FLASH: Hunter Gatherer Makes Good, Gets Technology, Builds Incredibly Screwed Up Civilization

I wrote the following comment in reply to a post Giselle Minoli wrote at Google+, specifically in response to the question Matthew Graybosch posed with respect to the subject of her post. I have since been asked to blog my reply, so it might be more easily shared. This is quite easy to do, now that G+ and Blogger are integrated.(Reading Giselle's original post and Matthew's comment immediately following will help orient you as to the nature of the discussion).

How did we forget? Why did we forget?

That's the question of the century - possibly even the millennium - and when it gets down to it, New York, being the earliest and greatest of the American primate cities - is a model of the same phenomenon being repeated across the nation, in hierarchies of differing scales.

I think one could go on listing various factors, social, political and economic that have influenced and do influence the "state of the Union," right now, and we can carry those back as far as they go (and some go back a very long way). They are pertinent and valid; some of them have been mentioned in your previous discussions.

But suppose that there is something intrinsic to our natures which, when brought into combination with increasingly "modern" and artificial life styles engenders a huge array of social, economic, and political problems. That is, there is a set of qualities, intrinsic to our natures via Homo sapiens sapiens evolutionary history, that continue to operate and in fact may even "drive" the course of our lives within these artificial, wholly cerebral and even arbitrary, constructs that comprise our increasingly artificial society. The result of this is an increasingly large array of social, economic, and political problems, the farther we get away from our "intrinsic" natures.

Consider that the role evolution prepared us for is that of the hunter gatherer. Consider that the characteristics that were selected for as we evolved were those that augmented that role - characteristics that made us more likely to survive and reproduce. Language (spoken and written), abstract reasoning and toolmaking (coupled with the precision grip afforded by our opposable thumb and forefingers) gave us the ability to move beyond our hunter gatherer natures to do other things that the mindless selectivity of nature could not possibly have foreseen.

First came the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, where we learned how to grow the plants we once foraged and to domesticate and husband certain of the animals that we once hunted. We then shifted from nomadic bands of hunter gatherers to sedentary agrarians. First big change.

But we were still hunter gatherers. We were still born baby Cro-Magnons.

Bring it up to the future, to the Industrial Revolution. The same skills that enabled us to build Atalatls, huts, and stone/bone tools, to observe the patterns of the seasons, of animal migrations, to engage in cooperative hunting, to transmit technological and cultural information through oral histories...our abilities to abstract and imagine and make those abstractions and imaginings real...these also enabled us to build great cities and automobiles and extract fossil fuels from the earth, to build freeways and factories and machines and assault rifles and atom bombs and rocket ships. And the crude currency systems of the past (also a product of our ability to abstract) evolved into more and more finely tuned systems, which then were further tweaked and tuned by theorists, to "serve" all of the aforementioned.

But through all of this, we were still hunter gatherers. We were still born Cro-Magnons.

Is it unreasonable to suppose that our own natures came into conflict with the fruits of our own ingenuity?

Consider: the disorder ADHD has been given much attention in recent years. Most of us are aware of the symptoms of this disorder. Inability in children to sit still, to focus, to follow instructions, and a tendency to be easily distracted by even small stimuli. All these are highly problematic in the classroom.

But what use might these qualities be to a hunter gatherer? Lots of excess energy...very useful in running down injured prey. Likewise, being easily distracted means that they will be hyper-attuned to every little movement in the bushes, everything they see out of the corner of their eye....

Well, clearly this is not definitive, but it is suggestive of what I'm trying to get at. Here we are, thrust into this future where the technology now accelerates with frightening speed. We live immersed in vast cities of strangers, immersed in our technology, but...

We're still hunter gatherers. Still out in the forest looking for our supper.  We are born little Cro Magnons, and in the first seven years of our lives we are dragged through 10,000 years of technological evolution, to reach a point where "technological" and "cultural" are in many ways synonymous. And the things that our intrinsic nature allowed us to do as hunter gatherers are increasingly ill-suited to serve us as technology transforms from year to year.

Now, as computer technology continues to accelerate, what crosses the minds of the hunter gatherers? The _Singularity._ Just like the Babylonians built themselves graven images to assist them in their lives, so to do we conceive of building ourselves a God.

So, if it's a concrete jungle out there, and we behave like selfish, stifled, pent up animals, then it only figures. It's made of concrete, and it's populated by naked apes who know how to make really good digging sticks/clubs. After all, isn't an atom bomb just a really big stick? And isn't money just a stand in for groundnuts?