I'm going to talk about bread.
Again?
Look, without bread there's no "Agricultural Revolution," at least for much of the world. You could put the same scrutiny on rice and tell more or less the same story. Without these once-wild, calorie-dense crops, there is no civilization as we know it.
Except in the Americas.
Yeah, but look at the population density.
You were talking about "civilization," not "population density."
Can I just say my thing now?
Sure, sure.
If you look at it from wheat's perspective, they really got our number. It went from an unremarkable wild grass in the Middle East to growing all over the world. I'm not going to say it's the most successful plant in history, but if you consider where it started and where it ended up, that's an impressive record. I'm not saying it pulled this off in some intentional way, obviously. Wheat doesn't have a brain or thoughts or intentions. Like any other life form, it exists to replicate itself. Members of the species that survive better will be able to pass on their genes; those that survive worse are less likely to procreate.
You throw humans into the mix, now we care about the wheat's survival. That changes the math. In general, plants don't want to be fucked with at all. They want to grow, mature, and spread their seeds. Well, you know, as much as they "want" anything.
Your first problem is competition. Other members of your species might starve you out of water, nutrients, or even sunlight. So body shapes and root systems that help you survive those things become paramount. Then it's competition with other plant species. And then you worry about disease and predation. The last thing you want is for a disease or some bug or animal to take you out before you've had a chance for your seeds to mature.
What's interesting is you can start to see where plants take advantage of would-be predators. Some plants are self-pollinating. Those that aren't depend in pollinating insects like honeybees, who do no damage to the plant and just so happen to ferry their pollen around to ensure the plant can produce the next generation. Other plants make themselves hard to eat, but only to a point. They produce seeds tough enough to survive chewing and stomach acid, but by the time they exit the animal, they're ready to germinate. This helps reduce competition with their own species, too, since odds are the eaten seeds will be deposited well away from the original plant. Plants that produce sticky burrs that stick to animal fur do basically the same thing but skip the whole "getting eaten" part.
I know all this. Get to the point.
I do pay you by the hour.
Wheat does things a little differently. It evolved to protect its seeds right up until the point where they're mature, then the ear spontaneously shatters and the seeds spread around on the ground. Obviously, this makes for a grass that spreads very slowly, year by year, but it's a good way to ensure you've got a blanket of wild grass that's pretty durable over the long run.
But humans, we don't want the ear to just break open like that. We want it to stay closed until we're ready to harvest it. Either deliberately or through simple trial and error, we chose to perpetuate wheat that kept its ears shut. This is bad for the natural proliferation of wheat, but good for human-driven proliferation of wheat.
We did the same for the grain husks. Wild wheat has thick grain husks to protect the inner seed from heat and dryness. Humans selectively bred that away to make it easier to clean the grains. We also selected for bigger grains, which are risky for the plant if it doesn't have us to depend on--it's putting more resources into each grain, reducing the chances of spreading enough seeds.
We also greatly expanded its flowering time, which leaves it vulnerable to pests and other damage. But again, so long as we're protecting it, it's a beneficial relationship.
There are those who've said wheat domesticated humans, and it's worth thinking about that. Wheat became very vulnerable thanks to human intervention, but didn't humans become vulnerable, as well? After all, homo sapiens and homo erectus got by for millions of years without agriculture. Our numbers weren't huge, certainly nothing like what we have today, but humans survived well enough. Wheat--or pick your grain of choice, I don't care--made it possible to stay in one place and live off of that land, allowing forms of development that just weren't possible otherwise. Hunter-gatherers didn't build big cities, obviously. They had no reason to. But that also meant they never built any significant infrastructure and couldn't lay any of the groundwork for what humans would later be able to accomplish. There's no railroads, light bulbs, or space travel without agriculture, is what I'm saying.
Then we shouldn't question the value of those things? Sounds like you're saying the ends justify the means.
Hey, space travel has been pretty valuable to me. I think like anything, there's tradeoffs. Hunter-gatherers had better nutrition and quite possibly worked less. Pre-industrial agriculture was prone to brutal famines, and even when there weren't famines, the nutritional coverage of wheat is mediocre at best. If it's all you're eating, you'll live, but you won't thrive as well as if you'd had a more diverse diet to begin with. Hunter-gatherers were taller, too. Another sign of that superior nutrition. But, like I was saying before, you can support a lot more people on the same land with agriculture than you can with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. From an evolutionary standpoint, having a hundred or a thousand times more members of your species but having them live under relatively mediocre conditions is probably better than the alternative, where your individual members live better but are so few in number they could be wiped out by a couple of catastrophes.
Kind of a fucked up tradeoff if you ask me.
I'm not saying it isn't! And those calculations no longer matter once you get to industrial agriculture, anyway. We've been able to increase the efficiency of our food production such that only a few percent of all people can feed everybody, with surplus to spare. Even under optimal conditions for hunter-gatherers, that wasn't remotely possible.
There is enough food for every person on Earth to eat, and eat well. Starvation is purely a political issue anymore. Nobody has to go hungry. Anyone going without food is the result of someone making a choice to withhold it from them. But it's certainly not because it doesn't exist.
Hey, now you're saying stuff I agree with.
Well, I'm just telling the truth, aren't I? Industrial civilization is a mixed bag, to be sure. Our ability to feed billions of people is an impressive achievement. But a lot of that is accomplished in ways that aren't sustainable, so we're essentially living on borrowed time. It is possible to do it sustainably--humanity does eventually figure it out, albeit by that point we've got a few billion fewer mouths to feed.
I would also argue that there's really enough of everything that nobody should have to go without basic needs. But you look around and the price of everything is increasing while wages are stagnating. Forget wheat domesticating us--money domesticated us. Money can be used as a weapon to kill people in huge numbers and they won't fight it even a little bit. You can strip people of their livelihoods, push them to the edge of destruction, all because of "economic conditions," and they'll just tolerate it. They'll march right into oblivion because it's not like somebody put a gun to their head and forced them into that situation.
Money is just the tip of the spear, though. It's really a mental framework we're all brought up in. I was, too. We're taught that the world is basically just, even if it's not perfect. Good people get what they deserve, and bad people get what's coming to them. When the world fails to deliver on those promises, it's either due to a personal shortcoming or it's an isolated mistake. But really, it's just a structure built to keep people complacent so they don't realize what's being done to them. You look at a prison, and then you look at places that are like prisons, like refugee camps, and then you look at countries full of desperate people who hardly scrape by, and the only real difference you see is how overt the prison walls are, how visible the guards and their weapons are. But they all operate under the same basic rules. If you are treated unjustly by the prison that holds you, unless you have vast means to fight it, you will only sign your own death warrant by striking back.
Wow, thanks for the nihilism.
I'm not a nihilist at all, believe it or not! But the first step toward destroying this prison is destroying the prison in your mind, so you are no longer bound by the rules imposed on you by society.
I'm smarter than I look, you know. None of this is really news to me.
Yeah, but here you are working a dead-end job getting paid not nearly enough, getting shit for tips, lending a friendly ear to a guy whose business is failing and he's too stubborn to admit it. You've resorted to having some weird old man tell you fairy tales for sixty bucks an hour, and you don't even care how insane the things I say are. You'll come here like clockwork, five days a week, because you need the money. If you didn't need the money, tell me: would you ever show up here?
I don't like you putting it like that. Now that I know you, I think I would definitely still want to hear your stories.
But you would never have been in a position to know me if not for your shitty coffee shop job. You'd be doing something better with your life. If you could be doing anything, what would it be?
Probably writing about postmodern feminist sculpture or something.
I take it nobody will pay you to do that.
Hah. Not unless you already know someone in that world who is willing to hook you up with a job. Or maybe if I could afford to continue my education and got a faculty position somewhere. Then I could do all the research writing I wanted. But with the way the world is now? There's just no way. I'd have to come into a bunch of money--a lot more than you're paying me. Sorry.
Nothing to be sorry for. I think you just made my point. The wheat's probably got it easier at this point, don't you think?
You say that, but the root of "domesticate" means "house." Which of us is living in houses? Not the wheat!
Not much of a brag given how many people don't have houses...