Fluent Essays

see pdf The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race The advent of agriculture was a watershed moment for the human race. It  may also have been our greatest blunder.  By ​Jared Diamond​ April 30, 1999 10:00 PM      (Credit: Gajus/Shutterstock)    To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. 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  https://www.discovermagazine.com/author/jared-diamond God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is  demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years  has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the  adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life,  was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With  agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and  despotism, that curse our existence. At first, the evidence against this revisionist  interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better  off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it  easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our  advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and  material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are  safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not  from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a  medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?  For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we  hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have  traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and  little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew  each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was  facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people  began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until  today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.  From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did  almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course  they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less  work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just  imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild  animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture  full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to  appreciate the advantages of agriculture?  The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture  with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few  thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick  food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that  hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the  Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.  While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove.  How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they  abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had  to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the  progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century  hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world,  several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen,  continue to support themselves that way. 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. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated  neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there  are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"  While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the  mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides  more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's  average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140  calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended  daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen,  who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of  thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the  1840s.  So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish,  even though farmers have pushed them into some of the world's worst real  estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with  farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the  agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the  distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from  gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing  remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in  prehistoric garbage dumps.  How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby  directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in  recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology,  the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.  In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to  study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts  found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could  be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians  who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be  examined for hookworm and other parasites.  Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit  a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner's  sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many  skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance  companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age.  Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people  of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood  malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy,  and other diseases.  One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from  skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and  Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the  ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of  agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for  men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again,  but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their  distant ancestors.  Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from  burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located  near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have  excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that  occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming  around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the  University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their  new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the  farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of  malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone  condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting  infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the  spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in  the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos,  "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes  of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to  survive."  The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other  primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to  feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunter-gatherers  farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality  for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at  Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field,  Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that  argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a  respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."  There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture  was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early  farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers  gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three  high-carbohydrate plants — wheat, rice, and corn — provide the bulk of the  calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain  vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a  limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.  Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in  crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded  societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some  archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted  disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages  agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were  scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal  disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the  appearance of large cities.  Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring  another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little  or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of  cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore,  there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized  from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set  itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae  c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the  royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the  average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies  from c. A. D. 1000, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold  hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.  Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people  in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting  and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that  must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one  could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer  in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?  Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from  the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under  pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have  more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts — with  consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example,  more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.  Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New  Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of  vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field  trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an  airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice,  which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together.  When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads,  while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it,  supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.  As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us  with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do  farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me  misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had  they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art  forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures  were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still  being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some  Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.  Thus with the advent of agriculture the elite became better off, but most people  became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we  chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped  by it despite its pitfalls.  One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support  many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population  densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over one person per ten square miles,  while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted  entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered  edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep  their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since  a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults.  Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child  every two years.  As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice  ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first  steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose  the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the  transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with  increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the  bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished  farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers  abandoned their lifestyle, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were  forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't want.  At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a  luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present.  Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at  which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between  limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and  ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.  Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in  human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which  agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose  that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain  human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs  by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time.  If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost  at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of  that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we  adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of  famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow  achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering  facade, and that have so far eluded us?    75 THE SHERIDAN BAKER “THESIS MACHINE” Follow these steps to turn a topic idea into a working thesis for your paper. Step 1: State the topic under consideration. Examples: a.) cats, b.) writing classes, c.) grades Step 2: State the specific issue in the form of a debating proposition. a) Resolved: Cats should be subject to leash laws. b) Resolved: Writing classes should be abolished. c) Resolved: Grades are unnecessary in college. Step 3: Using a because clause, convert the resolution into a sentence that states your position on the issue and provides a main rationale for that position [= rough thesis]. a) Cats should be subject to least laws because they are inveterate wanderers. b) Writing classes should not be abolished because many students are unpracticed writers. c) Grades are unnecessary in college because students learn more rapidly without them. Step 4: Polish and refine the rough thesis by adding qualifications (using an although clause) and removing the ‘because clause’ [= thesis]. a) Although it is against a cat’s instinctive wanderlust to be restrained, the crowded nature of city life demands that cats not be allowed to roam around freely. b) Although gifted high school graduates should be exempt from writing classes, most entering students need help in attaining college-level writing skills. c) Although there may be a legitimate need to evaluate the work of college students, the traditional grading system hinders learning and stifles creativity. Step 5: Test your faith in the thesis and explore potential counterarguments by reversing your position. a) The cat’s independent and adaptable nature makes it the only pet capable of living an unrestricted existence within the city. b) Although introductory writing classes may have remedial value for some students, most high school graduates possess writing skills sufficient for success in college course. c) Traditional grading procedures may offend educational purists, but public school systems require pragmatic approaches to evaluation. Adapted from Sheridan Baker, The Practical Stylist 2021/9/22 下午11:43 Write a Thesis https://canvas.pasadena.edu/courses/1117051/assignments/9003812 1/2 Write a Thesis 截止 星期四 由 23:59 编辑 得分 20 提交 一个文本输入框或一份上传文件 可用 9月19日 0:00 至 11月6日 23:59 大约 2 个月 开始任务 Good news! The Sheridan Baker Thesis Machine will write your thesis statement for you! Well, not exactly, but it can help you generate and improve a thesis. Here is the thesis machine: Sheridan Baker Thesis Machine.pdf It is also the next item in the module. Assignment: Look over the first paper assignment, and then use the Sheridan Baker Thesis Machine, or some other method, to write a working thesis statement for your first paper. Here is the Paper 1 prompt: English 1A Paper 1 (Fall 2020) Write a thesis-driven essay of 3-5 pages in answer to one of the following prompts. The essay should be double-spaced, in 12 point type, and the essay should use MLA citation format including a Works Cited page. The question stem for each prompt (that is, the question your thesis is answering) is in boldface. 1. Both Jared Diamond and Kim Stanley Robinson present causal arguments. Diamond says the turn from hunter gatherer societies to agricultural societies some 10,000 years ago is responsible for, among other things, epidemics and class divisions, while Robinson identifies a particular “structure of feeling” that has until now perpetuated neo-liberal capitalism’s ravaging of the environment. Write an essay explaining and evaluating each author’s causal argument. What problem or problems are they concerned with and how do the causal factors they identify function (for example, how does agriculture cause tyranny)? How convincing are their arguments (or aspects of their arguments)? What makes them convincing or unconvincing? Finally, what response or responses to the problems they identify do the authors’ arguments suggest either explicitly or implicitly? 2. Do a rhetorical analysis of Timothy Morton’s radio broadcast, “The End of the World Has Already Happened.” What are the most effective examples and the relative importance of ethos, logos, and https://canvas.pasadena.edu/courses/1117051/files/70982774/download?wrap=1 2021/9/22 下午11:43 Write a Thesis https://canvas.pasadena.edu/courses/1117051/assignments/9003812 2/2 pathos in the broadcast? Are there any logical fallacies? Overall, do you think the broadcast is an effective rhetorical intervention on the issue of global warming? Why or why not? 3. Analyze the argument of any one of the authors from the Nature, Science, and Environment unit. Do you agree with their argument? Why or why not? 4. In her recent book, Anthropocene Back Loop, after defining resilience thinking in some detail, urban geographer Stephanie Wakefield questions its value, writing, “What about the rest of us, for whom the safe operating space of existing society is not safe at all? How to move forward? How to break out of this cycle?” To explore the value of resilience thinking for yourself, analyze the “Applying Resilience Thinking” pamphlet from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and use your analysis to answer this question: Are there any problems with resilience thinking given that its goals are to sustain rather than fundamentally change systems? What are some implications of applying resilience thinking to other problems (the current pandemic, systemic racism, educational institutions, etc.)? Rather than addressing the application of all seven principles in your paper, you might focus on a selection of (one, two, three … ?) principles in more detail.