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Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization - Spencer Wells, Spencer Wells Updated - 7/28/13 - see link at bottom

In a 2006 interview with Conservation Biology, geneticist, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, and head of NatGeo’s Genographic Project, Spencer Wells said that in various ways people today
are mismatched with the culture we’ve created in the last 10,000 years. And where are we going in the future?
When asked what he meant by “mismatched,” Wells replied
I mean things like the obesity epidemic, increasing diabetes, children on Ritalin, high levels of suicide and depression — ever-increasing levels of those in the developed world, certainly. Our biology is clearly mismatched with some of the aspects of culture, the way we live today. How did this society arise? If it’s so bad for us in so many ways, why do we have it? And going into the future, what are we going to change about ourselves in the society? It’s amazing to think that we are the first species in the history of evolution that has evolved to the point where it can change its own biology. We have the tools of genetic engineering now. We can craft our own evolutionary fate. Where are we going to go? That’s a big responsibility, and I would argue that to understand where we need to be going in the future, we need to look to the past and understand where we come from.
Between eleven and twelve thousand years ago, a group of sedentary, grain-gathering people in the Fertile Crescent, stressed by declining resources, figured out that they could feed themselves by cultivating crops. Once that happened, human organization changed from hunting and gathering to farming. Like a stone dropped into a pond the repercussions of that change have spread from then to now, affecting not only how we organize ourselves, what we believe in, our health, our freedom of movement, our mental states, but our very DNA. In Pandora’s Seed Wells looks at the environmental conditions that allowed the sowing of this new way of living and offers his analysis of both the long-term social and genetic impacts of the shift. He looks as well at how recent and potential actions might ripple outward from today. It is fascinating stuff.

Before people could drop out of the eat-what-you-can-find-or-catch rat race, (Survivor: Crescent?) certain conditions had to exist. The end of an Ice Age made a major difference, increasing the number of places where edible flora, like wheat, grew. So one need not go far to gather the good stuff. Populations expanded in numbers and geographical breadth. But Mother Nature played an early version of Mommie Dearest. In an event with significant implications for the present, the retreating ice, ironically, allowed the release of a huge quantity of fresh water into the oceans. Since fresh water is lighter than salt water, it floats atop it, sealing off the warmth that ocean currents had circulated throughout much of the world, thus creating a mini ice age around 12,700 years ago. One effect this had was to make much of the land considerably drier. Crops that had merrily sprouted in much of the temperate world, rice, barley, and wheat, for example, retreated to more agreeable places that still had water. That usually meant uphill into high mountain valleys. No fun for lowland dwellers, who then had to travel farther than was sustainable to gather their food.

We see the similar things today, as plants and critters that thrive on cool temperatures are retreating to higher elevations and latitudes, or perishing. Aspens, for example, are currently under assault by insects that used to find the aspens’ mountainous locales too chilly. Never previously having had to cope with these insects, the trees developed no defenses against them. Now that global temperatures are climbing, the hungry bugs are comfortable in places that used to be inhospitable. Result? Lower elevation aspens are endangered.

People of the Neolithic Period had to adapt or perish, as well. Communities had been established and had grown, before this new Big Chill, locating based on access to easily retrievable food sources. Adapting meant recognizing that one did not necessarily have to follow the favored flora; one could grow food plants in fixed locations as long as the local conditions were reasonable. Thus the seed of the Neolithic Revolution was planted. But from this change many side-effects sprouted.
As humans expanded their population size, they were forced to move from the original centers of domestication, mountain valleys, out onto the plains, since the small land area near easily accessible water supplies could not sustain an unlimited number of people. This necessitated the development of a system for transporting water and irrigating fields. Constructing irrigation canals requires that large groups of people work together toward creating a common, shared piece of real estate. This meant they had to develop some way of administering the work itself, as well as the maintenance of the completed canals and the access to the water—suddenly a scarce resource. And this meant they needed something else that had never existed before in human history: a formal government, with specialized bureaucrats, and most important, authority. Otherwise, why listen to someone telling you what to do?

Because of a growing population that was increasingly urban, as well as the growth in trade between Neolithic cities, the need to oversee complex public works projects drove the development of ever more complex forms of government. (p 56)
Wells goes on to detail how the growing size of communities led to the creation of greater social stratification and the creation of a military. Religion changed as well.
The world’s hunter-gatherers are traditionally animist, and their belief in a multitude of spirits and gods mirrors their reliance on a complex variety of natural resources. Agriculturalists, with their relatively simple food supply and their view of nature as something that needs to be controlled as rather than cooperated with, were sociologically predisposed to create religions with fewer, more powerful gods—and gods in their own image at that. (p 55)
But social changes were not the only new thing on the block. DNA was doing the twist inside homo sap too. It makes sense, for example, that a hunter-gatherer would have a body that hangs on to available calories, given the sometimes uncertain nature of the food supply, but when one shifts to an agricultural world, in which supply is often abundant, that ability can become a liability, translating into diseases like diabetes. A few examples. We have receptors on our tongues that are attuned to appreciate sweet food and reject bitter. But a sweet tooth becomes a liability when one is not attempting to distinguish between fruit that is edible and rotten. The diet of hunter-gatherers helped keep teeth clean. With the shift to farming, tooth decay increased. Wells also cites a decline in longevity when hunter-gatherers became farmers. Bodies selected for one type of existence did not necessarily fare well at the other. For example, lactose intolerance was a non-issue for the hunter-gatherer, but it became a significant disadvantage for survival in an agricultural world. The lactose-tolerant were better suited to survive in a world that was domesticating animals, so those genes spread.

What happens if you are forced to remain in one place instead of wandering to new territories when local resources fade? Dashing through the woods, a hunter-gatherer needed to be acutely sensitive to sound and motion, lest one fall prey to human competitors or large critters with a hankering for two-footed steak. But the sensitivity that kept us alive ten thousand years ago became a liability. Our bodies simply cannot cope with all the stimulation, noise, numbers of people that were inherent in growing agricultural and urban environments. Wells cites studies showing that people can realistically relate personally only to a maximum of 150 people. In hunter-gatherer societies, a group could split if it grew too large, but this was not an option for Neolithic farming communities. One result, in Wells’ view, was a growth in mental illness. In addition, the stress of all this excess stimulation compromises our immune systems, making us more vulnerable to a wide range of diseases, acute and chronic.

What might be the long-term implications of activities of the present age? How will gene therapy ripple out to the humans of the future? How will our mining of natural resources, biological as well as chemical, affect the future us? Whereas hindsight can be twenty-twenty (well, it is often not even that, as there are typically competing theories explaining past events) foresight is a bit like wandering around at night in the country wearing shades. Which is to say that I found some contemporary analysis and some of the projections Wells offers sometimes less compelling than his look backward.

Wells offers a fascinating discussion on major revolutions in where we get our food. The establishment of agriculturalism in the Neolithic was the last basic change. Domestication of aquatic food sources only began on large scale in the last 100 years. Fishing has remained pretty much a pre-industrial enterprise. Mega-fishing has almost destroyed native stock, so we need aquaculture if we are to satisfy growing demand for fish-based protein. Will the impact of fish farming match the dramatic changes wrought by the institution of plant farming and the domestication of animals for food? Who knows? But it is an interesting question.

He notes a correspondence between income and obesity, but never mentions that the food that is a primary culprit in this contemporary trend, corn, is heavily subsidized by the government, whereas foods that are healthier receive minimal, if any support. Thus, it is much less affordable to consume the right foods if doing so means not being able to pay the rent. While bodies that were selected for the Paleolithic, in large measure, would probably still have issues with obesity and disease in the contemporary world, those public health concerns certainly would not be nearly so significant if our public policies and corporate marketers did not encourage our craving for sweet.

Wells decries the use of gene therapy, and more extremely, the use of genetic tools to select traits in our babies, as harbingers of grave unseen dangers in the centuries ahead. Gene therapy may keep alive some who might otherwise perish, thus altering the future gene pool, but unless that group and their descendants become dominant, we should, as a species, retain our genetic diversity.

Re contemporary religious extremism he writes:
Unlike previous movements that have advocated violent solutions to social problems, however, such as the PLO or the IRA, with their territorial desires, today’s violent fundamentalist movements claim to be doing God’s will, giving them a sense of higher purpose success means not simply achieving proximal goals such as political autonomy, for instance, but changing the world order in the name of God. Crazy though it may appear from the outside it is not insanity that drives terrorism in the fundamentalist world; rather, it is the God-given certainty that what one is doing is morally just. (p 201)
And what madman does not cloak his desires under the banner of religion? I thought Wells was out of his depth here. Many contemporary Islamic extremists seek to establish the Caliphate, which would certainly entail extinguishing many Middle Eastern states. If that is not territorial I do not know what is. In the USA, fundamentalists of the Christian persuasion have been seeking real estate since landing here in the 15th century. Seeking to incorporate religiosity into our secular political institutions is nothing, if not territorial. Israeli fundamentalists have made a clear translation of their religious beliefs into territorial demands.

The strength of Pandora’s Seed is in tracking the ancient change to the present. There are plenty of social critics and futurists about and there are many places one can go to get views on what lies ahead. While it certainly makes sense for Wells to use what he has discussed as a basis for making projections, there does not seem to be anything in that effort that is unique. His prescriptions for coping with our impending crises struck me as bromitic and lacking the analytical heft of his look at our genetic and social inheritance. Basically he encourages humanity to learn to live with less. He is probably correct in the overall, but a more pointed menu of suggestions would have been welcome.

Definitely read the book for its considerable strength, mapping how the shift to an agricultural way of life created the people and institutions of today. That work is utterly fascinating. You may certainly find his other analyses and projections intriguing, but I thought they were bits of chaff to his bushels of analytical wheat.

==============================EXTRA STUFF

7/27/13 - GR friend Jan Rice passed along a fascinating article from the December 19, 2011 New Yorker Magazine, THE SANCTUARY: The world’s oldest temple and the dawn of civilization, by Elif Batuman. It takes the view that religion came before settlements rather than the other way around.