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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Book: Psychiatry and the Human Condition - Less Wrong
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Did you just say the words "group selection"? Out loud?
There's no need to suppose that subsistence farming reproductively benefits the group of farmers but not the individual - that doesn't even seem to make much sense in this context.
I believe I recall seeing other studies claiming that the hunter-gatherer life is being slightly overromanticized; they might have been healthy and tall, but they also underwent a good deal of stress and fear. The carrying capacity of the environment would have been determined by lean years, not average years. One good episode of starvation and you can see why they might want to try raising a few crops. And then anyone who didn't bother raising crops would have been pushed out / exterminated by the far more numerous farmers.
Gosh, I'd sure like to see some actual statistics on that.
According to Kevin Kelly in The World Without Technology, the reason why everyone in a HG tribe is healthy is because their life expectancy is so low that all their older and less healthy people are already dead.
"And then anyone who didn't bother raising crops would have been pushed out / exterminated by the far more numerous farmers."
Hunter-gatherers were far better nourished than their farming counterparts, who had plentiful calories but a very limited diet. Once the population rose to the new carrying level, the farmers didn't even have plentiful calories, and rapidly also became subject to starvation in lean years.
In both conditions, the key seems to have been to keep the population well below the maximum in order to ensure a high quality of life. Societies that didn't do this were miserable, but between population pressure and disease managed to exterminate / extirpate the h-gs.
Humanity began to switch from a K to an r reproductive strategy, with obvious consequences.