Adaptive Diversity

I'm continuing the ever-unpleasant endeavor of finishing my Fremont Farmer/Forager paper for Dr Janetski. It's focused on Simms' notion of adaptive diversity, if I haven't mentioned that before. Basically the idea is that the Fremont people chose, on an individual basis, how they ought to live each year or season--one year I'm going to farm, the next I'll wander the hills gathering roots and rabbits and such. Interesting concept but not entirely reasonable if you look at hunter-gatherer/farmer behavior throughout the world.

But adaptive diversity puts me in mind of that opening bit of The Gods Must Be Crazy. It talks about how 'civilized' man creates new environments for himself instead of adapting to what he already lives in, such that he has to constantly disadapt himself from his present surroundings and readapt himself to an entirely different set of conditions. This has created all sorts of craziness sense man didn't know when to stop and created a complex of daily adaptations that have become 'required' for survival. Work, home, car, stores, etc.

So why did we do it to ourselves? We created all these 'labor saving devices' which now require children to be sentenced to 12-20 years of education just to survive in this environment that we've created. But if we go out into the original environment from which 'civilized' man emerged, we don't know how to survive.

Hence survival classes that ask people to pay large amounts of money in order to learn how to readapt to their ancestral environment. Sigh. Our air-conditioned, 4 Wheel Drive selves are something of a tribute to our inability to exist in this complicated, 'civilized' world of ours.

And I'm typing this on a laptop that's wirelessly linked to somebody or other's network in the Elms Apartments...ok, so all adaptation isn't bad...