The Cranky Anthropologist The Cranky Anthropologist Is it possible to live in a way that completely undermines your own soft- ware configuration? Are we corrupting our own code? Well, yeah, I guess that's where I'm leading, based on the aforementioned hypothesis of our closeness in design to our ancient forebears. Scientists call it evolutionary discordance. The anthropologist Jared Diamond fumed in a famous essay from more than 20 years ago that the move to agriculture 10,000 years ago was "the worst mistake in the history of the human race" (Discovery Magazine, May 1987) and "a catastrophe from which we have never recovered." Diamond emphasized the rigid class-based systems and "gross social and sexual inequalities, the disease and despotism" that agricultural systems have bred, but there were other physical and health-related downsides as well, which persist in a different nature all the way up to modern times. Don't get the wrong impression from my knocks against the Ag Revolution--I love farms, particularly of the small and local variety. I just returned from one, with a juicy bag of salad materials, Macintosh apples, and blueberries. The point of this passage is that the transition from hunter-gatherer to the diet of agriculturalists had bad health