Worst Mistake

This blog is on my feelings towards Jared Diamond's essay, Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.

I believe that Mr. Diamond had a few good points to his essay, but overall he was mistaken in his rather blunt argument. In his argument he failed to identify with the human race's want and need to make things better. It would have been nearly impossible for the human race to better itself while constantly on the move; worrying about whether or not they are going to have a full stomach tonight. The anxiety of the people who were a part of hunter gathering societies must have been something to heed, because without the storage of food you have no guarantee when or where you are going to eat your next meal.
Mr. Diamond did bring up a good point when he stated that with agriculture came the development of huge societies with an increase in disease. This would definitely be a realistic assumption because in large populations disease spreads more readily. Instead of having small tribes over a vast area consisting of a total of 100,000 people; with agriculture you instead have 100,000 people in a very close quarters. Instead of isolating the disease in a certain tribe, the disease in a city quickly becomes endemic, perhaps an epidemic if other cities are involved.
But where Mr. Diamond's essay lacked thought was where he states that agriculture is virtually the cause of wars. This was a outrageous statement. Just because agriculture was invented and widely used, and was accompanied by wars, does not mean it spawned wars. Wars were taking place on the America plains long before the Vikings or Columbus ever cam here. It is the same argument when people say religion is the cause of all wars. We must look past these entities and look into why the wars start because of these things. It is out of domination and power that humans feel the need to violate and kill one another. A person with the most stored grains in a town would not be any different than an alpha male of a tribe who possesses the strongest bow. Both have access to the largest food supply, and thus have the most power. That is what causes war and violence: power struggles, hierarchy, and poverty. No one person wants to be at the bottom of the to tum pole, whether they are in a hunter-gatherer society or in an agriculture type society.
Another point Mr. Diamond failed to make was that most of human society's advances were made because of agriculture. When the Europeans came to the Americas they found civilizations whose technology was lacking by hundreds of years. They had developed firearms and sailing ships while the natives had bows, arrows, and canoes. Agriculture has led to most major inventions because the people who invented them had the time to think and create their invention without worrying about the reliability of their food supply.
While Mr. Diamond was right about the spread of disease associated with agriculture, that was about the only valid point he made. He failed to look deeply into human nature, before assuming agriculture to be a mistake. He failed to realize that agriculture allows the modern human race its freedom to travel, eat a variety of foods, invent, and countless other objects that allow us to have this unprecedented quality of life.