A curious flaw in that story is that Adam and Eve were supposed to know in advance that disobeying and eating from the tree is wrong, before they had knowledge of what wrongness or disobedience is.
I like the evolutionary interpretation, that humans developed the capacity for social cooperation (including interpersonal ethics, moral good and evil) and then realized paradise (the natural world) was actually a bot of a quagmire, teeming with disease and parasites. They were less evicted as realized they could do better.
I like the evolutionary interpretation, that humans developed the capacity for social cooperation (including interpersonal ethics, moral good and evil) and then realized paradise (the natural world) was actually a bot of a quagmire, teeming with disease and parasites. They were less evicted as realized they could do better.
That’s not true. Before civilization, diseases were much rarer because people travelled together in small, consistent groups. Anthropological evidence suggests that the average person had better, more well rounded diets as well. Which isn’t really surprising, pre-civilization is literally the thing we had millions of years to adapt to.
Civilization brought about much higher rates of disease, and also came along side the introduction of class and slavery, which reduced the quality of life of the average person.
Slavery was not viable in hunter-gatherer societies, because slaves could not be sent out to forage or they’d just leave, and they can’t join hunts without being armed. With agriculture, you can sit on the porch with a bow and arrow and make other people do all the backbreaking labor, and with higher, more consistent yields, you can afford to hire an army of dedicated soldiers to go out and capture hunter-gatherer tribes to use as slaves, perpetuating the system.
It wasn’t that humanity just collectively decided to do cities instead of tribes, and it wasn’t like everyone in cities wanted to be there. But once cities were established, systemic forces caused them to expand and become dominant.
This is what the story of Eden is actually about. Once humanity became aware of agriculture and civilization, we no longer had the ability to remain in the state of nature that we were adapted to, where our brains were evolved to make us happy and satisfied, and faced with problems that our brains aren’t designed to handle or cope with.
Nowadays, yes, we have things like medicine and vaccines and basic hygiene, but those things were only developed in the past few hundred years. From the first cities until then, cities were perfect vectors for the disease, tons of people clumped together, just dumping waste on the streets.
I’m pretty sure there were still infectious diseases. Bacteria don’t have to exist inside a host, and viruses sometimes jump species. It also explains why our hindbrains want a small homogeneous community and start distrusting the Jews and Romani even in a village of only a thousand. Small tribes that don’t like each other much are less likely to communicate a pathogen between each other.
If infectious diease was not a concern in the bush ages, the capacity to organize larger groups would prevail over their xenophobic cousins, but in civilization we actively have to train kids tolerance of other races and creeds, since their hindbrains are super eager to faction up and wage war on the next block over.
I remember from my anthropology class it was livestock that served as a catalyst for both the propagation of infectious disease and community resistance, usually after a sequence of outbreaks and die offs. But that’s not to say plagues weren’t a problem prior to agriculture.
Of course diseases still existed in hunter-gatherer societies, they just didn’t have the capacity to spread as far. If, for example, during COVID, everyone had formed groups of say 100 people and those 100 people only ever interacted with each other, that would have made it very difficult for the virus to spread. Obviously, that’s impossible today because we are too interconnected, but that was more or less how hunter-gatherer tribes tended to function.
Disease wasn’t a significant limiting factor in the size of those groups because there were other limiting factors. One is resource availability. Without agriculture, what the land naturally produces is what’s available, and larger groups would require more resources. Another factor is social dynamics. The larger a group is, the less likely you are to personally know everyone in the group. Informal collective decision making also gets harder as you scale up, with smaller groups, it’s possible for everyone’s concerns to be heard and accommodated.
The extent to which xenophobia is a product of nature rather than nurture is debatable. I would argue that racist attitudes are taught and passed down, usually informally, rather than being innate. Growing up, I learned one set of stereotypes about Japanese people and another set of stereotypes about Chinese people. The origins of those stereotypes can be traced historically, and it’s not as though everyone comes up with stereotypes on their own and they just happened to arrive at the same ones.
I would say the thing that is more evolutionarily ingrained in us is “Dunbar’s Number,”, which limits the size of our direct social in-group to around 150 people, likely consistent with the size of hunter-gatherer tribes. Modern ideas of race or nationality obviously present an in-group that goes far beyond that number, which suggests that those ideas are learned rather than innate. There is a degree that we have to be taught how to function in a world with regular interactions with strangers in general, but I would argue that treating people differently based on race or other characteristics is learned behavior. Though of course, everyone starts in a state of ignorance and ignorance of someone’s culture can lead to accidental offenses and misunderstandings.
A curious flaw in that story is that Adam and Eve were supposed to know in advance that disobeying and eating from the tree is wrong, before they had knowledge of what wrongness or disobedience is.
I like the evolutionary interpretation, that humans developed the capacity for social cooperation (including interpersonal ethics, moral good and evil) and then realized paradise (the natural world) was actually a bot of a quagmire, teeming with disease and parasites. They were less evicted as realized they could do better.
That’s not true. Before civilization, diseases were much rarer because people travelled together in small, consistent groups. Anthropological evidence suggests that the average person had better, more well rounded diets as well. Which isn’t really surprising, pre-civilization is literally the thing we had millions of years to adapt to.
Civilization brought about much higher rates of disease, and also came along side the introduction of class and slavery, which reduced the quality of life of the average person.
Slavery was not viable in hunter-gatherer societies, because slaves could not be sent out to forage or they’d just leave, and they can’t join hunts without being armed. With agriculture, you can sit on the porch with a bow and arrow and make other people do all the backbreaking labor, and with higher, more consistent yields, you can afford to hire an army of dedicated soldiers to go out and capture hunter-gatherer tribes to use as slaves, perpetuating the system.
It wasn’t that humanity just collectively decided to do cities instead of tribes, and it wasn’t like everyone in cities wanted to be there. But once cities were established, systemic forces caused them to expand and become dominant.
This is what the story of Eden is actually about. Once humanity became aware of agriculture and civilization, we no longer had the ability to remain in the state of nature that we were adapted to, where our brains were evolved to make us happy and satisfied, and faced with problems that our brains aren’t designed to handle or cope with.
Nowadays, yes, we have things like medicine and vaccines and basic hygiene, but those things were only developed in the past few hundred years. From the first cities until then, cities were perfect vectors for the disease, tons of people clumped together, just dumping waste on the streets.
I’m pretty sure there were still infectious diseases. Bacteria don’t have to exist inside a host, and viruses sometimes jump species. It also explains why our hindbrains want a small homogeneous community and start distrusting the Jews and Romani even in a village of only a thousand. Small tribes that don’t like each other much are less likely to communicate a pathogen between each other.
If infectious diease was not a concern in the bush ages, the capacity to organize larger groups would prevail over their xenophobic cousins, but in civilization we actively have to train kids tolerance of other races and creeds, since their hindbrains are super eager to faction up and wage war on the next block over.
I remember from my anthropology class it was livestock that served as a catalyst for both the propagation of infectious disease and community resistance, usually after a sequence of outbreaks and die offs. But that’s not to say plagues weren’t a problem prior to agriculture.
Of course diseases still existed in hunter-gatherer societies, they just didn’t have the capacity to spread as far. If, for example, during COVID, everyone had formed groups of say 100 people and those 100 people only ever interacted with each other, that would have made it very difficult for the virus to spread. Obviously, that’s impossible today because we are too interconnected, but that was more or less how hunter-gatherer tribes tended to function.
Disease wasn’t a significant limiting factor in the size of those groups because there were other limiting factors. One is resource availability. Without agriculture, what the land naturally produces is what’s available, and larger groups would require more resources. Another factor is social dynamics. The larger a group is, the less likely you are to personally know everyone in the group. Informal collective decision making also gets harder as you scale up, with smaller groups, it’s possible for everyone’s concerns to be heard and accommodated.
The extent to which xenophobia is a product of nature rather than nurture is debatable. I would argue that racist attitudes are taught and passed down, usually informally, rather than being innate. Growing up, I learned one set of stereotypes about Japanese people and another set of stereotypes about Chinese people. The origins of those stereotypes can be traced historically, and it’s not as though everyone comes up with stereotypes on their own and they just happened to arrive at the same ones.
I would say the thing that is more evolutionarily ingrained in us is “Dunbar’s Number,”, which limits the size of our direct social in-group to around 150 people, likely consistent with the size of hunter-gatherer tribes. Modern ideas of race or nationality obviously present an in-group that goes far beyond that number, which suggests that those ideas are learned rather than innate. There is a degree that we have to be taught how to function in a world with regular interactions with strangers in general, but I would argue that treating people differently based on race or other characteristics is learned behavior. Though of course, everyone starts in a state of ignorance and ignorance of someone’s culture can lead to accidental offenses and misunderstandings.