From: alanm@igc.apc.org (Alan McGowen)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Re: The Return of Nasty, Brutish and Sh
Date: 12 Dec 92 20:34:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #R:hpindda.cup.hp.com:149180148:cdp:1466601977:000:3397
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!alanm    Dec 12 12:34:00 1992


Though I have been unable to find Sigurdsson's quote in _Cultural 
Anthropology_ Daniel G. Bates and Fred Plog, third edition 1990 
McGraw-Hill, they say the following:

"One of the reasons anthropologists find hunter-gatherers 
especially fascinating is that these people show us how humans can 
live on a low energy budget. A *low energy budget is an adaptive 
strategy by which a minimum of energy is used to extract sufficient 
resources from the environment for survival...  

"In general, the primary source of energy that hunter-gatherers 
expend in food procurement is that contained in their own 
muscles. While they may expend energy in building shelters, their 
energy is not diverted into the construction of a complicated 
infrastructure of food procurement  -- cleared fields, irrigation 
systems, or fuel-burning machines. As a result, hunter-gatherers 
spend much less energy to support a single unit of population 
than do other peoples. And since they generally support 
themselves rather well -- in terms of nutrition, leisure time, 
and general physical well-being --  their system must be regarded 
as remarkably efficient.

"They are efficient, too, in preserving their resource bases. 
Because of their low expenditure of energy and because they tend 
to exploit a wide variety of foods, they place relatively limited 
demands on any one of their resources. At the same time, their 
way of life seems to limit their population growth; their numbers 
tend to remain proportionate to those of the animal and plant 
species on which they depend. The combined result of this 
adaptive strategy -- low energy needs, a wide resource base, 
controlled population -- is that hunter-gatherers interfere 
relatively little with other components of their ecosystems... 
Accordingly, their ecosystems appear to be in relative 
equilibrium and their resource bases remain unthreatened, at 
least in comparison with those of other economic systems."

[Pp 99 - 100] 

But this book -- though it shows the recent influence of ecology 
and evolutionary biology on anthropology -- is not about human 
populations.  The *fact* that hunter-gatherer populations are 
typically at long-term equilibrium with the environment (like 
other animal populations) is mentioned, but the causes are not 
probed. Whether this arises purely from ecological limitations, 
as some argue, primarily from cultural adaptation, as others 
argue, or from a combination of the two is still in dispute. I 
would also like to offer the suggestion that this mode of life 
persisted long enough that feedbacks of cultural adaptation onto 
biological adaptation cannot be ruled out. While in general it is 
quite difficult for an animal to evolve mechanisms to restrain 
its own population growth except by strong coevolution, most of 
the reasons for the difficulty may not apply to a species 
evolving in small demes capable of transferring *acquired* traits 
rapidly. 

In my opinion, one of the most exciting areas of population 
biology is the attempt to combine neoclassical evolutionary 
theory based on population genetics with cultural inheritance. 
I suspect that many surprises about ourselves will emerge from 
this. For more about this very new field, see Robert Boyd and 
Peter J. Richerson _Culture and the Evolutionary Process_, 
University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1985.


-------------  
Alan McGowen
Xref: sparky sci.environment:13665 talk.environment:5102