Sex at Dawn полностью

Difficult as it may be for some to accept, skeletal evidence clearly shows that our ancestors didn’t experience widespread, chronic scarcity until the advent of agriculture. Chronic food shortages and scarcity-based economies are artifacts of social systems that arose with farming. In his introduction to Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, Gowdy points to the central irony: “Hunter-gatherers ... spent their abundant leisure time eating, drinking, playing, socializing—in short, doing the very things we associate with affluence.”

Despite no solid evidence to support it, the public hears little to dispute this apocalyptic vision of prehistory. The sense of human nature intrinsic to Western economic theory is mistaken. The notion that humans are driven only by self-interest is, in Gowdy’s words, “a microscopically small minority view among the tens of thousands of cultures that have existed since Homo sapiens emerged some 200,000 years ago.” For the vast majority of human generations that have ever lived, it would have been unthinkable to hoard food when those around you were hungry. “The hunter-gatherer,” writes Gowdy, “represents uneconomic man.”²⁶

Remember, even those “wretched” inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, condemned to “the bottom of the scale of human beings,” threw down their hoes and walked away from their gardens once the HMS Beagle sailed out of sight. They knew firsthand how “civilized” people lived, yet they had “not the least wish to return to England.” Why would they? They were “happy and contented” with “plenty fruits,” “plenty fish,” and “plenty birdies.”

The Never-Ending Battle over Prehistoric War (Brutish?)

Evolutionists say that back in the twilight of life a beast, name and nature unknown, planted a murderous seed and that the impulse thus originated in that seed throbs forever in the blood of the brute’s descendants....

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN¹

Just as neo-Hobbesian fundamentalists hold that poverty is intrinsic to the eternal human condition, they maintain that war is fundamental to our nature. Author Nicolas Wade, for example, claims that “warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent.” According to this view, our propensity for organized conflict has roots reaching deep into our biological past, back to distant primate ancestors by way of our foraging forebears. It’s always been about making war, supposedly, not love.

But nobody’s very clear what all this incessant war was over. Despite his certainty that foragers’ lives were plagued by “constant warfare,” Wade acknowledges that “ancestral people lived in small egalitarian societies, without property, or leaders or differences of rank..” So we’re to understand that egalitarian, nonhierarchical, nomadic groups without property . were constantly at war? Hunter-gatherer societies, possessing so little and thus with so little to lose (other than their lives), living on a wide-open planet were nothing like the densely populated, settled societies struggling over dwindling or accumulated resources in more recent historical times.³ Why would they be?

We’ve no space for a comprehensive response to this aspect of the standard Hobbesian narrative, but we’ve selected three well-known figures associated with it for a closer look at their arguments and data: evolutionary psychologist Stephen Pinker, the revered primatologist Jane Goodall, and the world’s most famous living anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon.⁴

Imagine a high-profile expert stands before a distinguished audience and argues that Asians are warlike people. In support of his argument, he presents statistics from seven countries: Argentina, Poland, Ireland, Nigeria, Canada, Italy, and Russia. “Wait a minute,” you might say, “those aren’t even Asian countries—except, possibly, Russia.” The expert would be laughed off the stage—as he should be.