Review of Pandora Seed: The Unforseen Cost of Civilization

I am going to use an acronym CRITIC to review the new book by Spencer Wells entitled Pandora Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization. This is based on the article in Skeptical Inquirer by Wayne R. Bartz: Teaching Skepticism via the CRITIC Acronym and the Skeptical Inquirer from the September/October 2002 Skeptical Inquirer.
C-Claim; what is the claim made? The overall claim of the book is Humanity needs a new mythos of learning to live with less if we are going to continue as a species, our greed "for more" fuels fundamentalism, mental illness, obesity, climate change, and the current issue of modernity. Dr. Wells is not advocating going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle but through development of civilization from Agriculture, we have develop languages, science, cultures, etc. that can not only influence our genome through Eugenics but also, as the last 10,000 years have shown, has given humanity resources and more importantly the responsibility for the sustainability of our species and planet.
R- Role of Claimant; who is making the claim? Dr. Spencer Wells is a Geneticist and residing director of the National Geography Genographic Project.
I- Information Backing Claim, what is it?
1. Modern anatomical Homo sapiens (i.e. modern humans) evolved in Africa 195,000 years ago and left Africa 50,000 to 60,000 years ago to populate the rest of the world. Other Hominid species like Homo erectus, Homo Ergaster which evolved into Homo neanderthalensis left Africa as well much earlier. Homo sapiens are the only Hominid species left, with Neanderthals dying out approximately 25,000 years ago in Europe.
2. Starting approximately 10,000 years ago Humans invented agriculture (probably a woman, since women did most of the gathering in hunter-gatherer societies) and replaced a hunter-gatherer diet with a sedentary agricultural diet high in Carbohydrates which is a contributing factor in our present problem of obesity. Obesity plays a significant role in diabetes, heart disease and hypertension, and other non-communicable diseases.
3. It was through agriculture that communities formed once there was enough food to sustain the community. Over the past 10,000 years these agricultural communities evolved into villages, villages into towns, towns into cities, cities into strong -centralized states that developed non-agricultural specializations like art, languages, religion which required priesthood,craftmen,merchant class, that is, all the hallmarks of what is now called civilization.
Test - Can the claim be tested? Dr. Wells shows how our DNA has for 6 million years, when human split from other primates, lived as hunter-gatherers and how when comparing actual data early hunter-gatherers to early agriculturalist lived longer, where taller, etc and for the last 10,000 years we moved from to a more sedentary life-style that is not necessarily conducive to a DNA and body that evolved from a hunter-gatherer life style. Obesity, other cost of civilization is what we are experiencing and living with today. The reason agriculturalist gained an advantage over hunter-gatherers is because they were able to have more offspring, and evolution is about passing on genes and whoever does this more successfully will have more offspring in future generations.
I- Independent Testing: Have the claim been tested by others? Yes, Jared Diamond have made similar claims in his books, Gun, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies and Collapse: How societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
C-Cause: What explanation, if any, is being proposed? The cause is agriculture. Agriculture taught humanity that we can control our resources to a certain extent. Through agriculture we developed food storage, which lead to surpluses, this lead to gains in status by bartering and selling the surplus. With the sedentary lifestyle people were less likely to give up their resources therefore there was more widespread warfare over limited resources. Agriculture in controlling our resources created civilization and the idea that we are the masters of our own fates, but we have over-extended ourselves by the greed "for more", moving ever increasingly to a world of haves and haves not and the cost of civilization (fundamentalism, global warming, war etc.).

John D. Socrates