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Date: | Sun, 18 Mar 2007 14:37:00 -0400 |
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Robert Kesterson:
> If you believe that evolution works (which is the whole premise for
> this
> diet), then the fact that we are here and primitive man is not must
> mean
> that we were superior in some way.
This is the same sort of rationale that led Europeans to determine that they
were "superior" to American Indians, Africans, and other peoples they
conquered. Some primitive peoples still exist and are still living the old
ways (I have seen an estimate of around 300,000 globally). The fact that
there are many more modern people today than primitive only means that
agricultural populations outbred hunter-gatherer populations, decimated HG
populations with the epidemics that result from agriculture and cities, and
slaughtered many of the HG survivors. This has next to nothing to do with
biological evolution (beyond adaptation to germs). Being able to out-disease
and out-filth someone does not make you "superior" to them, unless we are to
argue that Pig Pen is "superior" to the other Peanuts characters. ;-)
Jared Diamond, Daniel Quinn, Loren Cordain and others make a strong case
that rather than being seen as "superior," modern civilization and modern
people have experienced some downsides from abandoning the hunter-gatherer
way of life. I think Cordain calls it the "two-edged sword" of civilization.
Diamond goes farther and calls agriculture the greatest mistake of human
history.
Also, all of us are descended from primitive peoples and our genes are not
significantly different from theirs (we are not a new species or sub-species
as compared to people of the Upper Paleolithic). Society has changed
dramatically, but human biology has changed very little. As Cordain said, we
are stone agers living in a space age world.
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