The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

http://www.agron.iastate.edu/courses/agron342/diamondmistake.html

by Tichy • 19 years ago

29 31 19 years ago

agron.iastate.edu

>Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species.

Neither of which would have been possible if we were too busy hunting for food every waking hour.

veritas2• 19 years ago

>>It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania.

FTA... please read it :p

You can make the argument that by increasing population size and crowding, it also made collaboration, partnership, and the growth of ideas easier but the article itself debunks the whole "they spent their entire life looking for berries" argument.

Jared Diamond is awesome.

arhar• 19 years ago

It still does not make sense. Humans were in a hunter-gathering mode for quite some time. If they were so much healthier, AND had more free time, why did the society start rapidly progressing only with the advent of agriculture? Did they just magically become smart? I'm sorry, but no. While this article is certainly interesting, and thought provoking, the thesis doesn't hold.

Darmani2• 19 years ago

I think it is moreso the ability to settle in one place that caused the growth of technology. The hunter-gatherers, no matter how numerous, certainly did not spend their free time building forges and experimenting with metal.

Also note that the time spent gathering food likely does not include preparing to gather food (e.g.: making weapons). Although they could spend plenty of time playing games, note that games originated to prepare children to spend time gathering food (and practice other necessary survival skills).

corentin• 19 years ago

This article certainly is well documented... still I don't see why agriculture is a mistake. Yes, our ancestors were intelligent enough to understand that progress usually involves a temporary loss of comfort to achieve long-term benefits. Why is it a mistake?

davidw4• 19 years ago

Ok, time for a bit of hand wringing. I said I'd wait a week, but this needs to be pointed out. In the space of one day, we've gone from startup news to rehashed reddit news.

http://reddit.com/info/3895/comments

Not only that, but the article itself is 20 years old, and is not an attitude I have read in Diamond's later works like 'Collapse', where he certainly underlines the dangers and problems that face the human race, but does manage to strike a good balance between gloomy and cautiously optimistic about the possibility for improvement.

Harumph.

Tichy5• 19 years ago

I don't read reddit, anyway, I guess it takes time to find out what is considered appropiate for the new hacker news. I went by the definition of "is not shown on TV". It's 20 years old, but old articles have been posted before, and I only found it today... If nobody is interested, nobody will mod it up?

Besides, I thought this article also relates to startupping, because of the average work hours aspect. But granted, Jared Diamond is not exactly unknown.

davidw4• 19 years ago

It's not that bad a link... it just seems so drastic a change:-/ It seems also to illustrate that the intersection of interesting startup links is very well defined, whereas the intersection of interesting 'hacker news' is rather less well defined, and will probably be more prone to disagreement, even if the people posting are the same ones as with the old yc.news, because our interests and beliefs are likely to be quite varied.

Add to that people who didn't see or take part in the original, and while I hope the change will go ok, it will be a lot of work.

palish• 19 years ago

If you don't allow downvoting of stories then you get this, so you have to ignore some stories. But that's much better than the alternative, which is people banding together to bury certain stories that reach the front page (or before they do, if the karma threshold is above 2).

mikesabat• 19 years ago

Great point man.

"In the space of one day, we've gone from startup news to rehashed reddit news."

I love reddit, but I loved the old yc news also. I don't understand how this happens. PG says we're changing focus and all of a sudden people start linking and upvoting different stories??

How is this more interesting to hackers than startup news. I don't understand how a rather top-down decree has changed the output of a definitively democratic system.

portLAN• 19 years ago

Repeatedly on Reddit, e.g. http://science.reddit.com/info/1rssu/comments

Agriculture simply multiplied everything. Hunter-gatherers still had and have tribal wars, murder, rape, rapine, torture, high infant mortality, much lower male life expectancy (due to fighting), plus the usual disease, famine, and social inequality of women.

The average college student in a dorm room enjoys greater luxury and comfort than kings of yesteryear; they have climate control, hot and cold running water, antibiotics, corrective eyewear, and of course a far greater selection of food year-round, not to mention a better selection of healthy mates.

Whether people are happier in modern technological society or hunter-gatherer society is almost beside the point; evolution seems to have selected for worried, discontented people -- they outcompete the easily satiated. Even as we precipitate the extinction of traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles, we can imagine them at some point in the past wiping out even less technologically-savvy people who perhaps were even more happy and contented, leading an existence akin to our bonobo relatives. A similar article written then by gatherers might blame the widespread adoption of hunting for increasing societal violence and leading to a new class division: warrior, due to the ensuing upswing in human-human "hunting".

Increased population can be thought of as a tool; it has been exploited for ill much of the time, but it can also be used for the betterment of all. When we start to live in "The Matrix" (a pleasurable one), we may well rely on aquaculture to produce high-yield algae we farm for biofuel and for nutrients for our IV drips. At that point we may instead regard agriculture, regardless of temporary blips, as the best thing to happen to humanity.

zach• 19 years ago

Obnoxious. This article manifests the worst mistake in the contemporary world -- the triumph of modern cynicism over progressive idealism.

comatose_kid• 19 years ago

I can't believe this article was up-voted. What does this have to do with hacking or startups???

I'm a little worried this site will go the way of reddit...

Tichy5• 19 years ago

For me the connection with hacking is that it points out a potentially unintuitive thing, and switching from hunting to agriculture also is a kind of hack. Is a startup not also trying to hack society in a way? Also I thought it interesting that some ancient societies seemed to have less work hours.

Obviously it won't interest everybody, but didn't pg say "anything that interests hackers", not only hacking itself?

Anyway, my apologies if it was too far stretched. I hope I will refrain from further submissions in the future. Perhaps I should check out Reddit...

chaostheory• 19 years ago

Yeah I agree - this belongs on reddit not the site formerly known as startup news...

There are enough reddits and diggs in the world, if hacker news is going the way of reddit and digg I'll probably pass

pg• 19 years ago

Anyone who thinks hunter gatherers had pleasant lives should stop to think what happened to people who were too old to follow the tribe when it moved, or what happened when a mother who was already nursing had another baby.

Tichy5• 19 years ago

I don't think all hunter gatherers where nomads (but some agriculturalist are, or do shepherds not count), and I think I read in another book that nursing actually acts as contraceptive (Edit: I just saw that the article also mentions infanticide to keep children spaced four years apart, so true, some gruesome aspects are there).

Anyway, the point is certainly not to recommend going back to a hunter gatherer lifestyle. Although I wonder if startupping is not somewhat akin to hunting.

ivankirigin• 19 years ago

Indeed. I love this comic: http://static.flickr.com/100/267584452_4c7f35863f.jpg

jey• 19 years ago

The good news is that it's hard for a person to care about that once he's dead.

mnemonicsloth• 19 years ago

Massive self-aggrandizing factual error in the third paragraph:

It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short.

Um, Jean Jacques Rousseau? Noble Savage? Only a few decades after Hobbes?

It may not be relevant to the case being made here, but come on. I remember writing "compare and contrast" papers on Hobbes and Rousseau in high school.

mynameishere• 19 years ago

Yes, the basic idea has been re-hashed endlessly:

http://www.thecourier.com/manifest.htm

It sort of bothers me that this is getting upmodded--not because it's off-topic, but because it's so painfully banal--every high schooler has already thought these things through completely, just like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42398

Tichy5• 19 years ago

I didn't see the article as a manifesto against industrialism, despite the sensationalist title. Jared Diamond is a researcher, after all - I just found it informative to learn something about ancient societies, without jumping to conclusions from that.

rms• 19 years ago

One of the recurring off-topic discussions on Startup News was the evolution of humanity from nomadic tribes through the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Now that the scope of the site has expanded, it would make sense that one of the most popular discussions is still the evolution of humanity. If this topic doesn't interest you, maybe you should submit a story that you find interesting.

FatBastard• 19 years ago

This story is only interesting as a historical artifact in itself. It was a nice example of the current "conventional thinking" refuted by that other story yesterday about how England escaped the malthusian trap. Why is this story still here and the newer one gone already? Jared Diamond is very useful in this field, so maybe vote up some of his newer stuff?

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (by Jared Diamond)

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