Ur may not have been the first city, but it was the first one we know of that wasn't part of a false dawn - one whose culture and technologies did demonstrably spread to other areas. It was the flashpoint.
A contrary view — and I'm stating this deliberately rather strongly to make the point vivid:
"False dawn" is a retrospective view; which is to say an anachronistic one; which is to say a mythical one. And myths are written by the victors.
It's true that we perceive more continuity from Ur to today's civilization than from Xyz (some other ancient "dawn of civilization" point) to today. But why? Surely in part because the Sumerians and their Akkadian and Babylonian successors were good at scattering their enemies, killing their scribes, destroying their records, and stealing credit for their innovations. Just as each new civilization claimed that their god had created the world and invented morality, each claimed that their clever forefather had invented agriculture, writing, and tactics. If the Xyzzites had won, they would have done the same.
What's the evidence? Just that that's how civilizations — particularly religious empires — have generally behaved since ...
Thus my caveat "we know of".
However, while it would be quite possible for a victor to erase written mention of a rival, it is harder to erase beyond all archaeological recovery the signs of a major city that's been stable and populated for a thousand years or more. For instance, if we look at Jericho, which was inhabited earlier than Ur was, we don't see archaeological evidence of it becoming a major city until much later than Ur (see link and link).
If there was a city large enough and long lived enough, around before Ur, that passed onto Ur the bundle of things like writing and hierarchy that we known Ur passed onto others, then I'm unaware of it, and the evidence has been surprisingly thoroughly erased (which isn't impossible, but neither is it a certainty that such a thing happened).
See also the comment about Uruk. There were a number of cities in Sumer close together that would have swapped ideas. But the things said about calories and types of grain apply to all of them.
I think it is no coincidence that this switch occurs in this context. Oh no, some dusty old tomes got destroyed! Compared to other events of the time, piddling for human "utility." But burning books lowers the status of academics, which is why it is considered (in Haidt-ian terms) a taboo by some - including, I would suggest, most on this site.
We have good reason to think that the missing volumes of Diophantus were at Alexandria. Much of what Diophantus did was centuries before his time. If people in the 1500s and 1600s had complete access to his and other Greek mathematicians' work, math would have likely progressed at a much faster pace, especially in number theory.
We also have reason to think that Alexandria contained the now lost Greek astronomical records, which likely contained comets and possibly also historical nova observations. While we have some nova and supernova observations from slightly later (primarily thanks to Chinese and Japanese records), the Greeks were doing astronomy well before. This sort of thing isn't just an idle curiosity: understanding the timing of supernova connects to understanding the most basic aspects of our universe. The chemical...
Isn’t this kind of thing archetypal of knowledge that in no way contributes to human welfare?
Well, no. In modern times number theory has been extremely relevant for cryptography for example, and pretty much all e-commerce relies on it. But other areas of math have direct, useful applications and have turned out to be quite important. For example, engineering in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance benefited a lot from things like trig and logarithms. Improved math has lead to much better understanding of economies and financial systems as well. These are but a few limited examples.
But the modern attention is not on the rape, murder, pillage, etc... it’s on the book-burning
You are missing the point in this context having the taboo against book burning is helpful because it is something one can use as a warning sign.
Alvin Roth is no doubt a bright guy, but the idea that he has done more lasting good for humanity than, say, Sam Walton, is absurd.
So I'm curious as to how you are defining "good" in any useful sense that you can reach this conclusion. Moreover, the sort of thing that Roth does is in the process of being more and more useful. His work allowing for...
No-one is disputing that mathematics can be useful. The question is, if we had slightly more advanced number theory slightly earlier in time, would that have been particularly useful? Answer - no.
Answer: Yes. Even today, number theory research highly relevant to efficient crypto is ongoing. A few years of difference in when that shows up would have large economic consequences. For example, as we speak, research in ongoing into practical fully homomorphic encryption which if it is implemented will allow cloud computing and deep processing of sensitive information, as well as secure storage and retrieval of sensitive information (such as medical records) from clouds. This is but one example.
But no-one complains about the worse stuff, only the book burning. Which makes me disbelieve that people care about the taboo for that reason.
Well, there is always the danger of lost-purpose. But it may help to keep in mind that the book-burnings and genocides in question both occurred a long-time ago. It is easier for something to be at the forefront of one's mind when one can see more directly how it would have impacted one personally.
...Or, we could just allow a market for organ donati
No-one is disputing that mathematics can be useful. The question is, if we had slightly more advanced number theory slightly earlier in time, would that have been particularly useful? Answer - no.
My answer is "probably yes". Mathematics directly enables entire areas of science and engineering. Cathedrals and bridges are much easier to build if you know trigonometry. Electricity is a lot easier to harness if you know trigonometry and calculus, and easier still if you are aware of complex numbers. Optics -- and therefore cameras and telescopes, among many other things -- is a lot easier with linear algebra, and so are many other engineering applications. And, of course, modern electronics are practically impossible without some pretty advanced math and science, which in turn requires all these other things.
If we assume that technology is generally beneficial, then it's best to develop the disciplines which enable it -- i.e., science and mathematics -- as early as possible.
Follow up reply in a separate comment since I didn't notice this part of the remark the first time through (and it is substantial enough that it should probably not just be included as an edit):
... we might better understand the “Great Filter”
Isn’t this kind of thing archetypal of knowledge that in no way contributes to human welfare?
If this falls into that category then the archetypes of knowledge that doesn't contribute to human welfare is massively out of whack. Figuring out how much of the Great Filter is in front of us or behind us is extremely important. If most of it is behind us, we have a lot less worry. If most of the Great Filter is in front of us, then existential risk is a severe danger to humanity as a whole. Moreover, if it is in front of us, then it most likely some form of technology and caused by some sort of technological change (since natural disasters aren't common enough to wipe out every civilization that gets off the ground). Since we're just beginning to travel into space, it is likely that if there is heavy Filtration in front of us, it isn't very far ahead but is in the next few centuries.
If there is heavy Filtration in front of us, then it is v...
Alvin Roth is no doubt a bright guy, but the idea that he has done more lasting good for humanity than, say, Sam Walton, is absurd.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I'm not about to investigate the economics of their entire supply chain (I already don't shop at Walmart simply due to location, so it doesn't even stand to influence my buying decisions,) but I wouldn't be surprised if Walmart is actually wealth-negative in the grand scheme. They produce very large profits, but particularly considering that their margins are so small and their model depends on dealing in such large bulk, I think there's a fair likelihood that the negative externalities of their business are in excess of their profit margin.
It's impossible for a business to be GDP negative, but very possible for one to be negative in terms of real overall wealth produced when all externalities are accounted for, which I suspect leads some to greatly overestimate the positive impact of business.
Someone who is doing research that is published and doesn't lead to direct patents is socializing gains whether or not they want to.
I don't need to carry out expected utility calculations explicitly to guess that burning down a library is way more likely to be bad than good. My "What?" was because I can't see any obvious reason to suspect that actually carrying it out would yield a substantially different answer than my guess, and wondered whether you had such a reason in mind.
Also, this piece seems to be of high enough quality and of general interest that it probably makes sense to move it to main.
There is no cause to suppose, even if the human genome 100,000 years ago had the full set of IQ-related-alleles present in our genome today, that they would have developed civilisation much sooner.
The original point was not about genomes, it was about expressed IQ. Suppose the reasons for absence of the currently normal IQ in the past were environmental. If I understand correctly, your argument in particular suggests that it's the environmentally-mediated increase in IQ that might have enabled the rise of civilization (in this interglacial period). Then it's still the case that present IQ level is about as low as it can be.
The distinction your argument makes seems to be about the reason for the recent rise in IQ (environmental, not generic, at least not with changes in genes directly related to brains), not about the level of expressed IQ necessary to spark a technological civilization.
Yes, I think this would be my past self's reply (I don't remember making that particular argument, but it does sound like something I would say). Even if we granted that IQ-linked alleles were identical 100kya, we still wouldn't have to grant that IQ was the same! We know of many powerful environmental effects on phenotypic IQ: to give a recent example of interest to me, just iodine & iron deficiency will cost on average 15 IQ points. One might expect random diseases and parasites to cost even more. (And remember that aside from the effect on the mean, the tails of the bell curve are going to be affected even more outrageously.)
And we know IQ connects in all sorts of way to economic attitudes, activity, growth, etc, with patterns indicative of bidirectional causality; see http://lesswrong.com/lw/7e1/rationality_quotes_september_2011/4r01
More importantly, we have the equivalent of natural experiments on the importance of national IQ averages: African countries. There are countries where the limited samples suggest particularly low IQs; these are also the countries where economic growth is least, and anecdotally, charitable efforts like installing new infrastructure fail frequent...
In graphs of interacting cause & effects, that's not necessarily the best way to ask that question. Because IQ is predictive at least of general economic growth (but also increased by growth, 'bidirectional'), those systemic problems can be perfectly real and also rooted in lower IQs.
How much of the failure of the African countries is due to their average lower intelligence and how much is that a consequence of other systemic problems (e.g. lack of institutions) that also make the maintenance of modern technologies difficult?
I get the impression that "average lower intelligence" is a big cause of systemic problems, like lack of institutions. I'm reminded of Yvain's example that, in Haiti, they could not understand sorting things numerically or alphabetically. This meant bureaucratic institutions were basically worthless: "where is your file? Let me look at all of the files and try to find yours."
Edit: Also, see this paper.
I was going to say, “well, maybe that's a failure of education, not of intelligence”, but...
Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. [emphasis added]
Okay, I'm shocked. (It might still be something that people with IQ between (say) 70 and 90 can learn if they're taught it in elementary school but couldn't ever learn as adults if they haven't, but the “privileging the hypothesis” warning light in my brain is on.)
Tangentially, and specifically because I followed the link from LessWrong, this jumped out at me:
"Haitians have a culture of tending not to admit they're wrong[.]"
(Pretend that this sentence is a list of reasonable caveats about what to conclude from that.)
If the gene for the synthesis of docosahexaenoic acid arose 80kya, and the current interglacial period began 12kya, that still leaves four thousand years between the end of the glacial period and the beginning of city-based civilization, which, keep in mind, is a long time.
If the civilization developments followed within a hundred years or so of the necessary biological and environmental factors coming into place, I wouldn't be so skeptical that our intelligence already exceeded the minimum necessary to produce those developments. But we already had domesticated grazing animals thousands of years before the foundation of Ur, and grains earlier than that. Don't forget that when we're dealing with cultural rather than biological evolution, a millenium is no longer a relative eyeblink.
Historical quibble- in "The First City" section, you seem to be partially confusing Ur with Uruk. Uruk is generally regarded as the first city in Sumeria, during the eponymous Uruk period (4000-3100 BC). Also generally believed to be the center of the "Uruk phenomenon" during which cuneiform writing and a number of other features of Mesopotamian civilization were developed. Ur was the capital of the Neo-Sumerian Ur III empire c.2000 BC, which built the Great Ziggurat of Ur shown in the picture.
(Summary:) There is no cause to suppose, even if the human genome 100,000 years ago had the full set of IQ-related-alleles present in our genome today, that they would have developed civilisation much sooner.
(Rhetorical nitpick:) You gave an argument against one such cause. This doesn't mean there are aren't other causes, and it's not clear that your argument is decisive.
Didn't civilization develop independently in several different places, e.g. the Aztec or Inca civilizations in the Americas?
Looking at the Americas, we have evidence of cultures with agriculture and pottery, roughly equivalent to Europe's Linear A, going back about 6000 years ago (4000 BCE). We have writing dating back to about 3000 years ago (1000 BCE), though this was probably delayed by much of their function earlier being usurped by quipu (which date back at least to 2600 BCE). This corresponds to the emergence of the first long term stable cities in the Americas starting at about 1500 BCE and the growth, about 1000 years later, of Teotihuacan, a true majestic city rivalling ancient Ur in size and influence.
So yes, that is an independent (but later) development of civilization, which I think endorses the idea that once the climate settled down after the intergalacial, our species was going to develop civilization on a fairly quick timescale (compared to biological evolutionary timescales), and that it wasn't lack of intelligence holding us up.
Having large mammals available to domesticate, who can provide fertiliser and traction (pulling ploughs and harrows) certainly makes things easier, but doesn't seem to have been a large factor in the timing of the rise of civilisation, or particularly dependent upon the IQ of the human species.
How would we test this? If human IQ matters, it seems like we would need some animal which is in contact with low-IQ humans and higher IQ humans, which the first couldn't tame but the second could. You already link to an example of recent man domesticating the fox...
The best example of that is neanderthals, who probably were better at abstract problem-solving, foresight, tool-making, and so on
What evidence do we have for this?
What is the essential difference between human and animal intelligence? I don't actually think it's just a matter of degree. To put it simply, most brains are once-through machines. They take input from the senses, process it in conjunction with memories, and turn that into actions, and perhaps new memories. Their brains have lots of special-purpose optimizations for many things, and a surprising amount can be achieved like this. The brains are once-through largely because that's the fastest approach, and speed is important for many things. Human brains ar...
Gwern suggested that, if it were possible for civilization to have developed when our species had a lower IQ, then we'd still be dealing with the same problems, but we'd have a lower IQ with which to tackle them. Or, to put it another way, it is unsurprising that living in a civilization has posed problems that our species finds difficult to tackle, because if we were capable of solving such problems easily, we'd probably also have been capable of developing civilization earlier than we did.
And to put it yet another way, by something like a Peter Prin...
Evolution, as an algorithm, is very much better as an optimizer of an existing design than it is as a creator of a new design. Optimizing the size of the brain of a creature is, for evolution, an easy problem. Making a better, more efficient brain is a much harder problem, and happens slowly, comparatively speaking.
The optimization problem is essentially a kind of budgeting problem. If I have a budget of X calories per day, I can spend it on X kilos of muscle, or Y grams of brain tissue. Both will cost me the same amount of calories, and each brings its ow...
Although there is a nutritional argument for bigger brains in humans - the taming of fire allowed for much more efficient food usage - perhaps there is also some sense in which the human brain has recently become better, which in turn led it to become larger.
it is unsurprising that living in a civilization has posed problems that our species finds difficult to tackle, because if we were capable of solving such problems easily, we'd probably also have been capable of developing civilization earlier than we did.
I'd more say, it's unsurprising that life poses problems our species finds difficult to tackle, because we have moving goalposts of satisfaction in terms of our problems being solved.
We don't know for certain what it was about the culture surrounding the dawn of cities that made that particular combination of trade, writing, specialisation, hierarchy and religion communicable, when similar cultures from previous false dawns failed to spread. We can trace each of those elements to earlier sources, none of them were original to Ur, so perhaps it was a case of a critical mass achieving a self-sustaining reaction.
I suggest that the decisive ingredient was an explicit, somewhat accurate understanding of how children are conceived, and fo...
200k years ago when Homo Sapiens first appeared, fundamental adaptability was the dominant force. The most adaptable, not the most intelligent, survived. While adaptability is a component of intelligence, intelligence is not a component of adaptability. The coincidence with the start of the ice age is consistent with this. The ice age is a relatively minor extinction event, but none the less the appearance and survival of Homo Sapiens is consistent, where less adaptable life forms did not survive.
Across the Hominidae family Homo Sapiens proved to be most ...
But they had to be free to wander to follow nomadic food sources, and they were limited by access to food that the human body could use to create Docosahexaenoic acid, which is a fatty acid required for human brain development. Originally humans got this from fish living in the lakes and rivers of central Africa. However, about 80,000 years ago, we developed a gene that let us synthesise the same acid from other sources, freeing humanity to migrate away from the wet areas, past the dry northern part, and out into the fertile crescent.
So your point is...
if it were possible for civilization to have developed when our species had a lower IQ, then we'd still be dealing with the same problems, but we'd have a lower IQ with which to tackle them.
On the other hand, so many of our problems are caused by other people, and some of them are caused by smart people. It took a lot of intelligence to make the financial crisis happen.
Now I'm wondering whether a more equal distribution of intelligence would lead to fewer problems.
then we might expect to see something similar to the Flynn effect.
The Flynn Effect has been an order of magnitude too fast to be accounted for by such factors.
Technologies allow more technologies to be built. For example, writing bootstraps the ability to pass on knowledge a lot. Similarly, larger populations allow a higher chance that people will make discoveries.
The toy model I sometimes use to describe this is a biased coin with a chance of turning up heads of something like 1- /(C(k +n)) where C and k and are constants, with C very small, and k very large, and n is the number of previous heads. Here a heads denotes a discovery or invention. If for example C=1 and k=10^5 then it will take a long time to get ...
Gwern suggested that, if it were possible for civilization to have developed when our species had a lower IQ, then we'd still be dealing with the same problems, but we'd have a lower IQ with which to tackle them. Or, to put it another way, it is unsurprising that living in a civilization has posed problems that our species finds difficult to tackle, because if we were capable of solving such problems easily, we'd probably also have been capable of developing civilization earlier than we did.
How true is that?
In this post I plan to look in detail at the origins of civilization with an eye to considering how much the timing of it did depend directly upon the IQ of our species, rather than upon other factors.
Although we don't have precise IQ test numbers for our immediate ancestral species, the fossil record is good enough to give us a clear idea of how brain size has changed over time:
and we do have archaeological evidence of approximately when various technologies (such as pictograms, or using fire to cook meat) became common.
The First City
About 6,000 years ago (4000 BCE), Ur was a thriving trading village on the flood plain near the mouth of the river Euphrates in what is now called southern Iraq and what historians call Sumeria.
By 3000 BCE it was the heart of a city-state with a core built up populated area covering 37 acres, and would go on over the following thousand years to lead the Sumerian empire, raise a great brick Ziggurat to its patron moon goddess, and become the largest city in the world (65,000 people concentrated in 54 acres).
It was eventually doomed by desertification and soil salination, caused by its own success (over-grazing and land clearing) but, by then, cities had spread throughout the fertile crescent of rivers at the intersection of the European, African and Asian land masses.
Ur may not have been the first city, but it was the first one we know of that wasn't part of a false dawn - one whose culture and technologies did demonstrably spread to other areas. It was the flashpoint.
We don't know for certain what it was about the culture surrounding the dawn of cities that made that particular combination of trade, writing, specialisation, hierarchy and religion communicable, when similar cultures from previous false dawns failed to spread. We can trace each of those elements to earlier sources, none of them were original to Ur, so perhaps it was a case of a critical mass achieving a self-sustaining reaction.
What we can look at is why the conditions to allow a village to become a large enough city for such a critical mass of developments to accumulate, occurred at that time and place.
From Village to City
Motivation aside, the chief problem with sustaining large numbers of people together in a small area, over several generations, keeping them healthy enough for the population to grow without continual immigration, is ensuring access to a scalable renewable predictable source of calories.
To be predictable means surviving famine years, which requires crops that can be stored for several years, such as grasses (wheat, barley and millet) with large seeds, and good storage facilities to store them in. It also means surviving pestilence, which requires having a variety of such crops. To be scalable and renewable means supplying water and nutrients to those crops on an ongoing basis, which requires irrigation and fertiliser from domesticated animals (if you don't have handy regular floods).
Having large mammals available to domesticate, who can provide fertiliser and traction (pulling ploughs and harrows) certainly makes things easier, but doesn't seem to have been a large factor in the timing of the rise of civilisation, or particularly dependent upon the IQ of the human species. Research suggests that domestication may have been driven as much by the animals own behaviour as by human intention, with those animals daring to approach humans more closely getting first choice of discarded food.
Re-planting seeds to ensure plants to gather in following years, leading to low nutrition grasses adapting into grains with high protein concentrations in the seeds, does seem to a mainly intentional human activity in that we can trace most of the gain in size of such plant species seeds to locations where humans have transitioned from the palaeolithic hunter-gatherer culture (about 2.5 million years ago, to about 10,000 years ago) to the neolithic agricultural culture (about 10,000 year ago, onwards).
Good grain storage seems to have developed incrementally starting with crude stone silo pit designs in 9500 BCE, and progressing by 6000 BCE to customised buildings with raised floors and sealed ceramic containers which could store 80 tons of wheat in good condition for 4 years or more. (Earthenware ceramics date to 25,000 BCE and earlier, though the potter's wheel, useful for mass production of regular storage vessels, does date to the Ubaid period.)
The main key to the timing of the transition from village to city seems to have been not human technology but the confluence of climate and biology. Jared Diamond points the finger at the geography of the region - the fertile crescent farmers had access to a wider variety of grains than anywhere else in the world because that area links and has access to the species of three major land masses. The Mediterranean climate has a long dry season with a short period of rain, which made it ideal for growing grains (which are much easier to store for several years than, for instance bananas). And everything kicked off when the climate stabilised after the most recent ice age ended about 12,000 years ago.
Ice Ages
Strictly speaking, we're actually talking about the end of a "glacial period" rather than the end of an entire "ice age". The timeline goes:
So the question now is, why didn't humanity spawn civilisation in the fertile crescent 130,000 years ago, during the last interglacial period? Why did it happen in this one? Did we get significantly brighter in the mean time?
It isn't, on the face of it, an implausible idea. 100,000 years is long enough for evolutionary change to happen, and maybe inventing pottery or becoming farmers did take more brain power than humanity had back then. Or, if not IQ, perhaps it was some other mental change like attention span, or the capacity to obey written laws, live as a specialist in a hierarchy, or similar.
But there's no evidence that this is the case, nor is there a need to hypothesise it because there is at least one genetic change we do know about during that time period, that is by itself sufficient to explain the lack of civilisation 130,000 years ago. And it has nothing to do with the brain.
Brains, Genes and Calories
Using the San Bushpeople as a guide to the palaeolithic diet, hunter-gather culture was able to support an average population density of one person per acre. Not that they ate badly, as individuals. Indeed, they seem to have done better than the early Neolithic farmers. But they had to be free to wander to follow nomadic food sources, and they were limited by access to food that the human body could use to create Docosahexaenoic acid, which is a fatty acid required for human brain development. Originally humans got this from fish living in the lakes and rivers of central Africa. However, about 80,000 years ago, we developed a gene that let us synthesise the same acid from other sources, freeing humanity to migrate away from the wet areas, past the dry northern part, and out into the fertile crescent.
But there is a link between diet and brain. Although the human brain represents only 2% of the body weight, it receives 15% of the cardiac output, 20% of total body oxygen consumption, and 25% of total body glucose utilization. Brains are expensive, in terms of calories consumed. Although brain size or brain activity that uses up glucose is not linearly related to individual IQ, they are linked on a species level.
IQ is polygenetic, meaning that many different genes are relevant to a person's potential maximum IQ. (Note: there are many non-genetic factors that may prevent an individual reaching their potential). Algernon's Law suggests that genes affecting IQ that have multiple alleles still common in the human population are likely to have a cost associated with the alleles tending to increase IQ, otherwise they'd have displaced the competing alleles. In the same way that an animal species that develops the capability to grow a fur coat in response to cold weather is more advanced than one whose genes strictly determine that it will have a thick fur coat at all times, whether the weather is cold or hot; the polygenetic nature of human IQ gives human populations the ability to adapt and react on the time scale of just a few generations, increasing or decreasing the average IQ of the population as the environment changes to reduce or increase the penalties of particular trade-offs for particular alleles contributing to IQ. In particular, if the trade-off for some of those alleles is increased energy consumption and we look at a population of humans moving from an environment where calories are the bottleneck on how many offspring can be produced and survive, to an environment where calories are more easily available, then we might expect to see something similar to the Flynn effect.
Summary
There is no cause to suppose, even if the human genome 100,000 years ago had the full set of IQ-related-alleles present in our genome today, that they would have developed civilisation much sooner.
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link - DuncanS - animal vs human intelligence
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link - RichardKennaway - does more intelligence tend to bring more societal happiness?
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link - shminux - How much of our IQ is dependant upon Docosahexaenoic acid?
link - army1987 - implications for the Great Filter
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