But the point I do want to make is that our physiology and psychology is largely fine tuned by evolution for a certain operating environment. When we step outside that environment, it often introduces dysfunction in unpredictable ways.
An extreme example: as land animals we wouldn't survive very long at the bottom of the sea. More prosaic example: it's undeniable an environment with many more and tastier calories creates chronic health problems. Metabolic disease is virtually unknown in hunter-gatherers.
A rough heuristic is that removing purely adversarial elements from the evolutionary environment produces an improvements. Pathogens, predators, physical injuries, birth-related traumas, and famine. Removing or mitigating those elements are the main reason life expectancies have improved relative to hunter-gathers. But once you step outside the totally hostile elements, most environmental changes tend to be neutral at best and harmful at worst. Physiology and psychology rely on delicately tuned equilibria, which are easy to disrupt. The consequences aren't terrible, but do tend to subtly accumulate over time. Hunter-gathers die fast because they get a concussion and bleed out. Westerners die slow from the accumulation of plaque in their arteries.
Agreed. My point is just that we should look at physiology and psychology as guides, not anthropology (which is interesting but not necessarily prescriptive).
A diet of Twinkies and Coke is obviously terrible. But a finely tuned, balanced modern diet guided by nutritional science is likely superior to a primitive hunter-gatherer diet. There are plenty of people today who are in great physical condition; this is very feasible within our modern society.
Similarly, different modern countries often have differing familial arrangements, so we can look at empirical outcomes there instead of trying to guess at what our distant ancestors did, who had little choice but to do what they did, not having modern civilization as an option.
They're different, not really better.
Hunter gatherers definitely got more involuntary exercise. But modern people can choose to get better (more specialized/effective) and safer exercise than ancient people ever could have.
Hunter gatherers had to eat what was around them, and would involuntarily periodically fast. It's much easier and cheaper for modern people to have a varied diet. Many modern people also periodically fast. But you have to choose to do so.
Ancient people typically struggled with parasites and various diseases. That is largely not a factor in modern life. Modern people sometimes are affected by serious pollution issues - modern air quality from burning fossil fuels may be such a crisis. Airborne lead from leaded gasoline was almost certainly one. It's difficult to compare the effects of such problems.
There's also a pretty strong selection effect going on here: lots of people 100,000 years ago used to die. People would die in childhood, people would die in adulthood. This mean that women had to have lots of babies, which means women died in childbirth a lot.
So, I think it's true that, left to their own devices, modern people tend to be somewhat unhealthy. Mostly due to laziness. But modern people also pretty clearly have the opportunity to be much more healthy than ancient people.
Add to it easy to cure sicknesses, injuries that are nothing more and would kill you back then, their higher chance to contact said injuries and it is unlikely they would be so much healthier.
Also, there is reason why agrarian societies pushed away hunter gatherers - it is just easier to stay alive and healthy. Getting all the food a hunter gatherer in all seasons is hard.
In addition, childbirth in their society would both kill or forever damaged more women. They would also have harder time to leave physicly abusive situation, meaning likely more of it, meaning yet another negative impact on their health.
No.
Agriculture exists because it supports more people per unit of land than what the traditional way of life did (on average). This is as hard of a fact about history as you're going to get.
Now, you need to be savvy about what the statement is not saying. It is not providing a reason for an individual, or group of people, to make the switch from hunter-gather to agriculture. History did not lay that choice upon the discretion of people. It plays out in a much more complicated way.
Since the relatively natural land will only support so-many humans per acre, what happens when there are too many children? They move. Okay, what happens when that next region has too many children? Do they start making farms based on their ledgers of expected food production to population ratio - NO. The people who have political decision power are not the same people who starve or get their heads lobbed off as a result of their decision. If anything, a leader would prefer the neighboring tribe lose a few heads to adjust for the starvation problem. Do people start "switching" to farms anywhere in this? No. Only over a vast period of time, many climates, lots of movement, tribal reorganization, do people start... semi-nomadic animal husbandry. One day this will lead to agriculture.
All of this is vastly more complicated than it is on the surface, and the newly-established farmer occupation, when it comes around, could possibly be seen as the sucker at the table. There was constant tensions between "civilized" societies and their tribal neighbors, and only over the super long term does the higher calorie density of civilization win out. Even if their soldiers are shorter and stupider, there are more of them. We don't read about this, because recorded history picks up at a time when superior organizational capabilities of civilization is starting to give them a quality advantage as well (and as a side-effect, writing).
Anyway, easier way to get food and not get hungry or starwe is strong reason to switch lifestyle. Human societies of all kinds have been doing exact that decision over and over.
We would see that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes you get a great network of cousins who hook you up with business opportunities.
Sometimes you end up enslaved by your mother in law.
Our minds and bodies were not designed. They evolved — slowly — under conditions of relatively harshness and scarcity that to a large extent no longer exist. The human "habitat" has changed radically in the past several hundred years. One might argue that we're no longer adapted to our environment. Evolution doesn't work quickly enough for that.
I'd also suggest there was widespread physical and mental suffering in the distant past. It wasn't the Garden of Eden in prehistory.
I would agree that we are no longer adapted to our environment, and this seems to be the cause of many "modern" forms of suffering that are unrelated to scarcity, like mental illness and diseases of over-consumption. To me this implies that we have done a bad job in creating an environment for ourselves. We replaced suffering caused by scarcity (something we historically had little control over) with suffering caused by deliberate choices.
The point isn't that aligning our choices with biological and psychological needs will end all suffering. It's that not doing so pretty much guarantees a lot of unnecessary suffering.
They did not had diseases of over-consumption, but they had diseases from under-consumption.
To say that evolution is a "red herring" is absurd. It has literally determined every aspect of our being. You can't move forward without understanding what got you where you are.
So has physics. Why stop at hunter-gatherers, why not go back to the Big Bang? Would you argue that we need to study astrophysics to deal with obesity?
It's not absurd at all to suggest that evolution is a red herring, any more than it's absurd to suggest that astrophysics is a red herring. Prehistoric archaeology is highly speculative at best. I'm not saying it's unscientific, I'm just saying there are a lot of things about prehistoric societies that we could be very wrong about, due to lack of direct observation and evidence, and thus it would a poor guide for our current and future societies even if we decided to base our behavior on our ancestors (which we shouldn't).
No one is saying that we should live exactly like our ancestors.
In general, modern advances have maybe added 10+ years to an average adult lifespan. The quality of the added lifespan is harder to assess though.
> Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures
Is it? In a sense, the choice is still available to adopt the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, if you wanted. I don't know many who would want to do that.
Nonetheless, i'm not sure that the last ten years of my Dad's life (suffering from vascular dementia) were particularly good for him (I know that they were super hard for the rest of us).
I think the general point is that it's hard to trade-off the quality of those extra years, which is the point I was trying (unsuccessfully, it appears) to make.
For example, I'm Mexican. Here it's quite normal to spend plenty of time with your extended family, live near them, have your parents help you take care of your kids for extended periods of time, etc. at least in my experience. We're an industrial nation and have modern medicine, but this is more a matter of culture and social attitudes I think.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187...
We are baby-sitting lots of adults that couldn't make it past 1-3 years old of age before the medical revolution. Some of them might never be able to be productive and only consume resources from their families or the public. So maybe evolution was not such a bad idea after all.