Thoughts on the Evolution of Our Species.

[GliderGuider]

68. Speaking of "evolution"...

I'm chewing my way through this essay, and came on these paragraphs that seem appropriate to this discussion:

THE CULTURAL DYNAMICS OF EMPIRE

In viewing the cultural change that has occurred since we were all forager/hunters, we confront the myth of "man's evolution." There is the linear concept of biological, "genetic," evolution and a corollary concept of "social evolution." The picture is that "man the toolmaker" has laboriously evolved, socially, by his inventions. First the rocks were chipped for tools, then the bow and arrow, then agriculture and now computers. In order to logically justify this linear concept, those farthest back on the linear path must be understood to have been in much worse condition than we are today. In this myth, we, today, in the richest industrial countries are at the forefront of social evolution. We are the most "evolved." The emphasis is that we laboriously "invented" agriculture as an escape from the previous, less satisfactory condition. This is the standard myth. Others seek to use other functional reasons in addition, to explain why humans became civilized. Other theories to explain what influenced this cultural change are a rising population of forager/hunters that may have forced farming intensification or that the worldwide die-off of large mammals after the last ice age forced forager/hunters into agricultural intensification and a sedentary way of life.

The standard measure in the field of anthropology is that forager/hunters today, as in the past, spend an average of 500 hours per year per adult person in subsistence activities, the traditional villager spends 1,000 hours and of course the modern 40 hour week amounts to 2,000 hours per year. As anthropologist John Bodley so ably points out, this presents a problem for the linear concept, namely why would the forager/hunters opt for a system in which twice as much time would be taken up with subsistence? He points out that there are examples where village agriculturists have actually returned to forager/hunter life styles when the opportunity presented itself.5 The linear concept would argue also that humans "discovered" agriculture somehow, as if foragers with their intimate knowledge of the natural world did not know that plants grow from seeds!

The big myth, which we are confronting in this essay, is the myth that says that there has been a qualitative advancement with the change from forager/hunter culture to civilization. We have already seen that only ten of the countries in the world exceed the protein intake of the !Kung Bushmen. This means that most of the civilized people of the world can't even feed themselves to the level of the forager/hunters and this is no doubt true for most of the people (other than the elites) in history who have lived in "civilization." Civilization actually represents a lowering of living standards, using the values of longevity, food, labor and health for most people outside of the elite class. Only by restricting our view to "inventions," could we say that there has been a linear progression. We live in a world where starvation is increasing. It is a world of myth where millions and soon hundreds of millions, die of starvation and we still say we are making "progress" by counting the number of devices created. This may be the ultimate of materialism (the belief that material objects are the ultimate value), that as billions die on a dying planet, we say that we have made great progress because we invented airplanes, computers, satellites and we went to the moon in a rocket ship.