I agree that it does come down to how you classify "superior".
From a gene propagation standpoint (your children survive and have children of their own), it isn't a contest. Agriculture is the clear winner.
In a "how fulfilling is your life" context there is more room for debate, but I tend to think that modern authors overly discount the negative effects of food insecurity in a primitive society. The tradeoff between "your daily life is full of toil but you and your children probably won't starve to death or be eaten by a wild animal" is one that people came down hard in favor of historically.
In the long view, only one lifestyle choice leads to a population that can survive the next dinosaur killing asteroid impact.
But seriously, modern people underestimate how much it sucks foraging for food every day, even in the rain, even in the snow, even when the local animals have died off due to some disease, even when you are sick and/or injured, you either hunt or you go hungry. Your culture has to be largely word of mouth because anything else you have to carry with you. Technology progresses at a glacial pace because you don't have a system of writing and you don't have reliable sources for most raw materials. Even if you do find a source for something useful like obsidian your nomadic lifestyle means your access is still limited.
My stance remains that people who wax poetically about how superior the Hunter-Gatherer lifestyle is are not thinking things all the way through.
Thanks, great discussion and great points. I agree on all of them, but the part about space sticks in my brain. While I think it's correct, imo it's only looking at one side of the long-term-human-survival coin.
>In the long view, only one lifestyle choice leads to a population that can survive the next dinosaur killing asteroid impact.
A nice future to imagine, but it's hardly a foregone conclusion. The future might lead there, or it might lead elsewhere.
In the real world it's looking like business-as-usual kills the civilization (but not the human species) before we get a chance to re-enact Deep Impact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg
Expanding into space doesn't help us if we proceed to destroy our habitats on a finite time-scale (which is all "unsustainable" means: that it cannot continue for some reason). And we haven't figured out how to avoid that in an industrial society, which is necessary for living in space. New planets don't help if every civilization you establish on them inevitably collapses. Expanding through space can't be used to maintain a non-zero exponential growth rate either, if for no other reason than that the available volume of space only grows as t^3.
Ultimately we must BOTH establish a completely sustainable, steady-state (capable of 0% growth indefinitely) global civilization AND expand into space, or perish as a species. Neither is sufficient on its own.
Agriculture does seem to help the latter, but it hurts the former. Seeing as how we haven't actually retired the asteroid risk yet, and yet we have introduced at least two new existential risks (nuclear war and environmental degradation/climate change), I'd say we're not looking that great in the long view.
Our current score seems to be two steps backwards, one [hypothetical] step forwards.
>From a gene propagation standpoint.. Agriculture is the clear winner
Removing the primary means of genetic selection doesn't improve gene propogation qualitatively and it only improves quantity in theory until population levels reach capacity and another limitation restricts further growth. If birth rates decline over all, such that 1/1 survive now rather than 2/10 then we have regressed both quantitatively and qualitatively on an individual level. The only thing agriculture has added is the stability and certainty of food supply for those who control the means of production; which allows for a larger population, economics, and tech development, but doesn't necessarily improve genetic propogation in the long term for individuals.
From a gene propagation standpoint (your children survive and have children of their own), it isn't a contest. Agriculture is the clear winner.
In a "how fulfilling is your life" context there is more room for debate, but I tend to think that modern authors overly discount the negative effects of food insecurity in a primitive society. The tradeoff between "your daily life is full of toil but you and your children probably won't starve to death or be eaten by a wild animal" is one that people came down hard in favor of historically.
In the long view, only one lifestyle choice leads to a population that can survive the next dinosaur killing asteroid impact.
But seriously, modern people underestimate how much it sucks foraging for food every day, even in the rain, even in the snow, even when the local animals have died off due to some disease, even when you are sick and/or injured, you either hunt or you go hungry. Your culture has to be largely word of mouth because anything else you have to carry with you. Technology progresses at a glacial pace because you don't have a system of writing and you don't have reliable sources for most raw materials. Even if you do find a source for something useful like obsidian your nomadic lifestyle means your access is still limited.
My stance remains that people who wax poetically about how superior the Hunter-Gatherer lifestyle is are not thinking things all the way through.