The worst mistake in the history of the human race
According to Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the worst mistake in human history was the adoption of agriculture. According to Diamond, it would have been better if we'd kept on gathering and hunting.
Confused? Ready to pick up a pitchfork or hoe and join a mob of angry farmers in protest? Give this a read.
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<rant>As a scientist, I find Jared Diamond even more irritating than Richard Dawkins. Dawkins at least gave us The Blind Watchmaker, a genuinely wonderful piece of popularisation, in amongst the polemic. Re Diamond: You do not get to play the role of provocateur and bad-boy-prophet --- saying the opposite to whatever vulgar myth prevails in society --- and still claim the mantle of Scientist speaking to the laity. This is in violation of all the rules; it amounts to having your cake and eating it at the same time.</rant>
Bruce, have you read Guns, Germs and Steel?
I have always meant to, but I will confess that when I saw Diamond's own TV miniseries adaption of it --- at least, it was narrated by Diamond and starred him --- my resolve weakened. Ecological determinism of the most extreme crudity. From your question I take it that the book is better?
Regarding the agriculture article, I am not an anthropologist or an archaeologist, so let me just stick to items on the surface:
First paragraph: Replacing a myth of progress with a myth of science-progressively-challenging-antropocentric-smugness is not itself scientific work, it is an appropriation of it that goes beyond the scientific work and well beyond its authority. (I mean myth in the more technical sense, not the street sense.) It's how this article begins and ends, and it runs like a thread through the whole thing. Fine, you might say: isn't this legitimate in its own way; and why should a researcher not engage in it, for who better to do it, after all?
Maybe, but you need to fight fair. He's using nourishment and disease levels of individuals as a proxy for individual health; health of individuals who can be measured, for wellbeing of not just those individuals but their social groups as a whole. Both of those steps are nontrivial, and the tone of "this is what the studies show" that's appropriate to the first part should modulate into some sort of appropriate caution in the later steps. Instead, it just inches out sideways and prophetic certainty on the moral case replaces it, inch by inch. Then the gaps get filled by contemporary horror stories of female subjugation that are meant to drive off counter-argument; and "might makes right" storytelling of the most purely speculative kind.
Look I am sorry to rant, but this is serious. Part of how the sciences work is restriction and focus on questions that can be made objectively answerable. You can push a remarkably long way into surprising territory with this: we know about the chemical composition of stars, something a previous generation thought impossible in principle; we know (certain sorts of things) about the relation of different species by descent, something pre-nineteenth century generations did not even know was a question. And so on. But there are yawning gaps in which we don't know much, and it can be in areas in which we feel a natural interest. What was the life of the "cavemen" like; what did they do from day to day? Let me guess, did the picture of some shambling fellow with a club dart into your mind there? Everyone "knows" that picture, but in fact we know very little about it.
If one is convinced that progressivist myths are pernicious, and wants to use certain things we know to problematise the idea of progress: by all means. (Although one might add: the association of certain diseases with higher population density is not exactly a news flash.) But really: "No, it is not what `the progressivists' say! In fact, it is the exact opposite!" The certainty is in the wrong place.
Replacing a myth of progress with a myth of science-progressively-challenging-antropocentric-smugness is not itself scientific work, it is an appropriation of it that goes beyond the scientific work and well beyond its authority.
[...]
Part of how the sciences work is restriction and focus on questions that can be made objectively answerable.
I agree. I guess I was less concerned with his mythmaking than with his mythbusting.
I haven't seen the TV adaptation, but the book was very concerned to explain why his thesis was not ecological determinism. Instead, he was arguing that geography has, over the long term, played a very significant and often overlooked role in human history since the last ice age. The myth he is trying to bust quite explicitly throughout the book is any kind of racial determinism/superiority.
Hey Byron. Etiquette demands that I say something conciliatory here and tie off the discussion. Perhaps reflecting on the fact that I should probably go read Guns, Germs, and Steel would serve this purpose ...
... but I'm afraid I just don't have a sense of humour about mythmaking-in-the-service-of-mythbusting. Maybe it's the scientist thing; maybe it's a failure to be relaxed about the popular-science genre; maybe.
I guess it might help to clarify the discussion --- and help to move sideways a little from Jared Diamond --- to pick at the word "myth". I know I introduced it into this discussion, but it's treacherous the way that (in contemporary usage) it slips into meaning "factually incorrect story that I don't like": something one accuses other people of doing, and something one doesn't do oneself. It may be utopian but I would like to think that one could stand back from even one's own discussions and use the word neutrally as a piece of description: as a category.
I think this helps in addressing the agriculture article (which, at least, both of us have read in the same form).
[I need to break off here: will try to complete the thought later this afternoon.]
[I will try to keep my grammar under control this time.]
The story about the progress of civilisation, in which the development of agriculture and the growth of cities are prominent, will do as a myth: it's widely-known, gets presumed in all sorts of discussions without the participants necessarily noticing, grounds other stories, and lets people place themselves. Is it true?
Well, it's never been uncontested: we didn't have to wait for studies of disease marks on old bones (and such) in order to hear voices casting doubt on whether civilisation in general, and settled life in particular, was an unambiguous Good Thing. But such an argument is not just about "facts". Certain facts might be relevant to the issue, perhaps even decisively in some cases, but they don't necessarily get at the heart of what's going on.
For example, Diamond appeals (as to a truism) to the myth of science-progressively-challenging-anthropocentric-smugness, which you may have noticed irritates the hell out of me. Now, it happens that while some scientific developments have challenged some anthropocentric notions, this does not apply everywhere at all times, and even some of the supposed model cases are not accurately described this way.
But that isn't the main reason the myth of progressive-challenge annoys me: it annoys me because I think it's a travesty of what science is about and what it's for. The natural sciences are properly about love of the natural world in whatever aspect is relevant to the discipline in question: in my case, physics, that would be the big, the small, and the simple; and a studied indifference to any other narrative or personal purpose, or even practical use, the better to know the thing (and the system) as it is, apart from our agendas. And a putative crusade against anthropocentrism counts as an agenda: if you're trying to understand the phenomena themselves, you should mortify the desire to enlist them in any such crusade.
And so anyone who wants to characterise science as ideological warfare has a fight on their hands if I am in the room, but that fight is a fight about identity and purpose and narrative and it goes beyond the science itself. And I hope I am disciplined in the arguments I use, especially if I am going to go standing on my authority as a scientist in some public setting. Part of that discipline should be keeping track of, and giving other people a sense of, what sort of argument is being made.
So it actually bothers me, not just that Diamond is peddling a counter-myth that goes way beyond what the data can support --- just about any interesting story would go beyond what could be established with assurance from the data --- but also that he doesn't hold the data and the mythbusting at arm's length. Because he should (or so I say). Regardless of how important he thinks this piece of mythbusting to be.
Part of that discipline should be keeping track of, and giving other people a sense of, what sort of argument is being made.
I agree, and his equation of archeology with the natural sciences in the opening paragraph doesn't help this.
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