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The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race Summary

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Albert Einstein once said, “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” When it comes to trying something new, chances are that a lot of mistakes are going to be made a long the way. A person first learning to play tennis is not going to become a professional overnight. It is possible that they will swing and miss the ball a couple of times, they will undoubtedly hit the ball into the net, and they might not have the proper racket. It is going to take some time before a player becomes good at tennis. It is going to take time before anyone becomes good at something. And in this time, we can recover from mistakes. However, author of “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” James Diamond writes about a mistake that we have not recovered from and may never recover from. Diamond's article is about how the agricultural revolution was the worst mistake in the history of the human race. He starts off by saying, “adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe,” (1). He talks about this “catastrophe” by using progressivist and revisionist views. The progressivist view claims that the lives of hunter-gatherers were improved when they shifted to farming. Farming provided more food, which meant more mouths were being fed. But, this was hard to prove and was then challenged by the revisionist view that Diamond talks about. He says that the revisionists were thinking the opposite. They

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