I feel you missed my point, possibly because I expressed it with insufficient clarity.Nearholmer wrote: ↑19 Jan 2024, 2:15pmActually, it’s a bit of well-attested stuff coming from the understanding built-up by evolutionary anthropologists, who have studied, among other things, how remaining hunter-gather and subsistence-farmer populations obtain and use calories.That's a good theory. Well, it’s a good story. ...... Well ...... more of a neat bit of made-up-stuff
But, of course, if you don’t want to believe it, you don’t have to.
as a sort of PS: can anyone think of any other animal that does anything other than choose the easiest, least physically demanding, option when alternatives are open? Many animals have a tendency to expend a lot of effort trying to attract mating partners, but presumably they don’t get to propagate their genes if they get lazy on that front, but when it comes to things like finding food, or avoiding predators, even to migrating, isn’t economy of effort perfectly usual?
The notion that hunter gatherer humans who evolved over a long period to not waste energy when pursuing the needs to survive is hardly controversial as this is the mode of more or less every living organism. But what you seem to be positing is that modern humans are lazy (a very modern concept, perhaps) in response to this built-in condition of not wasting energy when pursuing the needs of survival.
There are two issues with this notion.
One is that many modern humans are far from lazy and in fact tend to the opposite, striving madly at all sorts of things, from job careers to riding a bike fast and far. Much of this has little to do with survival needs.
The second issue is that laziness is not the same thing as avoiding unnecessary work or effort in pursuing survival. Moreover, pursuing survival in the modern world doesn't require a huge expenditure of energy, even if you do go to the shops on your bike rather than in your car.
There is actually a third issue: being inactive when one has enough in the hunter's larder to survive for the foreseeable future does not, as far as I'm aware, force humans to be lazy or even just inactive. After all, hunter gatherers need to stay fit and able. Do those few still living in such conditions not also pursue active modes for pleasure and to serve their need to stay ready for the next hunt? Do they all just sit about dozing and getting feeble?
Perhaps we can ask an evolutionary anthropologist ..... although I suspect that what they will answer will consist mostly of theory and have very little basis in experience. After all, the past doesn't exist. We only have the present containing the surviving artefacts from the past. There are only a very, very few artefacts from hunter-gatherer times and no writings at all, so "made-up-stuff" seems to be needed by the anthropologists to fill the vast evidence-gaps. This may be "educated guesses" but even the education itself seems largely based on .... other guesses.