 All right. Welcome everyone to another episode of Not Related. I'm Luke, as always, and in this episode, the agricultural revolution has been a disaster for the human race. That's what we're going to talk about. I want to talk about this topic. I'll talk about the books we're going to talk about in a second, but I wanted to do this topic for a couple of reasons. And that is, I think growing up in modern society, a lot of people have this wig history when it comes to technological or economic development. We have this idea that there's this GDP line that's always going up and that's a good thing that's making us better, that's making life better. Modernity is a good thing. It's making things more livable, things are cheap. Look at all the inexpensive technological toys we can have. But in this episode, I want to talk about the fundamental and, I guess, exacerbatory aspects of modern society. Not just really modern society in itself, but specifically how we have been affected in a very bad way by agriculture and the change that our lifestyles went through several thousand years ago. I'm not just talking about modernity in the sense of the 1960s or the 1600s or something like that. I'm talking about modernity as it goes back to the very beginning of agriculture. As always, I'm Luke Smith. You can email comments about this episode to lukeatlukesmith.xyz. You can send donations to paypal.me slash lukemsmith. That's M as in microphone. I think I already used that one, but that's fine. Some of you guys noted that this week is my birthday, so feel free to send a birthday donation or whatever. But anyway, let's go ahead and get on with the content. In this episode, I'm going to use a couple different books and articles as a guide. That is, I have two books here. One is Pandora's Seed and one is the 10,000-year explosion. Now, Pandora's Seed, this subtitle is The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization. This is a book by Spencer Wells. I think it came out in 2010, it looks like. And 10,000-year explosion, how civilization accelerated human evolution, is by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. I think a lot of people have heard of this book. Now, the reason I chose these books, I should probably explain them, why I think they're worth checking out. Now, Pandora's Seed, again, it's by Spencer Wells. Spencer Wells was a guy working on, I shouldn't say working on. I think it was the leader of the Geographic Project a couple years ago. Now, this was a project that was looking at human haplogroups, genetic haplogroups, trying to trace archaic migrations of different people out of Africa to the different places that they settled. So that was sort of his, what made him famous in a lot of ways. I think he put out a documentary on it called The Journey of Man. It was back when I was in high school, I think. I think that's when I first saw it. But I ended up reading this book. I've known that Spencer Wells has been around for a bit, but I actually, someone I do follow pretty consistently is Razib Khan, who has written for a bunch of different periodicals, but he's a geneticist as well. And he and Spencer Wells actually do a podcast nowadays. It's actually relatively interesting. You might want to check it out on human genetics, the difference in different human populations in terms of different genetic developments and everything from metabolism to historic migrations and stuff like that. So I think it's an interesting podcast for anyone who might be interested. I think it's called The Insight. That's what it's called. But I listen to it every once in a while. Anyway, so that's Pandora Seed. And of course, as its subtitle suggests, the unforeseen cost of civilization, a lot of what Wells is getting at is the fact that, again, as I said before, there's been a lot of sense. And we think that modernity and technological development is something that's all good. But a lot of what this book is on is how a lot of the things that we take for granted as problems we have to deal with the existence of dementia and disease and social malaise. A lot of this comes from the fact that we are in effect bred to be Paleolithic hunter-gatherers in a lot of ways. And we are not psychologically or physically fit to live in the world that we're creating. So I'll talk about that. And again, Ten Thousand Year Explosion, the other book I want to focus on. Some of you guys might have heard of this book. Again, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harbin. This was written for a different reason and has a different editorial stance, I should say. It was written around the same time that Spencer Wells wrote his book. But specifically, Ten Thousand Year Explosion, the editorial stance is trying to rebut the commonly held popular belief. Actually, nowadays I don't know if people even hold this. You don't really hear this view talked about a lot anymore. But back in the day, there used to be this idea before we knew too much about the reality of genetics. And we had all this genetic data and stuff. There's a common idea that humans had sort of stopped evolving relatively recently. That is, once we became anatomically modern or behaviorally modern, we stopped evolving and we've pretty much been the same way for tens, if not hundreds of thousands, well, not hundreds of thousands, but at least tens of thousands of years. And this was a common idea taken for a lot of sometimes even political reasons that people had. But the Ten Thousand Year Explosion was a book that tried to rebut this idea. And a lot of what they seek to argue is that humans, even within the past 10,000 years, and even actually sometimes within several hundred years ago or even less, have actually gone through extremely significant Darwinian pressures and other kind of genetic shifts that have changed not just the human race generally, but also different human populations in relatively crucial ways. So in a lot of ways, they are more, I don't want to say they're more optimistic about modernity, but they are taking a stance in the sense that evolution is still occurring. And this, of course, is something that Wells or myself would consent to as well. It's just they take on a more, I guess, neutral stance to some of the same kind of changes. So I think the point that I want to get at, the argument before I even get into the specifics of all of this is that I guess, as I mentioned before, modernity is, in a lot of ways, man creating for himself an environment that he's not really built to live in. We're not built for modern society. We're built for society that doesn't really even exist anymore in the world. And a lot of our social, medical, mental problems come from the fact that we're still not built for modernity. Now, not more than that, our new circumstances, the fact that we live in a modern society and we've had there are significant demographic changes that we're dealing with, sometimes even things that we think of as being very good, like the fact that there's very low infant mortality nowadays, or in developed societies, there tend to be, you know, lower levels of violence, or maybe there's more people can live because we have so much food. But in a lot of ways, those the products of modernity, even if they seem like stuff like that, that's good, in a lot of ways, they put forth incentives, genetically and socially, etc. that aren't necessarily good for us as a whole. So I'll talk about that as well. And I'm also going to talk about some of the literature more recent than both of these books, because, again, when you're talking about the speculation in science with respect to human evolution, especially recent human evolution, a lot of the work, especially that has to do with genetics has been done only extremely recently. I mean, it's still coming out, you know, nowadays. So I have a couple articles, I'll list them out in the description be that the video description or the podcast description. But you can check those articles out as well. And I will talk about those later on. So how is this episode going to be ordered? Very simple. In the first half, we're going to talk about how agriculture and civilization have affected the human body, not just in directly changing it but changing its circumstances and in a lot of ways making us a whole lot less healthy, despite the fact that we might live longer. So we'll talk about that before the break. And after the break, we'll talk about how civilization has affected humans mentally, not just put us in different circumstances, but put in evolutionary and social incentives to cause a lot of genetic harm as time progresses. That is, I think a lot of times people think of us as being a good deal smarter than people were 100,000 years ago. And maybe that's the case. But the trend right now in the current year is going down. And we'll talk specifically about that. Now, I think a good enough place to begin as any other would be the subject of health. That is, are people healthier? Is it better to live medically now than it was several thousand years ago before agriculture was invented? Now, a superficial answer would be, well, yes, of course, we live longer now. That's one thing. In fact, depending on your estimate, we might even live two times as long as people did 100,000 years ago. If you have a conservative estimate, or something like that. So you might be tempted to say, ah, well, we have modern medical supplies, we can go to the dentist, we can go to hospitals, we can get treatment for our all of our cancer and diabetes and stuff like that. But one thing you need to keep in mind is a lot of the morbidity we have nowadays is due to the fact due to the technological society we live in with a particular distribution of food and a lack of exercise, etc, etc. Now, let's actually take a relatively sympathetic, or I should say not sympathetic to, to Paleolithic life. Let's take a pessimistic view of Paleolithic life and say that the, you know, median age of death was around 35. Now, one thing about estimating lifespan, you know, 100,000 years ago is, of course, it's nearly impossible. I mean, we don't have demographics of these people. So we have to base our estimates on how old bone structures look. And that can be biased by, you know, let's say there's a burial bias, like people who died by trauma are buried differently from people who died by old age. So we might find one more systematically than the other or something like that, or perhaps due to, you know, a higher standard, more activity 100,000 years ago, bodies might appear to be younger than they actually are, etc, etc. But we can take, we can take a relatively pessimistic view of pre-modernity and say that in Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies, people live to around 35 or so. And again, that's, that's being very pessimistic about that. Now, one thing you need to keep in mind, first off, before we even talk about what has changed in modernity, is the fact that if humans for hundreds of thousands of years, or really millions of years, I should say, before they were even humans, live to a lifespan of around 35 years they're there about, we're in effect only going to be built to live that long. A lot of things that happen to people after around 40, you know, or 50 or something like that. For men, of course, you know, you have a, you have a loss of testosterone, a loss of fertility, the same thing in women, you have menopause, of course, which wouldn't even happen if you live to only, you know, 35, 40 years old, something like that. You have a loss of bone density if you're not continually active, etc. So in a lot of ways, even if, even if you say that it's a good thing that we have longer lifespans, and even if we can see that that's the case, there's a lot of ways in which we're still not necessarily built to live that long. So one thing that societies, of course, even agricultural societies have to deal with is the fact that we have a relatively high population of older people who don't necessarily directly economically contribute. And I'm not saying that I'm not saying that we should, you know, kill all old people or something like that, but that it is a legitimate problem if we're built to have a particular lifespan and we run out of steam at a particular point. That is something that is, ironically, a problem that stems from the success of modernity. Now, aside from that, one thing that Wells talks about in his book is, first off, the cause of death in humans is very different from, you know, it was before the agricultural revolution. And the cause of death that people suffer by today is very different from the cause of death that people had even a hundred years ago. That is, if you really think of it in terms of, you can think of it in three different sections, right? In the Paleolithic world, we suspect that people probably died most of trauma, and that is that that would mean women might be dying in childbirth, men might be dying in a hunt, sustaining an injury, getting an infection, and dying as a result of that. So people died of trauma. After the agricultural revolution, things started to change quite a great deal. Now, one of the things that the agricultural revolution allowed, first off, is the formation of cities. In fact, they sort of necessitated that people form cities. Keep everything in one place, keep your stores of grain, continually, you know, farm one particular plot of land, don't move around into some place that you don't really know about. And one of the things that higher populations cause inevitably is infectious disease. So one thing that I think is hard for us to understand is that the Paleolithic people, or people who have extremely diffused populations, they just don't have to deal with an entire segment of diseases. And in fact, a lot of the diseases that we're very familiar with in agriculture or agricultural societies can't really even survive in if you had a diffused population of hunter-gatherers. Something like one example is rabies, which of course is a disease of animals. And despite the fact that it's a disease of animals, it can only really exist because of human agriculture. That is what happens with rabies, is that humans have these huge societies, animals come and, you know, eat their trash or live as pets or something like that, or, you know, they can live off of human society in a lot of ways. And due to the high population density of humans and animals, infectious disease like rabies can become a huge threat. Now, outside in the middle of nowhere, your chance of getting rabies is not particularly high. It's a disease that relies on the fact that we have a high population density. And that's the case with a lot of infectious diseases. One thing that Cochrane and Harpingdon note is that cities really before the modern era, actually in a lot of ways, this is still true of the modern era, but cities used to be nothing but population sinks. That is, people came to cities to die because very few people, while people of course had children in cities, there was such astronomically high death rates because disease was such a common fact of life that the population of cities was constantly depleting. And the only reason that cities could maintain themselves is because there is a constant influx of people from rural environments. This is where people actually had children. And it's actually a lot, in a lot of ways, where society was a little closer to that, that older, I don't want to say paleolithic, but a more diffuse population structure. Now, so that's one, one sense in which our diseases have changed. And after we invented things like penicillin, or I guess ran across things like penicillin and could deal with infectious disease more effectively, that really only caused another change in the cause of death, again, originally from trauma, then to infectious disease. And in the modern world, it's things like diabetes or cancer or heart disease, which are in a lot of ways, a function of our relatively poor diet and inactivity, both of which are, of course, a result of, you know, modernity in one way or another. Now, first off, in terms of diet, diet is something interesting to talk about. Because nowadays, you see a bunch of meme diets popping up. And I don't say meme in a bad way, but, you know, a couple of years ago, you had the Atkins diet, you have the Paleolithic diet nowadays. Actually, it's sort of fading out because now the biggest meme nowadays is ketogenic diets. This is, I don't know, really popular. But all of these diets in a lot of ways, you know, seek to minimize reliance on agricultural food, that is, reduce the use of grains, reduce, you know, reduce things that are high calorie or excuse me, high carbohydrate, I should say. And one thing that's important to remember is if you look at the Paleolithic diet, in a lot of ways, it's higher fat, lower carbohydrates. And really, the only reason there's this sort of fat phobia that people have, like dietary fat is something bad. This has been a meme, partially it's a meme because, you know, the dietary establishment for really the past century has been run by either seventh day adventists or vegetarians, both of which have ideological reasons to oppose consumption of meat and stuff like that. But in a lot of ways, the move to an agricultural diet meant moving to humans, eating things like grains that we frankly are not built to eat. And this is something that you can actually see in the archaeological record. One good indicator of general health is in fact, height. I don't mean that in the sense that, you know, tall people are ever always better than short people or something like that. But one universal is that people who are malnourished will not get to their genetic potential of height. That's one of the reasons that, you know, in the United States, for example, is very common for old Vietnamese immigrants to move here and they're extremely short. And then they have children that are like half a foot taller than them because their parents, of course, are malnourished. But when the child receives adequate nourishment, it grows up to its genetic potential. So one thing that we can look at is in fact, height. And one interesting thing is that you might be surprised, you might not. People in the Paleolithic era, Wells puts it between 30,000 and 9,000 BC, were actually a bit taller than they are nowadays. Not by too much, but at least by, say, an inch or so. So the average height was around an inch or so taller. And what happened during the Neolithic, which is when people began to move to agriculture, the height dropped from around 510 for men, dropped down as low as five three in the late Neolithic. And this is around, you know, 5,000 to 3,000 BC. So effectively, agriculture made people become manlets in a lot of ways. So people lost, not only did their health disimprove, got worse, exacerbate. That's the word. I think I already used that word today, but whatever. Not only did health generally exacerbate, but we can actually see it in the stature of people. Gradually, you have this height decrease because people aren't getting the kind of nourishment they need. Now, as modern society has happened, as the agricultural revolution came through and allowed us not just to eat agricultural foods, but made us wealthy enough to get things that aren't agricultural foods. Now we have a lot more meat in our diet. Now we have other things. Our height has gradually become is gradually going up. And as I said, it's not quite the height that it was before. The data that Wells has says that the average American height is five, eight and a half nowadays, whereas the Paleolithic person's height is five, nine and point seven. So we're not quite to that point. And of course, there is a sense in which, you know, genetically speaking, a height is selected for or against. But you do see this extremely drastic down and up when it comes to agriculture. That is, once people move to this agricultural diet, when you're eating this homogenous food, when you're eating, I mean, imagine one thing you need to understand about Paleolithic diets is it's not just about eating meats or basic plants and nuts or something like that. That's not really the point. The point is Paleolithic people also had a very diverse diet. They they could eat from a bunch of different plants. There's a lot less biodiversity nowadays, and there's a lot less wild plants in the way that they existed way back then nowadays. So people back then had a very diverse diet. They had a lot of different things to eat. And it's also, you know, when we move to the agricultural, when we move to using agriculture all the time, what happened is that people started eating just like one big staple. So maybe rice is, you know, 60 70% of the caloric intake of people or something like that. And it probably depends on, you know, which place you're talking about. But you have this homogenization of diet. Now, one of the other incidental things that agricultural people often had to deal with that Paleolithic people didn't have to deal with is a mere fact of famine. Again, if you're eating, you know, one example in recent history is the Irish potato famine that I think at least Americans are aware of because it's the impetus for a lot of Irish immigration to America. But the Irish potato famine was or blight, I guess they call it the Irish potato blight was so powerful because everyone ate effectively the same, same particular kind of potato. And when one disease struck that particular type of potato, all of the diet of everyone just totally collapses. Now, if I if there was a group of Irish people who were Paleolithic in their disposition, or were in effect hunter gatherers or pastoralists or something like that, who didn't rely on some particular crop for most of their diet, a blight of any particular plant or the mass death or extention of some particular animal, it's not a big deal because you have a very all of your eggs are in multiple baskets, it's just not that much of a problem. Now, Cochran and Harpingding in 10,000 year explosion, note that one of the things that's happened in the past 10,000 years is a genetic change in certain human populations to become more amenable to this new diet. So people who have lived in, let's say East Asians or Europeans who have lived in an agricultural society for a decent amount of time, they've gradually made accommodations to this new diet, metabolistically, their bodies can, in a lot of ways, better digest grains or rice or bread or these other things when you compare them to people who haven't lived in agricultural society for too long. Now, they make the comparison between them and say Navajo or Australian Aboriginals. And one interesting thing is that the prevalence of diabetes in Navajo is around two and a half times greater than it is for white Americans, or if you compare, again, white Australians with Australian Aboriginals, you actually find that the Aboriginals have something around four times as much of an incidence of diabetes. And that's, of course, even if you try and, you know, hold all the socioeconomic factors relatively constant, people who have not lived around agriculture for very long, there's not been a selection of metabolism tendencies that facilitates the movement to agricultural diets. Now, again, this isn't necessarily to say that there are some people who are good at digesting these diets, it's just some people have gotten a little bit more used to them. Now, anyway, let's talk about some other things related to this. Now, one other side effect, actually speaking on differences between different human populations. One thing that I think people are aware of is people from different places in the world are have different colored skin. I don't know if you've ever noticed this, I saw it once. But one thing that I think people are usually aware of is the fact that people as humans moved further north, there is, of course, less, you know, you get less vitamin D from the sun. So there was the gradual innovation of lighter skin. And so Europeans and East Asians have lighter skin than people south of them. And incidentally, the genetic change that happens in Europeans is different from the ones that happens in East Asians. But nevertheless, you do have this genetic change where these people can, in effect, digest vitamin D from, you know, UV radiation more effectively. Well, I don't know if it comes from UV radiation. I'm sure someone can clear up the specific science of it. But one other interesting variable in this is the fact that that specific, it's not just that the sun is the only place you can get vitamin D. It also can come from particular diets. So people who are hunter-gatherers or specifically who have a high prevalence of fish in their diet actually don't necessarily need to get vitamin D from the sun in the same way. So lighter skin is not is not just an aspect. If you were a hunter-gatherer group that had, you know, a high eight animals or maybe specifically seafood that has a lot of vitamin D in it, you don't necessarily need to develop lighter skin, or at least skin as light as modern Europeans have. So it seems to be the case. I think there's been a lot of convergent evidence or theorizing to this effect that while light skin is correlated with people moving into these more northern environments, one other, I guess, domino that has to fall down is that people have to gradually move to an agricultural diet or at least moved. When I say agricultural diet, I'm talking about a diet that doesn't have vitamin D or probably a lot of other vitamins that people were getting from their hunter-gatherer diet. So it's only after this point where people are gradually beginning to eat more grains and eat less of, you know, the stuff that's characteristic of a hunter-gatherer diet that they really need to develop skin as light as now characteristic in Europe or stuff like this. Don't tell Varg this. He might get a little upset about it, though. But anyway, one little other thing that I think shows how much agricultural diets have changed our lifestyle is something that we take for granted. And that is take the habit of brushing your teeth. This is something. I think we talked about this on my old form a while back. But brushing your teeth is something that everyone in modern society takes for granted. We just assume it's just something that people have to do. But brushing your teeth is really a habit of a post-agricultural diet. Now, people who do a meme diet like a Paleolithic diet who consume meat and vegetables and drink water, more or less, they will realize very quickly that you don't really have to brush your teeth after every meal. In fact, really, the thing you have to do, if anything, is floss. But brushing your teeth as it happens is something that we have to do. We have to rub chemicals on our teeth because we have an agricultural diet or a diet that uses a bunch of unnatural sugars. And we have to physically remove these things from our mouth so that we don't get things like cavities. One of the things that Wells notes is that with the dawn of agriculture, we see an increase in cavities of about 300 to 400 percent per tooth, which is a pretty big increase. And so people end up having, while Paleolithic people sometimes did have cavities, they did happen. They weren't totally unheard of. Once agriculture develops, they become a scourge. There's something that we have to constantly deal with. This is when dentistry was invented. You can actually, there are Neolithic dentistry devices and drills and stuff like that. Probably very painful, but that's something that agricultural people had to start dealing with. That's something you don't really think about it. Even at this level. I mean, despite the fact that we have, you know, been in an agricultural environment for thousands of years, this is not one genetic change that's happened. I mean, this hasn't, we haven't overcome the the disability of our mouth to clean up this kind of these novel things that we're eating. That's one thing that we haven't dealt with. Another minor thing that this is something that people will occasionally note about is the scourge of mouth breathing. Mouth breathing comes from a lot of different sources, but one of them well, I should say there's a habit of modern people to breathe out of their mouths for different reasons. It just happens. And one of the things that it sort of causes and sort of is caused by it is the fact that we don't necessarily chew that much nowadays. Nowadays, you know, you have your soy products that you directly drink. You have everything's nice and soft like applesauce. You don't have to tear through things. And one interesting thing about our teeth is that that action of ripping into meat or consuming hard nuts or something like this that you had to break apart. That's part that that is actually part of the natural exercise that people get in their mouths. And modern people, since we again are drinking all of our soy products and don't have to chew half the stuff we eat, we don't get the same amount of mouth exercise. So what happens is the muscles in modern people's mouths sometimes do not even form in the proper way that they are supposed to. And this causes physical differences in people. You will see people nowadays. Sometimes this is actually called caused by allergies as well. People have to breathe through their mouths, which allergies are another thing that modernity in effect causes. But people due to the fact that they don't exercise their mouth enough, their mouth muscles are very the muscles around their mouth are very, you know, not really flexing and they're sort of drooping and this mouth breather appearance is very common nowadays. And if you go to a tribal society where people have a primitive diet, it's not the kind of thing you see. You don't see this like the fish mouth. That's what they call it. That's what they call it sometimes the fish mouth. You don't see this in people who live in Paleolithic environments. So this might sound like a minor nitpick. Like, why are you bringing this up? But one thing we have to remember is that everything down to even the way we chew food has changed. And even something like that can have a very significant effect on your physiognomy. It really does change how we are. And that's something that's something that should really make you think. So anyway, I think we've about talked about health enough and the human physique. So I'm going to take a brief brief break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about how modernity is making us brainless or well, we'll talk about it. Anyway, I'll see you after our break. All right, welcome back everyone. So I might as well read out some donations. So first off, we got $3 on Patreon from Eagle Yeager. That's a monthly pledge. Five euros from Bjorn W. Thank you, Bjorn. A couple of anonymous Bitcoin donations, one amounting to around $15, one amounting to around $4 and a Litecoin donation from Matt R. So thank you, everyone. If I missed your donation, feel free to remind me. It's been sort of a shuffle since I guess I didn't do an episode last week. I took that week off. So if I forgot about yours, feel free to remind me. And as always, you can send donations to PayPal.me slash Luke M. Smith. That's in is in miraculous. As I said, it was my birthday this week, so feel free to send a birthday donation if you want. But regardless, that's it for donations. General questions, some organizational questions that some people have asked and I think it's worth bringing up. First off, some people have suggested us doing something more like a book club, where I tell you what to read. And the next week we cover it and you can come listen to the episode already having read the book. Now, there are a couple reasons I don't want to do that. First off, I I have been in academia for several years. I've been in many reading groups, been in many things that amount to book clubs. And I I'll just say I know human psychology when it comes to that. And that is no one does the reading. No one. I mean, people do the first couple of weeks, but the idea of having it as a constant chore, I don't I don't want my podcast to require some previous effort before people come into it. I don't want people to feel like they have to read the books. And if anything, the podcast episodes are not supposed to be the be all end all to any of the topics we talk about. You know, as I said, I mean, in the episode of Albion Seed, that was within an hour, you can only cover a very small portion of a thousand page book. Same thing with the episode on the bicameral or really any episode, right? You know, what I cover in the podcast is really just to peak people's interests in a lot of these topics. So I don't think that I don't want the episodes to be a cap stone to your knowledge on something rather than be the beginning of your knowledge and something. So that's one of the reasons I don't think that and aside from that, doing a book club thing. I mean, if I say this week, OK, next week, we're going to read book X. Well, even if everyone immediately goes and orders the book, it's going to take a while to get there. It's going to take a while to read it, etc., etc. So I don't I don't know if that's not very actionable. And some people have asked, sort of related to this, but sort of differently. Some people have asked for a book list or what I plan to do soon. And I'll just say the way I prepare for these. I do prepare for every episode. I have a lot of notes and stuff. But I will say that what I'm going to do for the next week will change several times. So I don't I don't want to commit myself. I don't want to put out a list of the things I'm going to do for the next month. I have an idea of what I'm going to do, but that that's liable to change. So I don't know if that necessarily would work. But I think how we have it now works pretty much fine. I will you may notice I'm drifting away from individual books and doing, I guess, more literature reviews or topic reviews. But anyway, and I will say I am still looking for a kind of medium where we can post comments that's not on YouTube. The thing to I mean, I sort of want to move away from YouTube gradually. I mean, I'm still going to be making videos on it and stuff. But one of the nice things that I like about this podcast being on Libsyn is that people can basically just subscribe to the RSS, get it wherever they want and everything works. Now Libsyn does cost me money costs. I think the plan I've signed up for is like maybe $40 a month. So it does cost money for me to do this, even aside from all the work that I do for it. So again, feel free PayPal.me slash Luke M. Smith if you want to support the podcast. But anyway, so we might as well just go ahead and get back into it. Now we've talked about how agricultural society is not a good match for our actual biology. We have gone through some evolutionary changes since the rise of agriculture, but most of our morbidity, most of our unhealthiness is a result of our biology, our metabolism, everything about our physics, not really being compatible with the life that we've created for ourselves. In this half of the episode, I want to talk about how we have been mentally affected by the social, I don't want to say political, but the changes that are necessitated by a change to an agricultural urban society and how in a lot of ways we have been put psychologically in a place that isn't necessarily good for us and worse than that, more than just saying we'll have a bad time. Worse than that, in a lot of ways, despite the fact that industrial society might require a higher level of intelligence, there are many ways in which the incentives for actual Darwinian pressures or any kind of genetic shifts, that direction is actually sort of going downward now. And that's a big problem. So let's go ahead and start with one buzzword that goes around. I think I might have mentioned it before, but one buzzword that goes around and describing the change in human society, especially with respect to the agricultural revolution, is domestication. That is, we know what domestication is with respect to animals, you know, humans take sheep and artificially breed them or, well, you know, select which ones reproduce and therefore affect the actual population of sheep by making them more docile and more malleable to humans. But one of the memes that's going around nowadays, even in my field of linguistics is auto domestication. And that is to say that humans in a lot of ways have not just domesticated animals, but they've domesticated themselves physically speaking, if you look at early humans of several hundred thousand years ago or proto humans, however you want to think about them, depending on where you draw the line of what is a modern human. If you look at early humans, they have physically, they're much more robust than we are. We are much more grass aisle. We have a much more delicate physiognomy. We're also weaker than them. We have smaller brains physically than creatures like Neanderthals, be they humans or not or something else. And maybe brain size doesn't brain size, of course, correlates very strongly with intelligence in humans nowadays. Does it correlate between us and Neanderthals? Maybe, maybe not. But if it seems to be the case that there has been a turn in the past several hundred thousand years to a different kind of human that is a human that is domesticated and a lot of our social behaviors less well, we should put it this way. Earlier humans were based on physical strength, individual competence, sufficiency, things like this. And this isn't to say that humans survived in the wild. Humans have always been a social animal. But as time has gone on, as agriculture and civilization have become more prominent, what happens more and more is that humans have more and more incentive to rely on the collective society, to rely on the government for protection, to rely on society at large to produce economically for them. Very few people nowadays are farmers or anything like that. And that might sound like something that's just the description of employment. But more than that, people are becoming less and less self-sufficient, generally. And that that puts in place a lot of incentives biologically. Before we get too far, let's go ahead and get into the actual specifics of the theory and the genetics of how people have actually changed psychologically, because it's not this is not just the cultural change. It's not just, oh, there are a bunch of soy boys out there. That's not what we're talking about. We are talking about a more general genetic shift to cause those soy boys. And in the perennial gale of human psychology and human society, we're all soy boys. I just want you to keep that in mind. We're all significantly more domesticated, pacified, and pliable than the people that existed many years ago. Now, the way that Cochran and Harpending put it is on page. This is page 110. If your ancestors were farmers for a long time, you're descended from people who decided it was better to live on their knees than die on their feet. And I think it's a good quote. I mean, the conversation they're having when they say that is with the rise of agriculture, this the incentives that an agricultural society needs are very different in a hunter gatherer society, having people of a genetic type in your group in your tribe that are a little more out there, a little more prone to violence, maybe. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's good to have someone who puts a lot of effort into the hunt or maybe conflicts with other tribes. It doesn't really harm your society much to have. In fact, it's really a good thing to have heroism and, you know, adventure and adventure someness in some people. But as people settle down into agricultural societies, the incentives change because one thing that starts to happen is if you have if you grow a bunch of crops and store them somewhere, that's something that people can steal. And those adventurous people might turn their predispositions to more antisocial endeavors like stealing your stuff. So it becomes necessary to either prevent that from happening by just while preventing it from happening or by eliminating those people who are most likely to do it. So one thing that Cochran and Harpingdon note is that their rulers, whenever you have executions or any kind of pressure put on a population, it is going to be, you know, any kind of capital punishment is going to be focused on those people who are more individualistic in a sometimes violent way. And that can be good and that can be bad. It can be good in the sense that, well, we want to keep, you know, a pacified society, society that doesn't have crime all over the place. But in a lot of ways, it gradually breeds a domesticated and so they go through a couple of specific examples in the book. One, I don't think they do include, but it's worth talking about. I think it was done afterwards is the work of Henry Harpingdon, one of the authors, of course, and Peter Frost. And they put out a paper a while ago. I think this is much more recent called Western Europe, State Formation and Genetic Pacification. Ryan Falk, for example, talks about this paper all the time, but it's actually a good one. And the point behind it is that if you look at Western Europe, since we have relatively good historical data of what happened in the Middle Ages, we actually see that what happened is the Europe, the barbarian Europe was gradually pacified by a deliberate policy of capital punishment. And the statistics that they quote, they estimate between half a percent and a full percent of all males of each generation were killed in capital punishment. Originally just for murder and stuff, but it also got to crimes that we think of as being sort of, you know, things that don't really matter. But so what happens is you have this massive really eradication of the more, I guess, more heroic, violent aspects of society and you have this genetic pacification and over these years you see this pretty precipitous decline in the rate of murder and other crimes during this period. And so what in effect happens and you can look in the article to, you know, for the specifics or you can also check out Ryan Falk's videos on this because he goes into it more. I'm not going to go too deep into it, but for a lot of reasons you have this huge reshuffling of the genetic types in Europe. And this is a Europe is a good example because this is a kind of pacification that happens has happened relatively recently. But what you have is a much more peaceful society that is the result of what is in effect a kind of eugenic policy. Now, you shouldn't necessarily think of the changes that modernity causes as being just oh, we're less violent because that sounds just like a good thing. OK, if if people in Europe are less violent than they were a thousand years ago, that that sounds like a good deal. The thing you need to remember is not only are there psychological traits that are correlated with violence predisposition to violence that might be something worth having. But more generally, there is selection against psychological types that may may or may not be good. Now, one of the examples in the actual book in 10,000 years explosion, the Cochran and Harpending note is ADHD. Now, ADHD, well, first off, I'm not a big fan of this whole diagnosing what amounts to a personality type. In fact, I'm the kind of person, you know, if your child can actually sit through eight hours of school and not act out, there's something wrong with your child. OK, so I'm very much against the diagnosing of these psychological types that ADHD is a symbol of. But anyway, despite that, of course, ADHD, like most all psychological types, does have a genetic reality to it. There are particular alleles particular genes that are correlated with having ADHD. Now, on page one hundred twenty seven, well, one thing that Cochran and Harpending note is that the area that has been civilized systematically civilized for the longest period, that is East Asia, specifically China. In this area, ADHD has been effectively eradicated. Now, it is clear that it existed in populations earlier, but it has been eradicated by what appears to be systematic selection. I'll read this passage out again. Page one hundred and twenty seven, the polymorphism for ADHD, that is, is found at varying but significant levels in many parts of the world, but is almost totally absent from East Asia. Interestingly, alleles derived from the seven are allele are fairly common in China, even though the seven are alleles themselves are extremely rare there. It is possible that individuals bearing the alleles were selected against because of cultural patterns in China. The Japanese say that the nail that sticks out is hammered down, but in China, it may have been pulled out and thrown away. So it's not just violence. It's also there are general psychological tendencies that are either selected for, selected against in the psychological repertoire of humans and the larger your population group has lived in civilization, the more likely you have, you know, some kind of genetic shift in the direction of civilization. Now, you might be saying, as you listen to this, OK, well, Luke, you're saying this like it's a bad thing. How is it a bad thing for people to be less violent or have less ADHD? Maybe you have some naive, noble, savage view where, you know, everything in the paleolithic was great. What's so bad about that? And now I want to the the way I think we can look at it is that while we civilization is putting radical changes and radical differences, selective differences on the human genome and selecting for things like non-violence, selecting for things like the ability to sit in a classroom for eight hours a day, despite the fact that it's doing that. Whenever you have selectional pressures that are that enormous, you have genetic problems in a lot of ways. Now, one thing that Wells talks about, Wells actually discuss, again, this this is in Pandora's seed. Spencer Wells talks about schizophrenia as a psychological occurrence in modern humans. And one thing that he notes is that schizophrenia, despite the fact that we consider it something very bad, like it's not good to have schizophrenia, it seems to be correlated and there are many theories to this effect. It seems to be correlated with a lot of other psychological types like general creativity. If we look at the history of mad people, we see that a lot of them have, you know, mental, what things that you might call mental illnesses or things like schizophrenia or other psychological types. Now there is a, I'm gonna read off this paragraph. This is in page 146 and 147 of Wells' book. I'll read this out. It's a full paragraph, bear with me, but it makes a good point. What might happen in a future where such variants are routinely selected against? After all, most parents wouldn't wish a debilitating illness like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia on their children. And so doing, however, they might also be selecting against creativity. While such a one-to-one correspondence between genetic predisposition and ultimate outcome vastly oversimplifies the complexity of human behavior and psychiatric disorders, it is likely that extreme creativity has at least a partial genetic basis. Perhaps the creativity is a knife's edge on which we sit poised to teeter in the direction of either illness or accomplishment. And indeed, many creative people alternate between the two. In an effort to avoid the former, we could be deterring the latter as well. After all, at its core, creativity is imagining things that aren't there and making them real. Schizophrenia is largely defined by such vivid imaginings, although to such an extent that it becomes deleterious to the individual. So that's the end of his quote, but think about the implications. Now, schizophrenia or some kind of undesirable mental disease may in fact have some good corollaries with it. And if we systematically eradicate schizophrenia or something, if it were just narrowly genetic or something and we could just get rid of it, it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. In the same way, violence, what happens, well, I'll give you my perspective, I used to do a lot of things in game theory. And one of the foundational problems of game theory, if you don't know what game theory is, it's really just the systematic strategy, what strategies are good in some kind of formal game, like how do you best make decisions, stuff like that. One of the elementary problems of game theory is what's called the hawk and dove game. And that is, and of course, it's actually correlated with actual evolutionary biology in a lot of ways. That is, let's imagine a species where there are hawks and doves. Or well, people can see it differently, but we'll consider it this way. Let's say there's a species where people can be born as hawks or doves. And the hawks are much more violent, they're much more, I guess they wanna get out there. Sometimes they exploit the doves or something like that. And the doves are much more peaceful, they're not gonna commit crimes and they could do much of anything. Now, one thing you need to remember is that the best social strategy or the best configuration of how many hawks or doves you have, because both of them are necessary. You want some hawks, you want some doves, but the best configuration of them depends on a lot of other things. And if you systematically, let's say if you do what Europe did during the Middle Ages and you kill a bunch of your hawks, a lot of times that puts you in a different genetic environment where you have to recalibrate your social institutions. You have to, I mean, take recent political issues in Europe, right? What a lot of people say about Europeans nowadays is that Europeans are cucks, right? Why did they say that? It's because Europeans, once they killed off all of the hawks, they have no reason to have really forceful death penalties anymore so they get rid of the death penalty. Every crime is sort of, you get a pat on the wrist or something like this. There's a lot of sympathy for criminals because if you kill all the hawks and the only people committing crimes or doves, well, it's no big deal. But regardless, this puts, what happens when you create a society of doves is that you have a society that's very manipulatable and it's not necessarily good. In a lot of ways, you wanna have some hawks in your society because that is something that is going to, I guess, keep your guard up in a lot of ways. So we might think of violence as being something bad and I think also we can say violence probably has some corollaries and other psychological types that are probably good as well and getting rid of violence means getting rid of those. But even aside from that, even if it's raw violence, simply killing all the people who are more violent in society doesn't necessarily mean in the long term, we're gonna be living in a better place because a lot of times it means getting rid of your immune response. It means getting rid of, you have to think of society as being an interaction between different people groups. And that said, this isn't of course what Wells is saying about violence, but it's what I'm saying. I think in a lot of ways, having a subsection of a population that's a little more violent generates social institutions and expectations of society in other people that makes them less vulnerable to things like that. So that's one problem, but a related problem that's important as well is the fact that even if we are adjusting genetically to agricultural society, which we are doing slowly but surely or at least slower than agricultural society is changing, even if we are doing that, the more significant the selectional pressures, the more likely we are to develop mutations and other undesirable things that aren't necessarily good. Now I'm not saying that we're more likely to mutate, but I'm saying in the sense that mutations, if we're selecting for something like being pacified or being nice or being whatever is desired in modern society, if we're selecting for that so significantly, we're not able to select against other things. And as mutations gradually accumulate, we can't weed them out. This is called mutational load. That's a term for it. You can look it up. Now one example, I don't think they use the term in the book, but Cochran and Harpending note a paper they put out earlier with Jason Hardy on Ashkenazi, Ashkenazi intelligence. And that is one thing that happened in Europe, medieval Europe is that Ashkenazi Jews were cognitively selected for a particular kind of lifestyle I mean, if you don't know, right? Medieval Jewry was sort of shunted into this position where most of them would be doing what is in effect is white collar work. And over this period, it happened that those who were more successful in that line of work had a lot more children and such. And since that kind of, since that line of work correlates with higher intelligence, what you actually see is that Jews over a relatively brief period of time, evolutionarily, were selected for higher and higher intelligence. And nowadays, I mean, if you look at something like IQ tests, Jews typically get around a standard deviation higher than their European neighbors, which is pretty significant. But anyway, let's, so that might sound like something great. Okay, great. Well, great for Jews at least. That is Jews have been selected for higher intelligence. That's fantastic. Okay, great. Now we can just do that with everyone and everyone's gonna be brilliant. But the thing about that is that since they were so significantly selected for this one psychological trait, there are a lot of, I guess you could say other selfish genes or something. There are other corollaries that might come with intelligence or those specific mutations that gave intelligence in those cases that became disproportionately common in Ashkenazi Jews that caused other disorders, be they mental disorders or physical disorders. So one of the things that's really awkward and harping to note is you have this huge, you have this massive, Jews are much more massively liable to fall for a bunch of other diseases. Actually, let's go ahead and read the passage. This is from page 213. The best known of the genetic diseases disproportionately affecting Ashkenazi Jews are Tay-Sachs disease, Ghoshay's disease and the breast cancer mutations, BRCA1 and BRCA2. But there are a number of others such as Neiman-Pix disease, Canavan disease, and familial dysautonomia. Some of these cause neurological problems and they're unusually common among Ashkenazi Jews, so common that they constitute an enduring puzzle in human genetics. And Cochran and Harbending's point is that these kind of genetic disorders come from the fact that they were probably associated with those genes that gave Ashkenazi Jews higher intelligence and they were systematically selected for. So what ends up happening is that the Ashkenazi Jews, again, gain a whole standard deviation of intelligence, but it comes with all of these other genes that may be something extremely bad for them, a lot of terrible diseases. And while Jews might be extremely good at fulfilling that white collar role that they have historically been in, or at least Ashkenazi Jews, I should say, while they might be very good for that, in a lot of ways, they become less fit in other psychological traits. Now you might say, well, isn't this just gonna happen all the time in evolution? Aren't you always gonna have this kind of stuff happening? And yes, you are. But if it happens, well, I should put it, yes, you are going to have selection bringing with it some things that are bad. But the fact of the matter is over long periods of time, you're gradually going to have selection against those things that are really bad. And those genes that remain for intelligence are probably just going to affect intelligence and not much else. That is, that's the ideal. And that's what happens if you're selecting for something in a natural environment where there's not much change. But in our society where there's constant change and constant shifts in what is being selected, there's a much higher likelihood of us accumulating different mutations that are bad for us. And coming down with these kind of disorders that might have been incidentally selected for due to other kind of genetic pressures. Now, this is one of the reasons I am not particularly optimistic even about things like eugenic policies. Even if we could all sit together and agree that we need people with particular traits, high intelligence or sociability or non-violence or something like this, even if we were in a place to sit down and say, okay, this is what we want in people. And even if we could impose policies to select for them, one of the problems with that is when we impose some kind of strong selectional pressure on something, we might be able to do well with that. But when you're selecting for something, you are at the same time not selecting, you're not selecting against the gradual mutational changes, most of which are bad that occur in the human genome. So at all points in time, if we're selecting people to breed some hyper-intelligent race or something like that, we want people to have IQs of 250 or something like that, we could do that gradually. But depending on how quickly and how targeted that is, the better our selection for intelligence or anything else, the more we are going to be ignoring mutational accumulations that are bad for the gene pool generally. So we might end up with a population that's highly intelligent but has an enormous amount of mutational load. Now, a lot of people have the idea, I mean, with respect to intelligence, for example, since we've talked about that. Now, one thing, I should put this out first, you may be familiar with what's called the Flynn effect. The Flynn effect, it's based on the work of James Flynn. It comes from Hernstein and Murray's, the bell curve, that's where the term comes from. But it's the general realization that over time it seems that IQ has been increasing. Now, long story short, I'm gonna sum up a bunch of literature for you. That's not actually the case that we are getting smarter. Our IQs are going up, but in terms of our actual general intelligence, our G factor, as it's referred to in psychology, there are many indicators that we are actually getting dumber. We are losing intelligence over time. Our general intelligence is decreasing, but at the same time, we live in a culture that is more analytical, it's more capable of doing logical puzzles, and at the same time, people who are a little slower are better at doing IQ tests. Now, you can see this when you actually look at an IQ test and look at the different sub-components of it that are more or less G-loaded. You see that the ones that are less G-loaded, i.e., less related to actual intelligence, are the ones which we have decreased on, whereas the things that don't necessarily matter as much for intelligence in IQ tests, those are the ones that we've been increasing on. People in industrialized societies, in a lot of ways, they are getting better and better and better at doing logic puzzles, and therefore, they're more attuned for IQ tests. But in terms of G as a general factor of intelligence, that in fact is, there are many lines of evidence that indicate that that has been decreasing in industrialized populations. Now, there are two main theories or two different hypotheses that we can have to account for this decline in accumulation. And I've included in the description an article by Michael Woodley on this, where he compares two common hypotheses. Now, one is the one that I think people are most familiar with, and that is the idea that dumb people have more children than intelligent people generally. I mean, it's the idea of, you know, idiocracy, if you've seen that movie, which is the sort of silly movie, but the idea behind it is, over time, people who are less intelligent tend to have more children, and people who are more intelligent tend to have less children. So what's gonna happen over time is that people are gonna tend to IQ or G, we should be talking about G as general intelligence, G is going to be decreasing and decreasing over time. Now, that's not always the case, I should say. There are, Cochran and others have done papers on, you know, historically there has been cognitive selection in different places, but as it exists in our industrialized society, it tends to be the case that people of lower intelligence are being selected for. They're having more children in effect. So that's one hypothesis, but in Woodley's article he compares that hypothesis, which seems to account for some of the decline in IQ with the general idea of mutational load. That is, instead of, it's not just that people who are a little slower on the uptake are reproducing more, it's really that there is gradual mutational load increases in our genome. That is, we are, as time goes on, we are mutating more and more and more, and since we're selected for other things, since our environment is changing so rapidly in modernity, and we're being selected for other things, those bad mutations are not actually leaving our gene pool. They're still there and they're having negative influences on our intelligence and other things at that. Now Woodley mentions two of the big changes that have caused this increase in mutational load, because it's not just an issue of the speed of selection or anything like that, as I've been talking about it, but there are really two changes that we think of as being very good that for our gene pool are very bad, and this is sort of, this is the acidic portion of, I guess, the whole point. And that is, two things that we really like, that is, in modern societies, we have low levels of childhood mortality, that's one, and the other one is, most people nowadays reproduce. Now, those two things were not true in primeval societies. First off, children die all the time. I mean, nowadays, if a child who is four years old and your neighborhood dies, that's a big event, that's a big issue, there's gonna be public mourning and stuff like this, because that's not something that happens very often. But in earlier primitive societies, children died young very often, children, there were many miscarriages, many more than today, and children died shortly after birth or young in life, et cetera, of different diseases. And again, in addition to that, nearly everyone reproduces, I mean, nowadays, there's a meme of the incels or whatever, but in primeval societies, most men were incels, that is, many men just did not successfully reproduce, it's not to say that they were celibate, but due to one reason or another, they had no offspring, or maybe they had offspring, but they died of some childhood mortality, some different disease in terms of that. Now, these two things are bad for our gene pool, and they're bad despite the fact that we might like that more people reproduce, or we might like that children, of course, are not dying when they're young. We think of those as being good things, but when you realize that genetically speaking, childhood mortality or inceldom does not happen randomly, it is systematically biased for those people who are, not to say that everyone who is an incel or every child who dies or gets sick young is inferior, but there's a general tendency for children who get sick young and get close to dying, there's a general tendency for them to, maybe they got bad genes from their parents, maybe they have specific mutations that have happened in their genome that cause some kind of problems, so there's a general tendency for which childhood mortality tends to be a genetically good thing, because although many people are dying, in effect, it's a death that affects those that happen to be maybe a little more sickly or in a worse position or generally those who have a higher mutational load, and the same thing is true in terms of reproduction. That is, while it's not the case that all men who can't get laid are just total genetic losers, but there's a tendency for those people to be, they're not symmetrical, maybe they have something psychologically wrong with them, it's not to put people in these kind of categories, but again, there's a general tendency for there to be a difference, and this is the hard pill to swallow in a lot of ways, because we think of low childhood mortality or everyone getting married and having children as being something that's great about modernity, and in a sense it is, but it's something that sews the seeds of its own destruction. In a lot of ways, when we have a society which doesn't select against bad mutations, even if it hurts us emotionally to do so, we are gradually breeding our children to be less genetically fit. So this is the central irony of human evolution as it's been affected by our agricultural and industrial revolutions. That is, we've created these environments where we cannot really be as fit as we used to, not just in terms of societies constantly changing and we have to genetically keep up, but even if we can, we have this ever increasing background radiation of mutational load. Now one other article that I've included in the description, Hen et al, I'll read the title, it's distance from Sub-Saharan Africa predicts mutational load in diverse human genomes, and this shows statistically, mathematically, what we've sort of been talking about. When we think of different human populations, if we think of, obviously at some point, we were all in Africa and spread out in one way or another, and what happens is those humans who left Africa, you have to think of leaving Africa as being a kind of grand human experiment, which is going to put us in an environment that we have not been exposed to and we're gonna be exposed to a lot of selectional pressures, and that's gonna change us quite a great deal, and it has, and so what's happened, what this paper illustrates is the fact that when you look at mutational load across different human populations, you see that mutational load is lowest in Africa, it's highest the further and further from Africa you get. That is, as different human populations have been exposed to all these different selectional pressures, they've been subject to founders effects, they've been subject to just any kind of population bottleneck that affects what kind of genes are in that population. It has caused us to increase in mutational load, increase that background radiation of badness, genetic badness in our genome as it goes on. So I think there's a tendency for people sometimes when they look at human population differences, some of them can be very stark, but there's a tendency for people to look at those and to think of it in terms of a kind of stairway where we are climbing up to mental modernity. I don't really look at it that way, I look at it in terms of we have changed in a lot of ways to get to mental modernity, be that a good thing or be it not a good thing, but it has affected us, it's put a bunch of genetic anchors on us. And these anchors are not something that we can just magically disaparate, they can't just disappear. In order for us to actually get rid of them, they are something that have to be selected against. And despite our genetic knowledge, despite even if we were to all sit down and say, oh, let's genetically engineer humans and select against these bad things, that's something that we still don't, we don't just not understand the genetics behind everything and thus can't be expected to adequately model all the variables of play. But in addition to that, exposing us to some kind of eugenic pressure is sort of the same thing. When you have a strong pressure that selects for one particular trait, you are ignoring all the other things that might be coming with it that are bad or good or whatever. Now, as we bring this episode to a close, I think a lot of people have an idea of civilization as being a kind of a cycle or either civilization is something all bad. Maybe it's something that we should just avoid entirely because it makes us weak and mutants and nasty generally. Maybe we should just avoid it altogether. That's one idea. Another one is the idea that civilization comes in a kind of cycle. That is what happens is if we are highly selected for, if we have good selectional genetic pressures on us and if we live in cohesive societies, gradually our genetic composition is going to be better. We're gonna be selected for higher intelligence or more strength or things like this. But once we use that intelligence and strength to create a society, a lot of times the incentives change in that society, but even more than that, mutational load and other things, which are an inevitable aspect of living in a prosperous society, will drag us down in a lot of respects. So there is a tendency for us to build up civilizations and then those civilizations put in effect incentives that degrade us in a lot of ways. And I think ancient people at least had this notion of civilization of being in cycles. You had this early Bronze Age society, which was brought down in the Bronze Age collapse. It was, we used to be very prosperous. Then civilization collapsed. People died off in a lot of ways. We were de-urbanized. And then gradually we began to come back from that. The same thing you have with the fall of Rome or any of these other kind of dark age, the general idea of a dark age in historiography. And I think there is, as we leave this episode, I think that is something to think about. That is there's a little wisdom in the fact that it's not just that socially speaking, we go through eras of progress and regress. But genetically, there are genetic corollaries to that. That is, modernity has, due to the fact that our intelligence and our civilization has created modernity as we know it. There are a lot of ways in which that same civilization and that same modernity is now undermining all the things that made it. So anyway, I think this is about time to bring this episode to a close. As always, if you have questions or comments, feel free to email at lukeatlukesmith.xyz or post something in the YouTube comments section. And of course, you can also send donations. Again, it's my birthday week this week. You can send donations to paypal.me slash lukeimsmith. That's im as in Machiavellian. But anyway, I'm hoping to have an episode up pretty soon after this. I'm not quite sure. I'm gonna be taking a trip out of town. So I wanna get some stuff done pretty quickly. But again, if you have any questions, you can check that out. And of course, I'm putting all of the articles and the readings that I talked about, even in passing in the video description or the podcast description, which you can check out. It should be in the metadata of the MP3 as well. So you can check that out and also check out the bibliographies of any of the articles for further reading or anything else. But if you have any other questions, again, email me and I will see you guys next time. So hope you enjoy it.