Sex at Dawn полностью

Throughout the world, the shift to agriculture accompanied a dramatic drop in the quality of most people’s diets and overall health. Describing what he terms “the worst mistake in human history,” Jared Diamond writes, “Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast,” he concludes, “we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it.”

Prehistoric life involved a lot of napping. In his provocative essay “The Original Affluent Society,” Sahlins notes that among foraging people, “the food quest is so successful that half the time the people do not seem to know what to do with themselves.”¹⁶ Even Australian Aborigines living in apparently unforgiving and empty country had no trouble finding enough to eat (as well as sleeping about three hours per afternoon in addition to a full night’s rest). Richard Lee’s research with !Kung San bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana indicates that they spend only about fifteen hours per week getting food. “A woman gathers on one day enough food to feed her family for three days, and spends the rest of her time resting in camp, doing embroidery, visiting other camps, or entertaining visitors from other camps. For each day at home, kitchen routines, such as cooking, nut cracking, collecting firewood, and fetching water, occupy one to three hours of her time. This rhythm of steady work and steady

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leisure is maintained throughout the year.”

A day or two of light work followed by a day or two off. How’s that sound?

Because food is found in the surrounding environment, no one can control another’s access to life’s necessities in hunter-gatherer society. Harris explains that in this context, “Egalitarianism is ... firmly rooted in the openness of resources, the simplicity of the tools of production, the lack of non-transportable property, and the labile structure of the band.”¹⁸

When you can’t block people’s access to food and shelter, and you can’t stop them from leaving, how can you control them? The ubiquitous political egalitarianism of foraging people is rooted in this simple reality. Having no coercive power, leaders are simply those who are followed—individuals who have earned the respect of their companions. Such “leaders” do not—cannot—demand anyone’s obedience. This insight is not breaking news. In his Lectures on Jurisprudence, which was published posthumously in 1896, Adam Smith wrote, “In a nation of hunters there is properly no government at all.. [They] have agreed among themselves to keep together for their mutual safety, but they have no authority one over another.”

It’s not surprising that conservative evolutionary psychologists have found foragers’ insistence on sharing to be one of their most difficult nuts to crack. Given the iconic status of Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene and the popularized, status-quo protective notion of the all-against-all struggle for survival, the quest to explain why foraging people are so maddeningly generous to one another has occupied dozens of authors. In The Origins of Virtue, science writer Matt Ridley summarizes the inherent contradiction they face: “Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.” ⁹ One must walk a tightrope to insist that selfishness is (and has always been) the principal engine of human evolution even in the face of copious data demonstrating that human social organization was founded upon an impulse for sharing for many millennia.

Of course, this conflict would evaporate if proponents of the always-selfish theory of human nature accepted contextual limits to their argument. In other words, in a zero-sum context (like that of modern capitalist societies where we live among strangers), it makes sense, on some levels, for individuals to look out for themselves. But in other contexts human behavior is characterized by an equal instinct toward generosity and justice.²⁰

Even if many of his followers prefer to ignore the subtleties of his arguments, Dawkins himself appreciates them fully, writing, “Much of animal nature is indeed altruistic, cooperative and even attended by benevolent subjective emotions.. Altruism at the level of the individual organism can be a means by which the underlying genes maximize their self-interest.”²¹ Despite famously inventing the concept of the “selfish gene,” Dawkins sees group cooperation as a way to advance an individual’s agenda (thereby advancing each individual’s genetic interests). Why, then, are so many of his admirers unwilling to entertain the notion that cooperation among human beings and other animals may be every bit as natural and effective as short-sighted selfishness?