Did you know that porcupines throw quills at you when they are upset? If you did, then you knew something wrong and you better get this book.

I’m writing a major thing on fallacies, and I will be mining a few examples from this book.

1) confuse life expectancy with lifespan;

2) underestimate the life expectancy of many past populations; and

3) think of the past compared to the present as a dichotomy, the present being one way, the past being the other way, failing to recognize diversity and variation in life history variables across our species and across time … life expectancy is seen as a measure of quality of life (which it may well be) that has tracked the one way progress of the human condition from a widespread past condition of short-lived misery to the present and much improved condition of living long and prospering.

As is the case with other bio-cultural variables such as stature, we often see the past as a particular (and often fairly immediate) past, which actually represents perhaps a few centuries at most and a few percent of the landscape across which our ancestors lived. And, in some of the most commonly conceived of ‘pasts’ … the English Middle Ages, Urban factory towns in the 19th century, some cave in France, etc. … it may well be true that short people experienced a life nasty brutish and short-lived. But in the meantime, in Australia, or South Africa, or the Amazon, or Mongolia, or Nebraska, or Kiribati, one thousand years ago or ten thousand years ago, entirely different things were happening.

Life expectancy is usually phrased as death expectancy, because it is often thought of as the average age of death of individuals of a certain age, estimated for a particular population and using empirical data. Technically, it is actually the number of years of life you have left, expressed as an estimated average for the individuals in your cohort and context. There are two commonly used frameworks for life expectancy: At birth and some later age, often 12 years old. In many populations, death is so common among infants and very young children that life expectancy from birth is a poor representative of what is really being considered, so life expectancy from a later (non-zero) age is more meaningful.

Life span is how long you live. Life expectancy and life span really are, in an informal sense, the same thing (or at least are often treated that way), but life span is usually conceived of by the human on the street as how old the old people are, or how long an individual person (or thing) potentially lives, as opposed to an average. In fact, sometimes life span is thought of as a maximum (the human life span is something like 120 years, because that’s about how long the oldest person ever lived). If you think of life span in any of these ways, then it is very different from life expectancy. Say the life expectancy (from birth or some older age) is 40 years. If you went to a place like this you might find plenty of old people over 70 or so, because 40 is the average age of death, not the actual age of death.

The statement “I’m 40 years old. If this was the Paleolithic I’d be dead by now” belies the confusion between lifespan and life expectancy, but it also, along with other statements of fact about “The Paleolithic” demonstrates widespread misconceptions about the past. (Another clue here is the use of the word “the” … the definite article signifying a lack of variation or diversity in that to which it refers … the “Paleolithic.”)

Consider the following estimates of female life expectancy in the US from Age 10:

1850: 47.2
1920: 55.17
1990: 70.1
2004: 71.3

These data (source)indicate a dramatic change over time, and might be used as the basis for a statement like “If this was antebellum US, and I was 50, I’d be dead by now.” Also, we see what might be a steady increase in life expectancy from the “old days” (1850) to modern times, with not a lot of change after that. Perhaps the Paleolithic ened around 1940 or so.

One reasonable estimate for life expectancy during the “Paleolithic” might be derived from estimating life expectancy for modern day foragers. It would be more convincing if life expectancy estimates did not vary a lot among modern foragers living in a diversity of environments (suggesting that the estimate is robust). This is in fact the case. Life expectancy of forager females at age of 15 in four different groups living in the New World and Old World, and arid vs rain forest conditions, range from about 52 to 58 years¹. So now we see that the “Past” (1850) for US females was perhaps more brutal than the “Past” for our species in general, the former having a much shorter life expectancy prior to the Civil War. (I know: I’m comparing 15 years to 10 years of age, but if we switched from 10 to 20 for the US data the situation would become much more gruesome, and I don’t have data for age 15.)

Human forager females, according to the same data, tend to experience their last reproductive event between 37 and 42 years of age, leaving several years, on average, between having the last child and being unable to care for that child because of one’s own death. Early anthropologists assumed that this made sense because one would want to stop reproducing in time to increase the likelihood of being able to care for offspring for a few years, but in more recent years, evolutionary biologists pointed out that mammals in general don’t do this… they just keep reproducing up until they die, which makes more sense, because it is impossible to say that a certain offspring or litter will be left motherless. So why not give it a try.

Menopause is a biological phenomenon in which women literally shut down their reproductive functioning. The idea that female mammals should keep reproduction up until a death uncertain in its timing may make a lot of sense, but if so, menopause makes no sense. Menopause is not a common phenomenon among mammals: Only a few species have been shown to have a post-reproductive life stage in females. The total number of species in which it has been observed is probably fewer than a dozen. The total number of species in which it has been observed in the wild, and can’t be explained as a function of captivity, is probably two or three (humans included).

The average age of menopause is about 42-58 years of age. If among foragers the average age of death is about 55, and the average age of last reproduction is about 40, and the average age of menopause is between these to dates, than it is possible that menopause is actually an evolved loss of reproductive function. This has been proposed and explained as older females shifting their efforts from reproduction to foraging on behalf of their offspring (and their offspring’s offspring)¹ and in particular, foraging for plant underground storage organs, which are believed to be fallback foods very important in human evolutionary history²

What does all this have to do with falsehoods and lifespans? This: If menopause really is an adaptation facilitating the use of plant underground storage organs by humans, and it happens late in the life of human females, say around the age of forty-something, then this means that there is an entire life-history stage (infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, MENOPAUSE, death) that happens AFTER you falsely assume you would be dead had you lived in the “Palaeolithic.” The Palaeolithic … when this adaptation emerged. So now you know why I cringe when I hear people say that.

So, yeah, sure, life expectancy has gone up, both because the babies don’t die as much and because we have amazing pharmaceuticals and other medical things to reduce death rates all along a person’s life history and to extend death of the elderly well beyond what would happen either in a Paleolithic setting where everyone would have been eaten by a sabertooth cat on their 40th birthday or a post-Palaeolithic setting where everyone would die of hardening of the arteries much later in life. But much of that modern medical-caused variation in life expectancy is post-menopause onset.

Then there is the issue of variation in the past (and present). Simply put, it is not the case that there was A Palaeolithic and A Now. There was a lot of variation in the past, and there is a lot of variation in the present. Many things thought of as having trends in one direction did not. For instance, in many areas, when agriculture was introduced the overall health of the population with this new technology and diet seems to have gone down. Life expectancy probably went down, rate of infections disease may have gone up, various diet-related problems like anemia may have become common, and periods of starvation that often accompany lack of food diversity linked to seasonally rigid high-labor agricultural efforts may have occurred. In some areas where this has been archaeologically documented, things later improved, presumably as a combination of both genetic and cultural adaptations to a new kind of food stress.

The reason this is important is that simplifications of the past (or for that matter, the present) is often associated with a false belief in certain causalities. We live in a “modern” world with certain features, including agriculture, industrial production of goods, lots of time spent on education, and Smart Phones. We have a longer life expectancy. Therefore, Smart Phones, our industrialized world, agriculture, etc. gave us our longer life spans. It’s all good.

The problem is that it isn’t all so simple and it isn’t all so good. Adding agriculture caused disease and death and suffering and other bad stuff. More recently, adding industry does the same thing but worse. Of course, you realize that your Smart Phone and your running shoes and your other cool stuff probably do not affect your life expectancy much, but you must also know that it does affect other people’s life expectancy, and usually negatively. Those people working in the sweat shops in China and Indonesia making your stuff don’t just get underpaid for their hard work. They die younger. The US based women with the lowish life expectancy mentioned above included women working very hard on farms and cranking out unusually large number of babies (and that will kill you) and women working in industrial sweatshops (that can kill you too). The Industrial revolution in the US was not an improvement, overall, for anybody or anything except those who got rich off it.

Humans do not live on a one-way street with two addresses: “Then” (not so good) and “Now” (improved in all ways) and life expectancy is not a variable that maps our movement from a nasty brutish and short-lived past to an all round better present with no stops or turns along the way. The big recent increase in life expectancy notwithstanding, various different populations of humans have experienced numerous shifts in health and well being, some tracked by expected age of death for various cohorts.

¹Kaplan, H, K. Hill, J. Lancaster, A. M. Hurtado. 2000. A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity. Evolutionary Anthropology 9:156-185, 2000.

²Laden, G. and R. Wrangham. The rise of hominids as an adaptive shift in fallback foods. Journal of Human Evolution. (pdf

We hear a lot of talk these days about “voters” being repressed in their attempt to be involved in the Democratic primary process. There may be something to that, and it might be nice to make it easier for people to wake up on some (usually) Tuesday morning and go and vote in a Democratic or Republican primary or visit a caucus. But there is a difference between a desire for a reform and the meaningful understanding of that reform — why we want it, how to do it, and what it will get us — that makes it important to do what we Anthropologists sometimes call “problemetizing the concept.”

We can start with the statement that in the primary system, “Voters should not be kept from involvement by rules that make it impossible for them to engage in the democratic (small “d”) process.” That sentence seems reasonable, even important, and is essentially a call for open, instead of closed, primaries, or in some cases, for replacing a caucus with a primary.

The first part of the sentence that is problematic is the word “voters.” Yes, people who vote in a primary are voting, and thus voters, but that is not really what a voter is in our democratic system. A voter is a person who votes in the general election for a constitutional candidate. The constitutional candidates got on the ballot, usually, through our party system in which a formally recognized party puts someone on the ballot by filling out the right paper work and following a bunch of law-based rules and some other rules that the party itself makes up. The person who goes and votes in a primary is doing something subtly but importantly different. They are participating in the party’s process of selecting a candidate. In theory, this could be done with no voting. It could be done by people meeting several times to pick surrogates, who will be delegates to a convention. Even when it seems like one is visiting a polling location and casting a vote for a candidate, that is not really what you are doing. You are actually casting a vote that will be put together with all of the other votes cast in that state for use in a formula that will cause chosen delegates to vote a certain way on the first ballot at a national convention, after which they can do (more or less) what they want.

I’ve seen people use the word “elect” and “election” in reference to what people are doing during the primary process. But we are not doing that. The statement that “Voters should not be kept from involvement by rules that make it impossible for them to engage in the democratic process.” is improperly framed, because what happens in the primary process does not really involve voters, but rather, individuals who are participating in a party’s process in a way that often involves casting a ballot, but really not a ballot for a particular candidate.

Now lets travel down the sentence a bit farther until we get to the phrase “kept from.”

There are a lot of ways to keep someone from casting a ballot or caucusing that are bad and that should be fixed. In Minnesota we cast our presidential preference ballot during a one hour time period at a large building (usually a school) with inadequate parking, often far from where people live, not on a bus route, in the dark (lots of people don’t drive in the dark), under conditions that are dauntingly chaotic. It is assumed, almost certainly correctly, that this causes a lot of people to not even show up. If an insufficient number of polling places is arranged so it takes hours of waiting to pick your candidate, or if you show up and somehow you are not allowed to vote because your name has been incorrectly removed from the registration list, or something along those lines, then you are being kept out. These and similar things are bad and should be fixed.

But a lot of the “kept from” stuff is not about any of that. Rather, it is about the particular rules a party uses (or all the parties in a state, in some cases) that the participant must know about and follow in order to be involved in the process. In New York you have to be registered in a party to vote in that party’s primary. In New Hampshire it, a registered Democrat must vote in the Democratic Primary, a registered Republican can vote in the Republican primary, and a registered Independent can pick at the last second which of those two party’s primary to vote in. I’ll discuss in a moment why these rules a) should be changed and b) shouldn’t be changed. For now, though, we need to recognize that these are not things done to keep one from involvement. They are simply the rules for being involved. Potential party primary participants who are kept out of the process because of these rules are, essentially, repressing themselves (sadly).

Now let’s go even further down the sentence (“Voters should not be kept from involvement by rules that make it impossible for them to engage in the democratic process.”) and look at the word “involvement.”

I’ve already implied that involvement in the primary or caucus process is not the same thing as voting, even if you think you are voting at the time, because you really aren’t quite voting for a candidate (I quickly add that yes, this is true with the Electoral College as well, but generally we feel that we have an inalienable right to vote in the general election for all sorts of candidates, and only one of those offices is somewhat indirect, and perhaps it shouldn’t be).

Involvement is not casting a ballot in a primary or standing on a table holding up a sign in a caucus one time. Involvement is bigger than that.

Consider Sorkin’s Rule “Decisions are made by those who show up.” That is actually not true. Important decisions about complicated things require multiple conversations, meetings, etc. The actual rule should be “Decisions are made by those who show up. And then show up a few more times.”

I suspect that the majority of people who are pointing at long established party rules and complaining about being kept form involvement really don’t want to be “involved” in the way it takes to really be involved because it takes a fair amount of work. Rather, people seem to want to vote for a candidate and go home, and have that be all there is to it, and have it count. But involvement is actually more complicated than that, and may require more work than that.

For example, consider the recent caucus in Minnesota.

We don’t actually caucus for president here, although it is called that. Rather, we cast a vote (as described above) just like in a primary, but a rather badly done primary. In Minnesota, as well as in other states, that vote ultimately determines only one thing: how will the delegates that the state sends to the national convention vote on the first ballot. If you want a particular candidate to survive an open convention, or if you want your candidate’s party platform planks to be considered, you better send a delegate supporting your candidate to the national convention somehow, and do some other things. To do this, you will have to show up not just once, but a couple or a few times.

In Minnesota, we had that preference ballot, and at the same event (the precinct caucus) people were able to present resolutions, which could ultimately be part of the party platform if approved by enough people. The resolutions that go through this process are the party platform, and the party platform doesn’t come from anywhere else. So resolutions are presented at the precinct caucus, and voted on, and if approved, go on to the next level. Also, at this precinct caucus, delegates are selected to go forward in the process.

A few weeks later, there is a Senate District convention. All the precinct level resolutions are listed on a ballot, and the delegates that moved forward can vote on them. Delegates are welcome to rise in support or opposition of a resolution, and there is discussion among all the delegates of these resolutions. So the voting itself is a democratic process, but that process is enhanced by a conversation at which questions can be raised and answered and issues can be clarified. The resolutions that are passed on will likely become part of the state party’s platform.

A this event, the delegates select among themselves a smaller set of delegates that will go on to the next level (Congressional District or County). Those delegates will form the pool from which the national delegates are ultimately chosen, and they will vote on other party issues at higher levels of the caucus process.

That, folks, is involvement. If you go forward to this level and participate, you have influenced the party platform, and you have influenced which actual people go forward as delegates. Maybe you yourself will even be one of these delegates.

Sticking for a moment with Minnesota, let me tell you what happened at my caucuses, because it is illustrative of a key point I’m trying to make here.

There were about twice as many votes cast in the presidential preference ballot than individuals who stayed in the room to participate. The people in the room were the usual Democrats who show up every two or for years, among whom were several Clinton supporters and several Sanders supporters. I’m pretty sure the two people running the show included one Clinton supporter (my guess) and one Sanders supporter (I know that for a fact. Hi Robin.)

Note to Sanders supporters: Those of you who voted and left gave up an opportunity for involvement. Casing your ballot was easy, and thank you for doing that. But it wasn’t enough.

Also in the room were about a dozen Sanders supporters who I’m pretty sure (and in some cases, I’m certain of this) had not participated in the process before, ever, even though their ages ran from just eligible to vote to mid 40s or so. The chair of the caucus asked for a show of hands of how many people were new to the process. Several hands went up, and the rest of us cheered them and welcomed them. In other words, what some might call the “party insiders” (people who show up again and again) welcomed the noobies, and were very happy to have them there. So this was about a 50-50 mix of Clinton-Sanders supporters cheering on a bunch of new folks who were likely in majority Sanders supporters.

It was interesting to see what happened when resolutions were presented. Some of the resolutions caused these newer folks to take notice and ask questions. Two resolutions asked that various aspects of medical coverage for transgender medicine be restored to the state health plan. These provisions had been removed by the Republicans, and the Democrats wanted them back. The Sanders Noobies said things like “this shouldn’t apply to kids” and “this is a lifestyle choice, why should it be paid for by taxpayer?” and such. They did not understand that those are issues that have long been dealt with by the medical community, and were not concerns. (Much of this was explained to them by a transgender woman who was in the room). Once the Sanders Noobies understood this, they supported the resolutions (mainly, there were a couple of conservatives who voted against several liberal resolutions, which is of course their right). The same thing, roughly, happened with two or three other resolutions having to do with issues of race and racism.

That was fantastic. Sanders supporters, involved in the political process for the first time, were engaged in a conversation in which they became more aware of certain issues, and asked questions, and had a conversation.

Note to Sanders supporters: Those of you who stayed at the caucus meeting contributed to the conversation and learned more about the issues. That was involvement. Thank you for doing that.

At the Senate caucus, the resolutions were available to vote on, and there was extensive conversation about them. The conversation was so extensive that the chair of the caucus noted that he had never seen such involvement. Oh, and by the way, he also asked for a show of hands of those who were there for the first time. There were many, and the rest of us applauded and cheered them, and thanked them.

The Senate District Caucus, as noted, selects a subset of delegates to go forward. This was done as a walking caucus, and because of the way a walking caucus works, people were divided up into groups that had a candidate’s name (or uncommitted) along with an issue. For example, “Sanders and wealth inequality” or “Clinton and health care” or “Uncommitted and education,” etc.

The number of delegates that were elected to go on were about 50-50 Sanders vs. Clinton. (Slightly more for Clinton than Sanders.) In other words, a Sanders win in the presidential ballot preference (at the Precinct Caucus) was erased with respect to the delegates that went forward. Our Precinct caucus was allowed to send some 12 delegates forward, but only about 6 people volunteered, and of those, only two showed up at the Senate District Caucus.

Decisions are made by those who show up. Multiple times.

So the outcome of this process was that the ratio of Sanders to Clinton delegates who would support one of the candidates in a second ballot, or in convention business, or with the party platform, from our caucus, does not reflect the presidential ballot exactly because Sanders supporters did not show up. I checked on some other Senate District Caucuses, and others had better numbers for Sanders, but I think the final outcome is close to 50-50.

Note to Sanders supporters: Showing up at the precinct caucus to cast a presidential ballot, and then not showing up again, was not enough.

A walking caucus is a bit complicated, and there is a way to do it to maximize a preferred outcome in terms of delegates passed on to the next level. I note that the Clinton supporters at that event did so, but the Sanders supporters probably lost one delegate because the were imperfect in their strategy. Why were thy imperfect? Because this process, which is highly democratic, grass roots, conversational, and all that, is also a little complicated. In order to do it right, it is helpful to have a number of people who know what they are doing (because they did it once or twice before, or got a half hour of lessons form someone who knows how to do it … very doable) on your side. The Sanders Noobs, bless their pointy heads, may have lost one delegate because they did not show up multiple times over the long term (from year to year) and the Sanders campaign did not bother to engage in the “ground game” in Minnesota.

This illustrates a problem with democracy. The problem is not that the process is necessarily complicated so the good guys lose. The problem is that having a real conversation and real involvement is not simple, and requires a little more effort. This puts a small disadvantage on the insurgent, but only a small one. The outcome is that people show up, talk, listen, learn, influence, make things happen.

A word about New Hampshire, as promised.

In New Hampshire, you register for a party (Democratic or Republican) or as an independent. This registration then limits your choices for what happens in a primary (so it is a semi-closed primary). People who say they want the rules changed to allow better involvement object to this. If you are a Republican who decides you prefer a Democrat, you can’t vote for the Democrat. That is, of course, not really true because this is not the general election, it is the primary, but whatever.

Here’s the thing, though. If you are an independent in New Hampshire, you are a special political snowflake. The activists and campaigners in both major parties have your name (you are registered) and will court you and buy you coffee and talk to you and visit you and call you on the phone and give you a lot of attention, and pay careful attention to what you say. You are the subset of people who will determine the outcome of the primary, in many cases. This is a situation where the rules, which are restrictive, actually enhance and amplify involvement for those who register in this manner.

Something like this happens at a different level of intensity with party registration in general. Even where there is no registration in a party (like in Minnesota, we don’t register here), there is a list of probable party supporters. This underlies strategies for mailings, coffee clutches in homes, door to door visits, etc. Here’s a hint: If you want to have a bit more influence in the process, donate five dollars to a candidate. You and your views will be attended to, at least to some extent.

A word about party platforms. People say, without evidence generally, that party platforms are not important, that no one pays attention to them. At the state level, this is simply not true. The party platform is the legislative agenda of the party. The success of a party’s effort during a legislative session is measured by the degree to which the party platform, which was determined by the people who showed up — multiple times — was put into effect. Seated legislators and governors take credit for their implementation of the platform, or find reasons to explain (often blaming the other party) why planks from the platform were not implemented, in their campaign speeches, campaign literature, and appeals for funding.

It might be true that these things matter less at the national level, but there are some good reasons for that. National policy implementation is often more reactionary than at the state level because politics are often shaped by unexpected international events or an uncooperative economy. But it still matters.

Now, back to Minnesota for a moment, for another stab at problematizing the premise. All that caucus stuff I’m talking about allows involvement by citizens to shape the political future at the local, state, and national levels. But we often hear that a simple primary, where you just vote and go home, counts as better, or more real, or more meaningful involvement in the political process. (This of course ignores the fact that voting in a primary does not influence the party platform or other party issues.)

In Minnesota we also have a primary. It happens late in the process. One of the main objectives of the caucus system is to endorse candidates for Congress, and rat the state level and below (but not municipal, usually). The caucuses can endorse a candidate, but that endorsement does not mean that the candidate is put forward by the party. The candidate is only put forward if they get the majority of votes in the primary. Often, probably almost all the time in fact, the various candidates for a particular office fight for the endorsement, then drop out if they don’t get it. But sometimes one of those candidates, or an entirely different candidate that was not even involved in the endorsement process, puts their name in the primary and runs.

The reason this is interesting and important vis-a-vis the key points I’m making here is this. The system that many seem to prefer because they think it is true involvement (and anyone can vote in either primary, there are no restrictions, in Minnesota) actually has the potential to circumvent and obviate the grass roots endorsement process. It allows a person with means to swoop in and become the party’s nominee. This happened recently two times. In one case, a person of means swooped in and took the party’s nomination form the endorsed candidate for governor. He won the election and became one of the best governors we’ve ever had. In a different case, a person with means swooped in to try to take the party’s nomination at the primary from a highly regarded much loved State Auditor, who had been endorsed. In that case, the swooper spent piles of money on the primary but was roundly shellacked, losing in an historic landslide.

Note to those who want to switch to having a simple primary for everything because it allows for more democratic involvement by the citizens; No, it doesn’t.

“Voters should not be kept from involvement by rules that make it impossible for them to engage in the democratic (small “d”) process.”

It is not a simple truth that closed primaries or caucuses limit involvement. That can happen, but limitations (i.e., as in New Hampshire) can increase involvement. Citizens who want to be involved but found this difficult because they did not know or follow the rules have repressed their own involvement. Personally, I would advocate for open caucuses or open primaries, so I don’t disagree with the proposals being made so vocally these days. But I think that many who are calling for such reform do not really understand why we want it, how to do it, and what it will get us, and what we might in some cases lose from it.

The caucus system is better than the primary system in many ways, because it encourages and allows a lot of involvement. But in those instances were we are basically voting for a preference, the caucus system can be stifling. We need to ask what we want, how to do it, and what it will get us, at a more detailed level, and then find solutions that may in some cases be hybrids, or may in some cases require only minor tweaking in the system.

I think people need to ask themselves why they are independents. Some people are independents because they dislike the party system, but I’m sure they are wrong to think that. Parties are organizations that give voice and power to regular people. We should work towards enhancing that effect, not tossing it like bathwater out the window. Others recognize that being independent gives them a bit more political power than being a party member, in some cases. Those folks have a problem in states where not being registered in a party takes you out of the primary process. Those individuals have to decide if they want to engage in a party system for a given year or not, or they need to advocate for an open system in their state. I recommend following the first strategy immediately — learn the rules and use the party system when appropriate — while advocating long term for the second strategy. What I do not recommend is complaining about a system you don’t fully understand and demanding specific changes that would actually reduce, rather than increase, your involvement.

I also suggest that people do two other things. One is to remember that the primary system is a totally different process than the general election. In a way, you can’t actually suppress voting in a primary, because a primary (or caucus) is a way a party, which could select nominees in any of a number of ways, reaches out the the people. Furthermore, you are not really voting for a candidate, but for delegates, and by voting and walking away, you are not really even doing that.

The other thing is to understand the numbers better. This is a bit of a digression from the main points of this post, but important. Remember my comments above about percentages of Sanders vs. Clinton supporters in various subsets of people at these events. It is not the case that the “party faithful” or “established Democrats” (people who show up multiple times) are Clinton supporters and the Noobs are Sanders supporters. Yes, there are differences in proportion, but evidence from Minnesota belies this oversimplification. My best guess is that about half the established Democrats (we call ourselves DFLers here) in Minnesota are for Sanders, and half are for Clinton, but Sanders won the presidential preference ballot because some extra people who were mainly Sanders supporters showed up. But then many of those Sanders supporters did not show up multiple times. The influence they had was to put the state in the Sanders win column, but remember the numbers. Sanders only got a couple of more national delegates than Clinton, and in the end the two candidates will have the same number of supporters, I predict, at the convention. So, the only influence there is in one — critical but singular — event at the convention, the first ballot.

Democracy is great, and democracy is hard. There are reforms that are necessary, but gravitating towards easy, thinking that enhances democracy, is foolish. If you make it too easy it will not be as great.

And, really, it isn’t all that hard.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the phrase “Every culture has a story about a flood…” This is very annoying because a) it is not true (I can think of several cultures that do not) and b) it is very Euro-centric, as are most phrases that start with “Every culture has a…”

So, I decided to enter the phrase “Every culture has a” into Google and see how many other stupid ideas I could find.

The list is not very long because this exercise, while interesting in principle, can get a bit old. But here is what I found before I tired of it:

• Every culture has a folk song about the circle of life…
• Every culture has a creation story, and every culture has a priesthood to interpret the story for them
• Every culture has its fried dough
• Every culture has a system for educating their young
• Every culture has a version of elves
• Every culture has a jewel that pops out the berries
• Every culture has some particular form of puppet theater. Not every culture has a form of acting theater
• Every culture has a word for experiences and understandings shared by people the world over
• Every culture has a “cultural unconscious” that drives the behavior of its members.
• Every culture has some kind of flatbread that is served frequently with all kinds of meals
• Every culture has a state religion or two
• Every culture has a distinct and colorful folkloric tradition
• Every culture has a holiday (or two) to observe
• Every culture has a creation story jealously guarded by a priesthood
• Every culture has drugs
• Every culture has a food that others would find just horrifying
• Every culture has a chicken dish
• Every Culture Has a Pancake
• Every culture has a catty corner
• Every culture has a legend about a great flood..

Now, I admit that in about four of these cases, the word “almost” preceded the word “every.” This, however, does not make the statement more likely to be true. For instance, the last one on the list, about the great flood, is from a recent item in Discover suggesting that a comet caused the great flood, claims that “Almost every culture has a legend about a great flood…” Unless “almost” means “A small number of” then the statement is grossly incorrect.

Ah, surely, the world would be such a better place if only it were true that every culture has a pancake….

Along with this belief comes another important concept: That the people who live in these developing civilizations needed to be able to deal with all this increasing complexity. People needed to be smarter, perhaps more adaptable, more long-range thinking, and so on. And along with that belief often comes the very personal belief than an individual who is part of one of these civilizations today might have: “I am a civilized person. Therefore I face challenges that my primitive hunter gatherer fore-bearers did not face. I live in a more complex world than has ever existed before. Indeed, I am this complex world. I. Am. Complex.”

Admit it. You were thinking that just now, weren’t you?

I’d like to offer a way of thinking about the difference between what we call “civilization” and what some people call “primitive cultures” that will be more useful and less falsehood-prone than the above simplified model. But first, I want to problemetize the word “primitive.” The word has connotations that are almost always associated with negative things. If you were to be compared to another person, in terms of your taste in clothing, your mental capacity, your talents and skills, your understanding of the world around you, your ideas, and so on, you would feel bad if in each of those comparisons those doing the comparison decided that you were primitive relative to the other person. From this I’m sure you get the idea, and I don’t think I really need to explain in great detail why primitive is negative.

Two of the most important areas where primitiveness is often assumed are morality/ethics and intelligence. If we go along with the hunter-gatherer vs civilization = primitive vs. not primitive concept, then it falls apart immediately. We don’t have IQ data on hunter-gatherers, but we do have some brain size data. Absolute and relative brain size is larger for hunter gatherer populations, both living and prehistorically. With respect to the moral/ethical side of things, that’s hard to judge because of cultural differences, poor sample size, and a complete absence of a comparative methodology that is not either trite or bankrupt. (Missionaries will tell you that the primitive people are morally inferior. Missionaries suck.) All I can tell you is that Stalin was not a hunter gatherer. Hitler was not a hunter gatherer. Kirk Cameron is not a hunter gatherer. And so on. None of the great moral or ethical transgressions that have been written down in the history books have anything to do with hunter gatherers. Assuming that they are morally inferior is just made up. At worst, there is no evidence pertaining to the question.

So let’s dispense with the term “primitive” society vs. civilization and switch to saying HGs (for hunter-gatherers) vs Western. Why not “civilized”? I’m sorry you asked that. You don’t really think you’re “civilized” just because you say you are, do you? Abu grave anybody? Fraternities? Astroturfers? Civilized? I don’t think so. Just “Western” will do for now although it may not be the best term, and in this sense we mean people who have lived over the last centuries in cities, states, industrially and technologically high energy consumption and industrially based cultures and economies, with the comparative sample we will use for this discussion being you and me, people who live in “the west” or something like it, have electricity, grocery stores, etc. etc.

So HG vs. Western.

The way I suggest we should best think about this comparison can be illustrated by using the simple case study of how one might go about getting a meal on the table. What do you, a Western person, need to do to have dinner and what does that entail, vs. what does a HG have to do.

At first gloss, this is where the “primitive people are simple but civilized people are complex” thing completely disintegrates. To get a meal on a table, a meal that has a piece of meat, a starch, and a vegetable or fruit, here’s what you have to do:

Step one: Open the refrigerator or freezer and take out a prepared meal in a box.

Step two: Put the meal in the microwave and set the timer and press start.

Step three: (Careful not to burn yourself!) take out the meal and put it on the table.

For a HG to get the same meal, the following has to happen:

Step one: The camp (that is the usual word we use for residential groupings of most foragers) divides up over the course of the day with different groups of people, or individuals, seeking out different types of food. The product of these efforts will later be shared.

Some of the men hang out for an hour or two fashioning pieces of equipment that they will need in their toolkit. Eventually they do some magic and get up and go hunting, with spears, bows and arrows, knives, traps, and other implements that they have manufactured and maintained themselves with materials they have gathered, some quite rare some more common. They will use these tools in a manner that only a lifetime of experience and training will allow. Some of the men are well known for specific techniques they’ve developed or advanced, some are known for being especially skilled at a particular aspect of hunting. They also have one or more properly trained dogs with them. Most likely the dogs were trained by a specialist in dog training.

They do some hunting magic.

Hunting can be done in a lot of ways, in groups or singly, but I wont’ go into that now. Suffice it to day that you need to know a lot of different steps and you need to be quite skilled to carry them out. So let’s say that step one is actually steps one through ten, which is probably an underestimate.

Step eleven: Some of the women do some magic and then go, with their children, to a clearing where they know there will probably be roots. They find the small, almost impossible to see vines of various plants coming from the ground and trailing up into the canopy overhead. Some of these vines lead to a root that is used for fish poison, and if you even touch the root you may get sick, so when you are foraging for food, you don’t want to accidentally dig it up. Other vines indicate roots that are not ready to dig up yet. The women consult with each other, and the older women instruct the younger women on some of the nuances, and they decide which plants to dig. They sharpen their digging sticks using a knife that they had sharpened earlier that day (the day before, one of them replaced the handle on the same knife) and dig up the roots. They package the roots up in a container skillfully made on the spot, and leave a bit of the roots attached to the vines and replace them in the holes they dug in a certain way so that the roots will regrow in the future. They do some more magic. When they bring the roots back they will have to be processed properly and cooked in a special manner. Even though these particular roots do not have the fish poison in them, they are still highly toxic and the very young and the very old, or the sick, can die from eating them if they are not properly processed.

Another group of women and two men who are disabled go to a stream. The do some magic. They build a two dams on the stream to isolate a 200 foot long section, and empty that section out using ‘buckets’ they skillfully fashion on the spot. When the stream is half empty, they mush the leaves of a nearby plant into the water, and this causes most of the fish to come to the surface, where they are harvested and wrapped up in packages skillfully made on the spot. Then they start to probe under the partly exposed bank for crustaceans and more fish. Two of the younger women are less careful and are badly shocked by an electric eel, but an older woman administers medicinal aid and explains how to avoid that next time. The women who are shocked do not think this is funny but everyone else does. As the women are finishing up this job, the two disabled men and one of the women gather up and package fruit fallen on the ground from a nearby tree, selecting only the fruits that are fresh and not munched on by the forest antelopes. They note, however, that the forest antelopes have been here, and plan to come back the next morning to set up an ambush.

OK, so that’s steps 11 through 64.

Eventually, after a few hours out foraging, all of the people manage to get back at roughly the same time. Two of the women who stayed in the camp hear people returning and skilfully stoke up their fires. Some of the children, as they return, are sent out to get more firewood. Some of the women take burning firebrands from the women who had stayed in camp to make their own fires. Water is fetched, food processed, food put into pots of clay that had been manufactured by some of the women a few months back, and one of the children comes back without water but instead a bunch of peppercorns from a nearby vine.

Eventually all of the food is processed and cooked. Not counting messing with the hunting implements in the morning, the entire process took four hours. And it was a hoot. This was a series of social events, jokes and stories were told, songs sung, tricks were played, people laughed until their sides hurt, people reminisced about a recently dead relative who had always liked to fish this particular stream (but got shocked by the eel that time and swore up and down for an hour, remember???). This wasn’t just a trip to the grocery store. It was the expression of a lifeway. Westerners pay extra money to spend a few days every few years doing this.

That was approximately steps 64 through 92.

You! Civilized person! Switch places with the hunter gatherers and see if you can make their meal. You would starve. You would die in the bush. You just would not be able to do it. Well, of course, this is a group effort, so that is an unfair comparison.

So, you, and 16 of your best friends and their kids and grandparents! Let’s see you do it! Well, no, you’d all starve. Eventually a group of “Westerns” might be able to learn how to do this, but if you sent a hundred such groups out into the bush to see how well they did (and equip them with books and videos showing how to do all that they need to know) they still starve or die of mishap long before they got the hang of it. They just would not be smart enough. They just would not be good enough.

On the other hand, if you take a forager and try to teach him or her to open a fridge and operate a microwave, he or she would probably starve to death as well, right?

Keep kidding yourself about that. In part two of this falsehood (yes, this is a two parter) we’ll look at the other side of the equation. For now, the immediate point should be apparent: When it comes to the basic daily task of putting food on the table, and for that matter for virtually all other daily tasks, you the Westerner can have the capacities of a relatively smart cucumber and you’d be fine, but in the hunter-gather world, it takes a team of highly trained experts working hard and working together doing very complex things every day to survive.