Science Memes

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this one goes out to the arts & humanities (mander.xyz)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This is some pretty weird and lowkey racist exposition on humanity.

Getting “racism” from that post is a REAL stretch. It’s not even weird, agriculture and mechanization are widely considered good things for humanity as a whole

Humankind isn't a single unified thing. Individual cultures have their own modes of subsistence and transportation that are unique to specific cultural needs.

ANY group of humans beyond the individual is purely just a social construct and classing humans into a single group is no less sensible than grouping people by culture, family, tribe, country etc.

It's not that it took 1 million years to "figure out" farming. It's that 1 specific culture of modern humans (biologically, humans as we conceive of ourselves today have existed for about 200,000 years, with close relatives existing for in the ballpark of 1M years) started practicing a specific mode of subsistence around 23,000 years ago. Specific groups of indigenous cultures remaining today still don't practice agriculture, because it's not actually advantageous in many ways -- stored foods are less nutritious, agriculture requires a fairly sedentary existence, it takes a shit load of time to cultivate and grow food (especially when compared to foraging and hunting), which leads to less leisure time.

Agriculture is certainly more efficient in terms of nutrition production for a given calorie cost. It’s also much more reliable. Arguing against agriculture as a good thing for humanity as a whole is the thing that’s weird.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I'm really not "arguing against agriculture," I'm pointing out that there are other modes of subsistence that humans still practice, and that that's perfectly valid. There are legitimate reasons why a culture would collectively reject agriculture.

But in point of fact, agriculture is not actually more efficient or reliable. Agriculture does allow for centralized city states in a way that foraging/hunting/fishing usually doesn't, with a notable exception of many indigenous groups on the western coast of turtle island.

A study positing that in fact, agriculturalists are not more productive and in fact are more prone to famine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/

But the main point I was trying to make is that different expressions of human culture still exist, and not all cultures have followed along the trajectory of the dominant culture. People tend to view colonialism, expansion and everything that means as inevitable, and I think that's a pretty big problem.