...Jared Diamond made some compelling arguments about why the consequences of agriculture could be considered negative but, overall he did not make a compelling enough argument that agriculture is the worst mistake in human history. Without agriculture I don’t believe that there would be as sophisticated and as large of a society that we have today. The benefits of agriculture outweigh the consequences. Diamond points out that agriculture came out of the need to feed more people. When groups of hunter and gathers were faced with a growing population they had two options: to split into smaller groups or to settle down and adopt agriculture. Had more groups decided not to take up agriculture and the population continued to grow, then the food resources...
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...Jared Diamond’s thesis is that civilization is not created through biological or intellectual superiority but the environment itself. Jared is trying to disprove the beliefs that Europeans are superior because of genetics and biological differences. To support this Diamond takes you back to roughly 13,000 years ago to an area called The Fertile Crescent in modern day Middle-East. The Inhabitants of the pre modern Fertile Crescent back up his theory that civilization is created through the environment. Through them you see the first step towards civilization because of a chain of developments that is only possible because of their environment. The first step is to move from hunter-gatherer society to an agrarian based society. The main...
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...Thesis: James Diamond believes that the shift from hunter-gather societies farming societies was the worst mistake in the history of the human race. Support: Diamond gives many examples to provide support for his claim. He compares modern day farmers and hunger-gathers and states that the hunter-gathers have more free time, better food, and less hours of work when compared to their counterparts. He also points out that in societies that switched from hunter-gathering to farming, that paleopathologists have shown that the former had better quality of life. Role: The author Jared Diamond points out that modern hunger-gatherers, when compared to farmers, work less, have more leisure time, sleep more than enough, and have better diets. One of...
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...-“Strauss versus Brains and Genes or the postmodern vengeful return of positivism.” This essay first started as an answer to what I deemed very problematic, i.e. the disputation which I found in bad faith (un-authentic to use a philosophical term or an existentialist term), of the mediatic, dashing Harvard cognitivist/linguist, Steven Pinker, in his article “Neglected novelists, embattled English professors, tenure-less historians, and other struggling denizens of the Humanities, Science is not your Enemy—a plea for an intellectual truce,” (The New Republic--August 19). Then the counter-arguments against Steven Pinker’s conception of the “human animal” developed into an essay arguing that the New Positivism, not science, or technology per say, was the enemy of humanism and its avatars as such. The point is not to become a postmodern anti-scientific Luddite. Genomics are changing the world in ways we barely imagine yet and will re-define what it means to be human (a becoming already imagined by science fiction writers, social critics and critical thinkers such as the feminist Donna Haraway with her “Cyborg”). The point is also not to turn “anti-brainiac.” Without a brain we would become vegetative, a vegetal…, i.e. a purely “natural body,” a “zombie.” If we make use of this “computer” allegory which is an analog but not a homologue, and which is used ad nauseam used by psycho-biologists, without a hard-drive there is no software. But is this a reason to say that the software...
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...Economist readings 1. It pays to give Allowing consumers to set their own prices can be good for business; even better if the firms give some of it to charity http://www.economist.com/whichmba/it-pays-to-give?fsrc=nlw|mgt|01-12-2011|management_thinking [pic]IN OCTOBER 2007 Radiohead, a British rock group, released its first album in four years, “In Rainbows”, as a direct digital download. The move drew a fair bit of attention (including from this newspaper) not only because it represented a technological thumb in the eye to the traditional music industry, but also because the band allowed listeners to pay whatever they wished for it. Some 60% of those who seized the opportunity paid nothing at all, but the band seemed pleased with the result; one estimate had it earning nearly $3m from the experiment. One group outside the music industry taking an interest was a trio of professors then at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego: Ayelet Gneezy, Uri Gneezy and Leif Nelson (who is now at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley). Inspired, they designed a series of experiments to gauge whether pay-what-you-want pricing would work for other businesses. Their most recent experiment, co-authored with Amber Brown of Disney Research and published in Science, also stirred in a new element: would it make any difference if firms donated some of the pay-what-you-want fee to charity? The authors set up their pricing experiment...
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...Copyright Salman Rushdie, 1988 All rights reserved VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York, New York 10010, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd. Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190, Wairau Road, Auckland ro, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Published in 1989 by Viking Penguin Inc. For Marianne Contents I The Angel Gibreel II Mahound III Ellowen Deeowen IV Ayesha V A City Visible but Unseen VI Return to Jahilia VII The Angel Azraeel VIII The Parting of the Arabian Seas IX A Wonderful Lamp Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is . . . without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon. Daniel Defoe, _The History of the Devil_ I The Angel Gibreel "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again...
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