a stronger ability to handle situations of disaster and shortage that
forces populations to go to war.

I'd also add that in a "civilized world" there are probably more avenues in
life open to a person who isn't bound to the responsibility of food production
(which constitutes 90% of a hunter-gatherer society). Science, history, the
arts? Aside from oral traditions, all are outside the reach of a primitive
society.

Oh, and at least in a modern civilization such as ours we have a small
fighting chance against say, an incoming apocalyptic asteroid.

[1][https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-
check/thanksgivin...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-
check/thanksgiving-guilt-trip-how-warlike-were-native-americans-before-
europeans-showed-up/)
[2][https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25cvxm/were_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25cvxm/were_native_american_tribes_peaceful_with_each/)

~~~
UnpossibleJim
It also seems to ignore the existence of war in pre neolithic species like
chimpanzees. While it might be difficult to argue that a direct correlation of
behavior exists, it shows a distinct seperation of war and agriculture.

~~~
toss1
Perhaps you didn't read to the end where they discussed how the bushmen got
past the level of Chimps:

>>. A key to that lost or forsworn ability, Suzman suggests, lies in the
ferocious egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers. For example, the most valuable
thing a hunter can do is come back with meat. Unlike gathered plants, whose
proceeds are “not subject to any strict conventions on sharing,” hunted meat
is very carefully distributed according to protocol, and the people who eat
the meat that is given to them go to great trouble to be rude about it. This
ritual is called “insulting the meat,” and it is designed to make sure the
hunter doesn’t get above himself and start thinking that he’s better than
anyone else. “When a young man kills much meat,” a Bushman told the
anthropologist Richard B. Lee, “he comes to think of himself as a chief or a
big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. . . .
We can’t accept this.” The insults are designed to “cool his heart and make
him gentle.” For these hunter-gatherers, Suzman writes, “the sum of individual
self-interest and the jealousy that policed it was a fiercely egalitarian
society where profitable exchange, hierarchy, and significant material
inequality were not tolerated.”

~~~
icebraining
But that's in a single tribe. What about between tribes?

~~~
djanatan
People who want to paint pre-civilized (or pre-industrial) peoples as
egalitarians will only point to specific behaviors in specific tribes. What
they won't do is refer to the rates of violent death among those peoples,
which are significantly higher than what we put up with even in the worse
parts of the developed world. It's noble savage mythology to the core.

------
cdoxsey
> But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that
> something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that
> everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to
> this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up.
> Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment,
> "Why do you prefer civilisation to savagery?" he would look wildly round at
> object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there
> is that bookcase ... and the coals in the coal-scuttle ... and pianos ...
> and policemen." The whole case for civilisation is that the case for it is
> complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof
> which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

\- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

~~~
WalterBright
Geez. I prefer civilization because I can sit in my warm office and work on
projects I like, I have good food to eat, etc.

Under savagery I'd be living mostly outside, shivering, wondering if I could
get enough food to live through the winter, and would have little hope of
living past 40.

I'd suffer from routine episodes of famine, backbreaking labor, and the tribe
booting me out to die when I was no longer carrying my weight. I'd watch most
of my children die young, and would fear all sorts of stupid mythical
boogeymen.

I'd have to train with weapons constantly, and live in fear of the next tribe
over attacking me and my family at any moment.

No thanks.

~~~
labster
Meh, tell that to the California Indians who worked less than four hours a
day, lived ten years longer than Europeans did, and had a society mostly free
of violence. Thanks a lot for introducing civilization, Father Serra.

~~~
interfixus
If you wish to go full fairy tale, you must always remember to include the
they-had-no-word-for-war meme.

~~~
labster
I don't wish to go full fairy tale, which is why I only mentioned facts. One
of my exes did a PhD thesis on California Native Americans during the mission
period. The Spanish introduced the locals to the concept of corporal
punishment, which afawct was alien to them.

None of this is to say that they were without technology, because science and
technology are definitively human traits. Boat tech was pretty decent for the
Chumash, and they traded inland to the desert tribes.

But there's an attitude that civilization must be superior here among lots of
commenters here, with an obvious ignorance of what uncivilized life was
actually like. We have traded away free time, clean environments, and live
with family; for medicine, safety, and iPhones. We have also traded infant
mortality, exile, and ignorance; for anomie, prisons, pollution, and tyrants.

~~~
WalterBright
I never hear of anyone even attempting to live like a stone age person would.
Nobody who romanticizes it ever seems to try it. Even people who love
backpacking and camping bring along a whole pile of stuff made possible by
civilization to make themselves more comfortable.

Heck, how many can make a fire without matches? Who'd give up boots? How about
that parka? and that lightweight tent? canteen? cotton underwear? pots and
pans? jeans? steel knife? trail mix? rain gear? toilet paper? the backpack
frame and straps?

~~~
labster
You're confusing civilization with technology. You should stop. Yes most
technologies have been invented in civilizations, but that doesn't stop people
outside of cities from using them. Fur trappers of the 1800s were not living a
civilized life, even though they had steel knives.

~~~
WalterBright
I think you missed my point. Given a choice, it seems nobody actually wants to
live like stone age people, including everyone who is posting in this thread.
Even the people who like "roughing it" make plenty use of modern technology,
__all __of which was invented and made possible by civilizations.

------
jstewartmobile
Going full-caveman might be a step too far, but we could certainly dial-back a
few things--especially in the US.

I look at my grandparents from the WWII generation, and I think their
existences, as modest as they are, have been more agreeable--to both
themselves and to the world--than the ones most people endure today.

There are many otherwise healthy young people who are morbidly obese who
wouldn't have been so 50 years ago. There are so many otherwise intelligent
people who cannot deal with other people in a social setting, and everyone's
like "oh, it's autism," and maybe in some cases it is, but I have to wonder if
some of it is just a case of otherwise ordinary people being raised by
television, books, video games instead of other people.

I hardly know a person over 30 who isn't already on an assortment of
maintenance medications. The doctors had me on two maintenance medications
before I was 30, and if I hadn't figured out that hitting the gym and not
eating like I was still a teenager works a hell of a lot better, I would still
be taking them.

Then you look at other parts of the world--where the slaves that make our
stuff live--and the rivers are choked with garbage and the smog blots out the
daylight.

Then there is the nearly _unavoidable_ proliferation of technology. In most
tech and sales jobs, regardless of your own preference, you _have_ to have a
cell phone and e-mail--unless you want to lose your job. In most marketing and
PR jobs, you _have_ to contend with facebook / twitter / etc. "So what?"
Neuroplasticity. " _The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they
are too strong to break._ " You are literally burning pathways into your brain
for compulsively checking/responding to messages/likes/etc. It's like Pavlov's
dog, but with humans, and it is a _very_ hard thing to un-learn.

Then there's all the stuff Taleb goes on about like _iatrogenics_ and
_hormesis_.

~~~
icebraining
_Then there is the nearly unavoidable proliferation of technology_

That happened before civilization. As it happens, tools are really useful.

~~~
jstewartmobile
In the older situation where man struggled against nature, the tools served
the man.

In the modern situation where man struggles against man, you end up with many
game-theory scenarios where the man is compelled to serve the tool.

------
FrozenVoid
The only good thing about the article is the analysis of grain dependence.
Anarcho-primitivism and its hunter-gatherer lifestyles would support less than
1% of current world population. "Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it
better?" is just a myth of lost Golden Age adapted for modern audience.

Civilization enables health and comfort levels that hunter-gatherers never
dreamed of: their "lifestyle" options were extremely limited and grim, geared
to maximize survival of tribes instead of individual happiness and comfort.
Without civilization existing in its current technological level, most people
will just die, the minority which will adapt will not live in a paleo
paradise.

There is no "abundant natural resources" of paleolithic anymore, there is no
skills and knowledge of wilderness survival. In the event of civilizational
collapse, people will have nothing much to harvest/hunt/gather after initial
plundering(long-term impact will not be a priority). The limited resources of
current Earth will not support such lifestyle. Even huntergatherers will not
survive this, as they'll have to compete with armed civilization remnants
searching for any resources to continue its current lifestyle. In short,
civilization has one way forward and any collapse will be fatal, a state which
cannot "jump start a civilization again", with all easily extracted resources
gone and natural environment plundered. The forests and jungles exist only
because there are legal frameworks to ensure their continued existence inside
a civilization: in case of collapse they'll be stripped for firewood and
collapse in a decade.

------
perilunar
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be
to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." — T. S.
Eliot

I've often thought that the ideal post-scarcity lifestyle would be to live in
giant gardens (in giant rotating space habitats no less) where we can run
around hunting, gathering, telling stories around the campfire and sleeping
under the stars, and occasionally spending time in the lab or workshop or in
zero-g building stuff.

i.e. hunting and gathering -> agriculture -> industrialisation -> automation
-> hunting and gathering (and space engineering)

~~~
yourapostasy
You probably would like Iain Banks' series of novels about The Culture. Some
of it described the shenanigans some people got up to after getting bored of
such a life.

------
cttet
The social structure shift is really not about preference, it is about
collective power and violence. Although people may prefer the hunter-gatherer
lifestyle, the neighbor farm-based civilization will conquer and enslave them.

It is also the same for technology/AI. They may not improve our quality of
life, but they allow more powerful armies that would defeat those who resist
them.

It's sad but it's true.

------
XorNot
The type of article written by someone who presumably has never needed a
cavity filled, never contracted any disease requiring antibiotics, and does
not need glasses to get around day to day.

~~~
charlesism
The first two aren't such good examples. Dental problems due to modern diet,
and resistance to antibiotics... it's not cut and dry.

~~~
WalterBright
Archeologists have surmised that the Egyptian Pharoahs were in considerable
pain from dental problems, from studying their mummies.

~~~
charlesism
There are indigenous people who don't eat a "modern" diet. Why speculate about
Egyptian Pharaohs? How about wild animals. Do they have dentists?

~~~
WalterBright
The Pharaohs' teeth were well preserved. You can see how messed up they were
with abscesses and stuff. The Pharaohs lived into old age, whereas few others
did.

Wild animals die when their teeth go bad. Zoos have dentists taking care of
the animals' teeth.

------
icanhackit
(Breaking some HN etiquette here but I think a large portion of responses so
far have been from people who've only scanned the introduction - there are
some good bits in the article, you'll just need to skip the first few
paragraphs to get to the meat)

Sorry for the cut-and-paste but it's only a fraction of a pretty long-form
article:

 _The other conclusion we can draw from the evidence, Scott says, is that
there is a crucial, direct link between the cultivation of cereal crops and
the birth of the first states. It’s not that cereal grains were humankind’s
only staples; it’s just that they were the only ones that encouraged the
formation of states. “History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro,
plantain, breadfruit or sweet potato states,” he writes. What was so special
about grains? The answer will make sense to anyone who has ever filled out a
Form 1040: grain, unlike other crops, is easy to tax. Some crops (potatoes,
sweet potatoes, cassava) are buried and so can be hidden from the tax
collector, and, even if discovered, they must be dug up individually and
laboriously. Other crops (notably, legumes) ripen at different intervals, or
yield harvests throughout a growing season rather than along a fixed
trajectory of unripe to ripe—in other words, the taxman can’t come once and
get his proper due. Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible,
assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ” Other crops have some
of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became
“the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a
hegemonic agrarian calendar.” The taxman can come, assess the fields, set a
level of tax, then come back and make sure he’s got his share of the harvest.

It was the ability to tax and to extract a surplus from the produce of
agriculture that, in Scott’s account, led to the birth of the state, and also
to the creation of complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor,
specialist jobs (soldier, priest, servant, administrator), and an élite
presiding over them. Because the new states required huge amounts of manual
work to irrigate the cereal crops, they also required forms of forced labor,
including slavery; because the easiest way to find slaves was to capture them,
the states had a new propensity for waging war. Some of the earliest images in
human history, from the first Mesopotamian states, are of slaves being marched
along in neck shackles. Add this to the frequent epidemics and the general ill
health of early settled communities and it is not hard to see why the latest
consensus is that the Neolithic Revolution was a disaster for most of the
people who lived through it._

~~~
toasterlovin
I think this is too complicated of an answer to the question of why cereal
grains lead to the creation of city states. IMO, the reason is much simpler:
grains are more economical than roots and tubers. By a lot. Based on data from
my local super market, here are the amount of calories that some of these
foods provide for $1:

\- Flour: 4,252

\- Russet Potatoes: 1,437

\- Yams: 540

I don't know why this is exactly, but my hunch is that it has mostly to do
with spoilage. Specifically, that grains essentially do not spoil.

The cited expert is also wrong, if I'm not mistaken, about the lack of
civilizations born of on a staple other than cereal grains. The New World
civilizations (Aztec, Inca, Mayas) did not have access to cereal grains. Their
primary staples were potatoes (South America) and corn (Central America).

\---

FYI, I've done some work quantifying food costs, which are, IMO, a fascinating
lens through with to view the world. If you want to dig in deeper, here's the
Google sheet:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSo8XQrIKZ8G...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSo8XQrIKZ8GnNq2ALLmgD6J7JD78RQiyP5vYomGp8n_hZrHlhcbjAjyhbfUYSYk4UcW5Tf5Ek2jR-Y/pubhtml).
I think the tabs labeled _Food Chart_ and _Category Range Chart_ are the most
interesting (everything else is supporting calculations).

~~~
icanhackit
> _here are the amount of calories that some of these foods provide for $1_

The glycemic index shows that calories are worth little if they blow your
blood sugar through the roof and then send it crashing as flour-derived food
stuffs usually do. Roots and tubers contain more complex carbohydrates and
have a lower GI, providing energy over a longer period.

That said I agree with the spoilage part - grains do last longer before
spoiling.

> _The cited expert is also wrong, if I 'm not mistaken, about the lack of
> civilizations born of on a staple other than cereal grains. The New World
> civilizations (Aztec, Inca, Mayas) did not have access to cereal grains.
> Their primary staples were potatoes (South America) and corn (Central
> America)._

The author wasn't talking about civilisations, they specifically mentioned
_states_ , which I guess could be translated as empire or collection of
civilisations taxed by a central authority. That said I have no idea whether
their point was correct - I just thought it was interesting.

------
jcranmer
Unfortunately, the development of agriculture and civilization are usually
conflated to mean the same thing: people predominantly contrast pre-
agricultural, pre-civilization peoples against agricultural, civilized
peoples. This causes confusions when people cite instances of agricultural,
non-civilized peoples to support claims on one side or the other (I'm unaware
of any examples of non-agricultural, civilized states; the closest examples I
can think of are still nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists, which is still
agricultural even if the reliance is on domesticated animals instead of
plants).

Also unfortunately, it's hard to know which to prescribe the "problems" and
the "benefits" of the agricultural and civilization complex to, agriculture or
civilization. The existence of things like specialization and war are hard to
find unambiguous evidence for in archaeology (it can sometimes be hard to
remember that there are multiple plausible explanations for a find, and
picking a certain interpretation may more reflect an archaeologist's biases
than the actual truth), and so figuring out when in the course of human
development they first appear is difficult if not impossible. I'm generally of
the opinion that most of the problems postdate the development of agriculture,
but I hold that position less because there's strong evidence for it, but
because there's no strong evidence either way and I find it more useful to get
other people to consider multiple interpretations of the matter.

~~~
sifar
This was posted in one of the threads a few days back.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo)

Starting at 12:00, Toby Hemenway talks about agriculture led industrial
culture & its problems. How we are missing a spot where horticulture can be
long-term beneficial.

------
leepowers
One large factor the author misses is the staggeringly high rates of murder
and violent death in non-state societies, in some instances reaching as high
as 60%[1]

This is the core of Hobbes' description of pre-state societies as "nasty,
brutish, and short". Prehistoric life was incredibly tough and brutal as there
simply wasn't much room for error.

If someone is able to steal from you or mistreat you without repercussion you
immediately become a target for every other bad actor in the tribe. In this
environment reciprocal violence is rational. A neutral state actor with a
monopoly on violence tips the incentives towards non-violent resolution of
disputes.

In modern times if you are unemployed for a month you can collect a check from
the government and move on with your life. In prehistoric times if you go a
month without successfully hunting or collecting food you get to watch your
children starve to death. Again, very very little room for error.

Neolithic life had it's own set of challenges namely famine, disease, and
inter-state warfare. But over the long term it provided more cushion for
common mistakes and the foibles of human nature. It enlarged the margin of
error for survival compared to prehistoric peoples.

[1] [https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-
archaeological-e...](https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-
archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths/)

------
baron816
This is basically what the book Sapiens is about.

One thing that has constantly been on my mind since reading Sapiens is that no
one has been able to definitively explain why men have dominated all of the
positions of power in societies (up until a just a few years ago, at least).
Civilizations that emerged completely independently from each other (whether
in the fertile crescent, China, Mesoamerica or elsewhere), universally became
patriarchies. Before the Neolithic era, and in some surviving hunter gatherer
cultures today, matriarchy was not uncommon.

Women still tend to report being happier than men in survey data, and just
going by the men and women I know, I think the men would prefer to abandon
civilization before women. But I think if we want advance more women into
positions of power in all tiers of society, then we need stop just trying to
wrack it up to discrimination and sexism, stop trying to have the government
regulate men and women's paycheck, and actually try to figure out why women
have universally faired worse in societies.

For example (this is just a theory, I have no evidence whatsoever here), the
men who tend to advance politically and in their careers are usually the ones
with the best social skills. They're the ones who are the best at making
advantageous alliances and forming strong relationships with those outside
their family. Perhaps women are not as good at that? If that is the case, then
it might be wise to try to encourage women to improve that subset of social
skills. I may be way off here, but I think we need to start asking questions,
coming up with theories, and testing those theories rather than settle on the
one that's easiest but doesn't really get us anywhere.

~~~
ddxxdd
>For example (this is just a theory, I have no evidence whatsoever here), the
men who tend to advance politically and in their careers are usually the ones
with the best social skills. They're the ones who are the best at making
advantageous alliances and forming strong relationships with those outside
their family. Perhaps women are not as good at that? If that is the case, then
it might be wise to try to encourage women to improve that subset of social
skills.

Since we're on the topic of biological determinism, it's worth pointing out
that women generally have higher levels of emotional intelligence than men.
Estrogen is a hormone for emotional bonding.

And for that matter, a disproportionate amount of clinical psychopaths are in
positions of leadership. That probably entails a better explanation for why
men are disproportionately in higher levels of management.

~~~
djanatan
It's silly to say that something is "biological determinism" just because it
points out differences between men and women. Almost all traits have a strong
overlap between men and women, including mental/personality traits, but
occupational choice tends to be driven by extremes at a personal level. In
general, men and women are about equally good at math, but at the far right
end of the bell curve, men outnumber women significantly. Steven Pinker cites
in "Human Nature" that at 6'0, men outnumber women almost 2000 to 1. Height is
one of the more substantial examples of sexual dimorphism, but study after
study has found sexual dimorphism in mental traits as well. This doesn't mean
people should be judged based on their group's characteristics (which would be
biological determinism) but that group differences can be quite severe at the
extremes.

It's worth pointing out that men also tend to outnumber women significantly at
the far _left_ end of most bell curves. Data appears to show that for many
traits, men have higher variability of traits, possibly caused by the
differing sexual selection strategies of men and women. (There is much more
diversity among mitochondrial DNA than Y-chromosomal DNA, which is just one
piece of evidence among many that a smaller number of males produce a
disproportionate amount of the offspring.)

~~~
toasterlovin
> It's worth pointing out that men also tend to outnumber women significantly
> at the far left end of most bell curves.

The lack of understanding around the implications of normal distributions is
such a problem when discussing this topic. Another thing that most people miss
is that, if you're zoomed way in on the very end of the right side, things are
going to look very different than if you are zoomed out and looking at the
entire curve.

------
eb3c90
I'm interested if we can have our cake and also eat it. Use advanced
technology/manufacturing to make our communities more self-sufficient. So we
are less reliant on the state.

[https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/](https://improvingautonomy.wordpress.com/)

------
arjie
Romanticism about nature and whatnot. Regardless of the merits of the hunter-
gatherer lifestyle, one thing marks it far inferior: the ability of the author
to make his argument and have it heard.

H-g societies lack knowledge beyond the most immediate needed to survive. The
author himself probably knows more about the world and the universe (excepting
the specifics of how to survive in the wild - a mundane problem) than the
entirety of all hunter gatherer societies.

I'd rather drink HFCS-infused water, eat processed meat, and breathe diesel
fumes than be unable to think the thoughts I think today because I lack the
framework to even think them.

No thanks.

------
AmIFirstToThink
Yeah, try convincing 8 billion people that we should all hunt for rabbits.

Case against Civilization is case for extinction of all animals 6000 years
ago.

I would rather be living now and enjoying this earth, than be someone who
thinks that he can take on the wild if there weren't as many other people
around.

And I don't think "human" become "humans" because things were just swell.
Precisely because of evolutionary pressure humans evolved. I would rather have
us evolved than not.

------
mehmehmehmeh
Lost me where he starts citing the speculation put forth in "Catching Fire" as
accepted fact.

We had big brains before we discovered fire. My understanding is that it's
generally understood humans traded muscle for big brains.

~~~
grondilu
> We had big brains before we discovered fire.

Homo Erectus had a much smaller brain than us. And the cooking theory seems
fairly well accepted these days.

Someone once made the calculus that if you had to grow and sustain your brain
with just raw food, you'd have to eat like 18 hours a day or something (can't
recall the exact number). That would not give you much time to actually use
that brain. It's hard not to conclude on the importance of cooking in the
evolution of our brain.

There's a TED conf on the subject, if you want:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7_XH1CBzGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7_XH1CBzGw)

~~~
srtjstjsj
How to raw-food diet people survive?

A diet of raw eggs would easily sustain, for a few minutes eating per day.

~~~
grondilu
Of course it depends on what you eat. If you eat protein-rich food like eggs,
I guess you can eat them raw and get what you need in short time.

The calculus I was mentioning was based on assumptions regarding the kind of
aliments you'd typically eat in paleolithical time or something. I believe it
was in BBC's the origin of us[1], but I'm not sure. They took the example of
carrots but I vaguely recall they generalize to a bunch of aliments.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Us](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Us)

------
throwawayjava
Science did not begin at Bacon.

Saying crop rotation or glasses or fire were not science is a bit like saying
ancient geometric constructions are not algorithms.

~~~
goatlover
Technology isn't science. Science is a systematic discipline meant to
understand the world in naturalistic terms. Technology has come to heavily
rely on science, because it gives good, reliable results. Better than the
hit/miss tinkering from before.

~~~
srtjstjsj
You think that crop rotation was just lucky guessing, and not learned from
experience?

~~~
goatlover
Learning from experience isn't science. Trial and error isn't science. There's
more to it than that. Of course humans have been learning from trial and error
since before we were homo sapiens. But we also explained things in terms of
ancestral spirits, angry gods who needed to be appeased, creation stories,
etc.

Along with all that learning came a lot of crazy beliefs and practices. It
wasn't until science was an actual practice that we began to have systematic
naturalistic explanations we could fit controlled experimental results into.

~~~
throwawayjava
_> Learning from experience isn't science. Trial and error isn't science.
There's more to it than that._

Alhazen's Book of Optics is "not science" in _exactly_ the same sense that
constructions in Euclid's Elements are "not algorithms". Both claims are
drawing, IMO, indefensible post-hoc epistemic lines in the sand.

 _> Along with all that learning came a lot of crazy beliefs and practices_

I don't see why this matters.

1\. Scientists, following a scientific process (perhaps not particularly well,
but that's just a Scotsman argument), found themselves believing all types of
crazy shit. Read about the 1950's. Science certainly dispels a lot of
superstition, but it's not a bulwark against bad or lazy thinking.

2\. Just because there existed supernatural explanations for e.g., crop
rotation or glasses doesn't mean that the people who _discovered_ those things
weren't following a fundamentally scientific process.

 _> But we also explained things in terms of ancestral spirits, angry gods who
needed to be appeased, creation stories, etc._

And?

Hell, there are _still_ people who believe lightening and eclipses are
supernatural events. It does not follow that we don't have a science that
explains these phenomenon.

------
Ygg2
For record. Up to 10% Paleo diet protein was from humans. This is the world we
would "return" to.

~~~
wavefunction
I'm not sure what you're saying?

The Paleo diet is a modern creation. The paleolithic diet was probably
whatever people could eat. I would think if 10% of human diet consisted of
human meat then prion diseases would have been more prevalent.

~~~
Ygg2
Paleo diet as in prehistoric hunter gatherer diet.

I didn't say 10% of diet. Up to 10% of protein. You don't eat only protein.

Also some people have genes resistant to prion diseases

[https://youtu.be/SXjIzDexPoU](https://youtu.be/SXjIzDexPoU)

~~~
jcranmer
> I didn't say 10% of diet. Up to 10% of protein. You don't eat only protein.

You said, and I quote: > For record. Up to 10% Paleo diet was from humans.
This is the world we would "return" to.

That is a statement I would reject without seeing very strong evidence, and I
don't know that we can have strong evidence of the sources of meat in
Paleolithic diets on a holistic basis. Furthermore, cannibalism is one of the
most widespread taboos among diverse cultures, and thus labeling your enemies
as cannibals was a good way to delegitimize their claims independent of the
veracity of those claims.

~~~
Ygg2
Well that's an error. Fixed.

Comparable cannibalism rates have been observed in other mammals. Do you
assume humans are exempt of it? If so why?

Cannibalism makes a lot of sense, in hunter gatherer societies. After all one
source of protein that is always present in human group is human.

Did you see the video I linked? There are links in the description.

Cannibalism is usually a taboo in modern western societies. Instance of
ritualistic cannibalism mentioned in video was in 1960 in Oceania.

~~~
flukus
10% of protein intake sounds way to high, at that rate you'd quickly run out
of humans.

> Instance of ritualistic cannibalism mentioned in video was in 1960 in
> Oceania.

If it were an every day part of our diet then it wouldn't be so ritualistic
would it?

~~~
Ygg2
Up to. Ancient diets are extremely environment dependent and variable. One
week a tribe could be 100% nuts and berries, only for next week to be 100%
meat, because tribe stumbled upon migratory herd of animals.

It's plausible some tribes didn't eat humans, while others ate humans after
wars or on predefined occasion. Like e.g. when important person dies, or moon
is full, or there isn't anything else to eat.

------
ValleyOfTheMtns
Got as far as the first paragraph and all I could think was, this author
doesn't know what science is.

Or is just artificially restricting its definition for the benefit of his
article using weasel phrases like, "and none historically had any connection
with _what we think of today as science_."

"Some of the most important things we use every day were invented long before
the adoption of the scientific method."

No, just no. The scientific method has been employed by humans (and animals)
for as long as we've had brains. Its formal definition is only a recent
development.

~~~
kelnos
> The scientific method has been employed by humans (and animals) for as long
> as we've had brains. Its formal definition is only a recent development.

Science is a discipline we've invented in fairly recent times (think on the
order of a few thousand years) as a rigorous means of determining how to
explain the world around us and make predictions that can be tested to be true
or false.

Science isn't throwing things at the wall until you find something that
sticks, or randomly stumbling upon something useful. That's just simple trial-
and-error development of technology.

Science is not technology, and science is not required for technology, even
though today's technological progress often leans heavily on science.

