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Mats Kaarbö

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When and why did we start staking out property?

When did it all start and why? Who was the first owner of land and what was the criteria for a person to do so?

Topics: Ancient history cultural evolution education environment evolution society
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  • John Dunbar 10+

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    Oct 25 2012: humans seem to be driven by overdeveloped, sometimes deadly, and almost surely viscous survivalist impulses. Peter Kropotkin wrote a book in the early 1900's calling into question Darwin's stance against mutual aid as an adaptive and necessary trait. Personally i think Kropotkin was correct and capitalism seeks to destroy this aspect of human nature so as to reap profits through an endless play to selfish desires.

    Tribes claimed land so as to ensure there survival this blew so insanely out of proportion as population grew that we now stand here today, guided and coerced by those in power with a primitive pack leader mentality funneled through a modern evolved cortex.
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      bristol ozturgut

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      Oct 27 2012: I haven't read much of Darwin so I'm hoping you can elucidate this "stance against mutual aid as an adaptive and necessary trait." I'm a little confused. If Darwin was against mutual aid as a necessary adaptation, and capitalism is also against mutual aid, what is there to say about Kropotkin's address? I must have misunderstood the dynamic here.

      • John Dunbar 10+

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        Nov 2 2012: Darwin believed as do modern Darwinists that human beings are by nature selfish(this may or may not be true). Adam smiths invisible hand is meant to mean that after he studied nature he saw that through competition and the forming of natural social classes capitalism was the system that should be implemented and through some force(the invisible hand) a homeostatic functioning system would emerge(it is not what the invisible hand actually means but somehow it has turned into that today). Marx also thought this was bogus and that humans by nature are cooperative and needed to be so in order to pass on genes and survive(of course he also though that the system of capitalism was a perversion of our nature meant to exploit certain classes). Marx claimed that because Darwin conceived of his theories in a capitalist society they were invariably tainted when he looked at the functioning of species. In a word, Capitalism and Darwinism both deny humans cooperative nature.

        this article suggests that this idea that "only the strong survive and pass on their genes" is an illusion but then contradicts itself to say that we now know through modern science that this isn't the case. I say maybe its time to update our economic system....
        http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=darwin-misunderstood




        " The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay."-Peter Kropotkin

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