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Quote by: Autolykos I'd like to jump into this thread, if it's all right with everybody. :)
It seems to me that Tman and G. Adams are both right. Tman is correct that the advent of agriculture allowed people to live longer, and often healthier, lives. On the other hand, G. Adams is correct that human beings, as a whole, are weaker now than at the dawn of agriculture.
However, I think both of them are missing a piece of the puzzle. That piece of the puzzle is human compassion. I submit that, if it were not for human compassion, the entire field of medicine would not exist. Think about it. What is medicine? It consists of things like fighting and curing disease, helping wounds heal, and performing corrective surgery. In short, medicine helps people live longer lives. But more than that, medicine is people helping other people live longer. Why would anyone want to do that? Ultimately, because of compassion. People do not want to see their loved ones hurt, sick, or dead, so they do whatever is in their power to prevent these things. Otherwise, medicine as we know it would not exist.
However, this compassion comes at a price. It interferes with natural selection. People who would have likely died without medicine have instead been able to survive and reproduce, passing their genes onto the next generation. As a result, congenital defects which would have promised an early death in the hunter-gatherer era have proliferated by today. The development of agriculture helped to further this process. In allowing people to accumulate more food, it better ensured their continued survival, which in turn let them have and spend more time on doing other things, which made their survival even more guaranteed, and so on. Of course, in so doing, it made the traits which were highly successful in the hunter-gatherer world become much less beneficial.
In the final analysis, I would have to say that, by and large, Tman is right. Technology does trump nature. What would have taken millions of years for unconscious processes to evolve (if ever) have taken mere centuries or decades for people to create. Any person from the hunter-gatherer age would probably kill to have the life of one of us. Furthermore, many of the health problems that G. Adams has pointed out are largely preventable, and the means of prevention are readily available. Whether people take the initiative to employ those means is their own problem. But what may be perhaps the ultimate irony is that, while our compassion has lead to the proliferation of congenital defects, it will also lead to technology that can reverse that trend: genetic engineering.
Perhaps things aren't quite so bad as we may think. :)
- Rob |