How Agriculture Turned Humanity into a Superorganism with Lisi Krall

Upstream

Politics, News, Society & Culture

4.9 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2018

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For the last 150,000 or so years of human evolution, not a whole lot changed. That is, until about 10,000 years ago, when in the blink of an eye we began organizing societies in very, very different ways. We went from small bands of hunter-gatherers to massive state societies; from having a relatively low ecological impact to devastating the natural environments we existed in; from relatively horizontal organization to extreme hierarchy and finely articulated division of labor. These now all-too-familiar traits have culminated in our modern capitalist era, where individual humans have become alienated cogs in a vast industrial machine that seems hell-bent on destroying everything in its path. How did we get here? What happened 10,000 years ago to put us on this path of expansion and ecological devastation?

This is the question guiding the research of Lisi Krall — an economics professor at Cortland University whose research blurs the lines between anthropology, economics, and evolutionary biology. She believes that the advent of agriculture was a turning point in human evolution, and that we can learn a lot about our modern societies by looking at ant and termite colonies. Upstream spoke with Krall about her eclectic research that has brought together an odd mix of disciplines and a lot of uncanny comparisons. We also explored the ramifications of her findings, which pose much deeper, philosophical inquiries into the existential, environmental, and economic challenges that human societies are facing in our modern era.

Intermission Music: "Human" by Mount Eerie

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh. We have this very complicated evolutionary history,
0:22.9	where on the one hand, we do best,
0:26.5	embedded in a robust other than human world.
0:31.3	We do best, we're healthiest in that kind of world. We do best, we're healthiest in that kind of world. And yet we have this
0:36.2	strange kind of part of our social evolution now that has taken us on a tract which is going to destroy every bit of the non-human world
0:48.2	before we're done.
0:50.0	And so when I look at our present ecological crisis, that's how I see it.
0:57.0	It's a crisis of our own evolution.
1:00.5	You're listening to an upstream conversation with Lisi Kroll, an economics professor whose research blurs the lines between anthropology, economics, evolutionary biology, and most recently, entomology, a branch of zoology that focuses
1:17.7	on the scientific study of insects.
1:21.1	Her current research has brought her together with ecological economist John Gowdy to study how agriculture impacted human evolution,
1:29.5	looking particularly at how human societies have evolved into superorganisms that resemble
1:36.0	ant and termite colonies.
1:38.9	Our conversation dives into these themes and also zooms out to explore broader questions concerning the existential,
1:46.7	environmental, and economic challenges that human societies are facing in our modern era.
1:57.0	Welcome, Lacey. Thank you, Della.
1:58.0	Let's start with just a brief introduction about yourself for our listeners.
2:02.0	Okay, I am a right now a professor of economics at the State University of New York at
2:08.3	Cortland and I concentrate on I guess what you would call ecological economics, but I actually have a lot of disagreement with much of what goes on in ecological economics.
2:23.0	So yes, I've seen you associated both with ecological economics and evolutionary economics.
2:28.0	So what do those two areas of economics mean to you?
2:32.0	And maybe what are the disagreements that you have?
	...

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