Sublime

it is far better to restore and maintain grazing by cattle and other animals on grasslands that typically coevolved with grazing animals and cannot remain healthy without them.

Observers who had previously considered the modes of subsistence and division of labour in North American societies to be trivial matters, or of at best secondary importance, now began assuming that they were the only thing that really mattered. Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of a

per stirpes,

Cultures are not matters of taste but systems of adaptation to specific circumstances that may prove irrelevant or even counterproductive in other settings. Humans live in a wide variety of habitats. The wide number of potential niches in which we live require variations in behavior that are too complex to be informed by instinct. Therefore, behavi

archaeologist Timothy Taylor, author of The Prehistory of Sex, to state, “While hunter-gatherer sex had been modeled on an idea of sharing and complementarity, early agriculturalist sex was voyeuristic, repressive, homophobic, and focused on reproduction.” “Afraid of the wild,” he concludes, “farmers set out to destroy it.”

First published in the prestigious journal Science in 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin’s paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” is one of the most reprinted articles ever to appear in a scientific journal. The authors of a recent World Bank Discussion Paper called it “the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues,” w

Second, Homo economicus’s behavior happens in a market of some sort. Third, Becker’s method demands that Homo economicus’s preferences are the same across all societies and circumstances.5

Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.

“ ‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’ Peter Farb said it in Humankind.”