RE: Agriculture was mankind's biggest mistake.

Rebuttal: My opponent claims that war is inevitable no matter what; he also says that no one would want to die for the greater good and to solve the issue of overpopulation. I find it completely logical that there is a possibility for no war without agriculture, which also relates overpopulation. You said no one would want to die because of over population, but the fact of the matter is that no one would have to, population explosion only occurred after agriculture started to provide enough food to have surplus. It is a basic biological fact that population is limited by the environment that supports it, which explains why there where less people around during the times of hunting and gathering. Because of the population explosion there were more people and fewer resources, making people more completive and eventually causing conflict and war. Another point you bring up is; what if there is not enough food or it all runs away or dies out in one area? This is a simple solution that is still used today; when there is not enough in one environment, migrate to a new one. If you can't get a job in one place, you have to work to make money, so you move to where there is a job to be had. The last point I will refute is disasters. Disasters are disasters, they cannot be controlled or prevented, we still can't stop hurricanes, droughts, and floods. Even with agriculture, disaster still struck, such as the potato famine in Ireland, or the deviating hurricanes that hit the coastlines. When people became "civilized", they started to underestimate and became ignorant of the force of nature. You probably didn't understand what I meant by "inequality between genders, races, and cultures, health related issues such as diseases, and dramatic impact on the world", because these are my next points that I have not gone into detail about. My next point: Inequality between genders, races, and cultures After agriculture had been accepted as the new means of obtaining food, people began to accumulate surplus food, which lead to wealth ,which lead to specialization of labor, which lead to the start of "complex society" (I assume you know how complex societies developed). The first form of inequality, between genders, started when a house hold was no longer farmers, When the head of the house, which was always a male because complex societies became strictly patriarchal, and became let's say a craftsman, only the man would do the craft while the women were left to do domestic work around the house. Only male hairs would learn the trade from their father, while females took over the job of their mother. At the surface it doesn't appear to be unequal, but as things progress it got worse. In Zhou dynasty and in the early 1900s, the role of women became mostly obsolete. In Ancient India, because wives where ultimately dependent a pound their husband, when the husband die, they would throw themselves on his funeral fire. No until the Women's Right movement, did women have equal rights as men by law in the United States. There are still places in the modern world that women are not treated the same as men. I have argued that in post hunting gathering times women's rights where not equal but I have not mentioned how it was in pre agriculture time. During the pre-agriculture era, women and men did not have the same jobs, but they had equal rights. Men hunted because they were bigger and naturally more fit to do the job, while women gathered and bore children, because men cannot have children. The roles of men and women where different, but equal. Inequality between race and cultures also occurred after the development of agriculture. When Indo-Europeans merged with the native people of India, they considered themselves the "noble" ones and better than the natives. We see this occur throughout history when cultures meet, another example is when the Spaniards can to South America and considered themselves better than the natives. A huge example of inequality is slavery that happened in almost every complex agriculture society. Until the idea of ownership (pre-agriculture times) people never considered themselves higher or lower than anyone else. Slavery is the idea that someone owns another person. You never see that in pre-agricultural times. Being the property of someone else is far worse than having to hunt or gather for food. Inequality of any kind is only seen after the development of agriculture. If you have evidence to disprove this, by all means bring it up.