Comments on: A modern Stone Age fallacy

By: Alice

Alice — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 17:39:00 +0000

One minor quibble: free-trade is not a recent invention, nor has it even existed for quite some time. Without some outside force, like a government, preventing it, free trade would have come into existance about 10 seconds after the concept of ownership. Latter, numerous restrictions were placed on trade, which is what we have now. Just look at the present US tariffs, or consider the fact that one cannot legally cut someone elses hair for money without getting permission from the government. What allows our highly restricted economy to appear more free than trade of old is the superior transportation and communication technology we have.

By: Sweet Machine

Sweet Machine — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 02:41:02 +0000

Yes, Dana, the point of this blog is that culture is totally perfect now.

By: Sniper

Sniper — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:29:39 +0000

And that, folks, was another episode of Missing The Point Theatre.

By: fillyjonk

fillyjonk — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:26:42 +0000

Who let you in?

By: Dana

Dana — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:24:42 +0000

It’s kind of funny to me to read some people talk about stuff like this, and they talk about what a messed-up world we live in, and how the horrible racists and the horrible sexists and the horrible free-marketers and the horrible earth-rapers are ruining everything. And then someone comes along and goes, “Because our ingenuity got ahead of our evolution, we’re suffering from all kinds of problems that we really didn’t need to suffer,” and the naysayers start pelting them with monkey shit. “SHUT UP! Things are GREAT now!”

Orly?

Evolution is a response to environmental pressure as applied by Nature. As human beings are a PART of Nature and not the entirety thereto, just because we invent something doesn’t make it De Facto Natural. This is how we can be “going the wrong way” evolutionarily even if all we’re doing is adapting to an environment that we ourselves have created. The adaptation part is supposed to happen, but it’s to the wrong kind of stressors.

You tell the people who didn’t develop adult lactase production and the ones for whom diabetes occurs in over 50 percent of their ethnic population and the ones who have chronic diseases that we don’t even have a name for yet, that everything’s peachy now.

Talk about fat people being accepted as human beings and treated with respect and I am RIGHT THERE with you and completely agree with you. But some of the other things you talk about are insane. It IS natural for a human being to adapt and to use available tools; this plus cultural pressures from infancy onward are why I’m not living in a fucking cave. (Not that we always did. Paleolithic humanity, as with modern, lived in a variety of dwellings.) But that doesn’t mean I think grain agriculture was the best thing that ever happened to us; in fact I think it’s the reason we’re at six billion strong now, going on seven billion, and about to choke out the rest of the biosphere. Not to mention all the health problems it’s causing. And I don’t mean fat either–that’s just a symptom, where it is connected to bad health at all.

I don’t like feeling sick or getting wild mood swings when I eat too much grain food or other starch. I don’t like not getting enough sleep because it is never fucking DARK around here thanks to the street lights. I don’t like my caffeine addiction. I don’t like not having an extended family to help me with my child. I don’t like it that too many people’s extended families are lunatic because this culture makes us pathological more often than not. I can’t blame anyone at all who wants to back out of the modern way of things to any degree and try to find something simpler and saner.

It’s not like we didn’t live just fine without late-night TV.

By: Caitlin

Caitlin — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:54:41 +0000

Chris Clarke: Pleistocene feminists were 12 feet tall, weighed a half ton, had four-inch claws and bony armor, and they tasted like giant ground sloth.

Tricia: :::mind in gutter:::

*laughs enough to get strange looks in the library*

Oh, SP. I could not love yous more.

By: O.C.

O.C. — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:36:06 +0000

A recent archaeological discovery of, among other things, a carving of a paleolithic fat woman:

http://blogs.discovery.com/news_animal/2009/01/view-some-of-the-worlds-earliest-portable-animal-art.html

Yeah, everyone was skinny. You betcha. (eyeroll)

By: fillyjonk

fillyjonk — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:09:25 +0000

akosia, your field has some damage control to do. You should be even more pissed off about these morons than I am!

By: akosia

akosia — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:07:38 +0000

On Ev. Psych: Please don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. It gets a bad rap for being sexist, deterministic, etc., but the latest literature and research is quite nuanced and very much takes into consideration the feedback loop of evolved psychological/physiological mechanisms and cultural preferences/constraints. I teach the subject at a very liberal school in NYC, and am a feminist myself.
Thanks! Love the site!

By: Meg Thornton

Meg Thornton — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:06:39 +0000

I love the nitwits who think everything was wonderful back when we lived in caves. Of course it was. Forty was old age then; you had children dying off young as a result of disease (particularly nice little things like septicaemia, or opportunistic illnesses like pneumonia); women had a much higher chance of dying in childbirth; warfare still existed, and was messier and bloodier and more likely to kill you off than the type we have now. Just think, we’re all descended from people who *survived* all of that. It’s worth noting that in most of the planet, agriculture became pretty much a universal cultural tool (the only places where it didn’t develop were places like Australia, where the ecosystem just didn’t have the correct ingredients – and even here, a number of the tribes practiced varieties of selective procedures on the native heathland).

If the palaeofantasists think the world was a better place then, they’re welcome to take up the lifestyle themselves. For myself, I figure that at least part of the reason my most *recent* ancestors had such long lifespans (three out of my four grandparents were over 90 when they died) is because they used the brains they had to avoid doing things the hard way.