[alexmat]

Hear hear, the agricultural revolution has trapped us in a Faustian bargain!

"The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."[1]

[1] https://erenow.com/common/sapiensbriefhistory/20.html

[cafard]

There is something curious about posters on a techie site lauding the superiority of the hunter-gatherer life.

[alexmat]

It may not be obvious from the context and the limited excerpt, but in the book Sapiens, the author is careful to make the point that this is not an invitation to revert to the hunter/gatherer lifestyle, in fact, we're past the point where that's a possibility. Rather we have to innovate our way out of the predicament we find ourselves in (the irony of fighting fire with fire is not lost on me). But in my mind, it makes this a perfect quote to consider on a techie site.

[TeMPOraL]

What's so curious about it? I'd expect an average techie to be able to think about this topic on their own and comprehend various perspectives.

[s-shellfish]

I imagine a lot of them are starting to have families. What resonates in background information provides a foundational structure, and often establishes direction in opinion.

[danharaj]

# of copies of DNA is just a proxy for probability of propagation.

[Radim]

Probability of propagation is just a proxy for consuming energy gradients more efficiently.

[arturh]

The gene is the unit of selection.