Do you ever feel like people in the modern age are weak?

I’m willing to take a bunch of people to hunt some mammoth. Anyone in?

desperation will make you stronger. @enzo I’m sharpening my stick lead the way.

Thank god for modernization.

One word : Dentist

I absolutely see where you’re coming from elcho. I think I’d die very quickly if civilization were to crumble. Luckily, I’m married to a man who’d be very capable under those circumstances.

I would argue that the fact that we don’t need to hunt and gather to survive indicates that we are more adapted and able to survive.

I think the term “evolution” shouldn’t just apply to being stronger and faster—being smarter and better able to utilize resources counts as evolving too. The point of evolution and adaptation is being able to get maximum energetic output with minimum energetic investment. We’ve accomplished that pretty well.

I think the ability to build a society and to trust and rely on one another is possibly our most important adaptation. Our brains devote massive amounts of cortex to being able to recognize each other, to imagine another person’s feelings, to exchange ideas and information—I don’t think that’s an accident.

Yes we are overly reliant on technology and the comforts of modern society. Humans nowadays couldn’t survive in a world where they had to grow their own food or have electricity constantly available. Just look at what happens in a blackout, mass chaos. Imagine if the world suddenly couldnt make electricity, we’d see massive amounts of people dying from lack of water, starvation, infections, and unsafe living conditions.

So to answer your question yes, society is to comfortable with its current state in has lost touch with the basic skills necessary for survival.

Boo on people asking “do we rely too much on what we’re created?” The question really can be extrapolated to, “Do we rely too strongly on hunting and gathering? What would happen to us if we couldn’t hunt and gather any more?”

There’s two things wrong with the question. (1) Technology is a human tendency. We tend to organize materials in the world around us into useful configurations. Technology is as innate as language is, and that’s why there isn’t a single human society in existence that doesn’t use tools. (2) We wouldn’t have survived this long if we HADN’T relied on technology so thoroughly. We’d all have been wiped out by smallpox, or the flu, or bigger, stronger animals. It’s the ace in the hole of evolution: corporeal speed, strength, and armor really aren’t the only options for survival.

and if you don’t like it, you can eat berries in a cave.

@nikipedia

“I would argue that the fact that we don’t need to hunt and gather to survive indicates that we are more adapted and able to survive.”

Yes…but we would be nothing without our infrastructure and modern civilization. Did you and I have anything to do with our more adapted life? No. We use technology but few of us would be able to replicate it if we had to.

@elchoo, gatherers didn’t each individually have to relearn which berries were poisonous. If they did, we’d have died out a long time ago. Another human tendency is to transmit knowledge to future generations.