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Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization

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I have to hand it to Spencer Wells. He's a master at explaining scientific data and making a subject that might seem dry and academic come alive. In Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization he takes on the topic of early man's transition from hunter-gatherer to an argicultural basis 10,000 years ago during the Neolithic revolution. Using his background in population genetics, Wells makes the case that in opting for the settled lives of farmers our early ancestors set us on a path toward civilization.

Little did our ancestors know that along with farming, they were also sowing the seeds of overpopulation, disease, obesity, mental illness, climate change and even violent fundamentalism. At least according to Pandora's Seed.

I enjoyed the early chanpters of this book where Wells discussed early man. His points about farming and early urbanization are clearly made, as are his ideas that the plentiful supply of food that could be grown rather than searched for set the stage for the development of diseases like diabetes. But as he delved into other topics it seemed like his ideas were less based on science and more on conjecture. I first noticed this in his chapter on mental illness, but it carried through the rest of the book.

By the time I finished the chapters on climate change and religious fundamentalism it felt like Wells was stretching his ideas almost to the breaking point. Granted, he didn't say anything I disagree with; but it was starting to feel less like science and more like an agenda.

Wells has much of interest to say. I just wish he'd be a little more clear when he's speaking for science and when he's speaking for himself.

The Economist magazine has suggested that if humanity has a "historian-in-chief" it is Spencer Wells, one of the foremost practitioners applying population genetics to refine our understanding of distant human history. That sets a rather high expectation for Pandora's Seed.

Wells builds on the basic evolutionary idea that when the environment changes not all of the genes suitable for the previous environment necessarily remain advantageous. The greatest disruption of this sort in the past 50,000 years, he believes, was when humans began growing their own food about 10,000 years ago, the development of agriculture. Of course, our ancestors had no idea of the long-term consequences of their choices as they began to domesticate plants and animals.

Wells emphasizes those consequences that were not so good. For instance, he argues, human health suffered. For both males and females, longevity, average height, and pelvic indices deteriorated from where they were in Paleolithic times (30,000 to 9,000 years ago) and did not recover until the nineteenth century. "Ultimately, nearly every single major disease affecting modern human populations whether bacterial, viral, parasitic, or noncommunicable has its roots in the mismatch between our biology and the world we have created since the advent of agriculture," he contends.

Wells carries the argument through to current times, although he attends little to the intervening cultural history. He would like us to be more conscious of the "transgenerational" effects of the choices we make as they pertain to, for instance, the health and ethical issues involved in genetic engineering, our impacts on global warming, probable future reliance on aquaculture, and so on. With greater capacity to alter life forms and environments than ever before, "More and more, we are coming to realize that tinkering with nature can produce unintended effects, even if the tinkering seems well planned and justified."

The biological perspective on history has proven bountiful in recent years. In this case Wells begins by covering new genetic evidence of the biological transformations associated with the shift to agriculture. He draws on scholarly publications not typically read by non-specialists, performing a service for general readers. But then he turns to information and points of view that many of his readers will have heard often before. A substantial part of the book relies on material previously accessible in various broadly popular works (Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Bill McKibben, James Howard Kunstler, William McNeill, and Jared Diamond, for example, feature in the bibliography).

Wells set out to delineate the costs of civilization and not the benefits. Having such a one-sided but transparent objective is fair enough, but it should not relieve the author of the responsibility for critical scrutiny of the evidence. Thus it is bothersome that he glamorizes hunter-gatherer life, suggesting that these societies met material needs, had ample leisure time, were egalitarian, were not acquisitive, and were generally non-violent -- civilization ostensibly spoiled all of this. He is aware of at least some of the important contrary anthropological findings, but he glosses over them in order to buttress his theme.

It is no surprise that Wells does not go so far as to advocate reversion to hunter-gatherer culture -- it would be shocking (and more gripping) if he did (like Paul Shepard, for instance). Instead, he is "merely pointing out that we can learn something about the state of modern society from those ancestors." Well, of course, but this conclusion seems rather tepid after all the build-up.

Wells (or his editor) deserves credit for striving to make the book reader-friendly. However, a couple of the devices employed for this purpose generate at best only mixed results. Each chapter begins with an account of Wells visiting some particular place. In certain instances this works to humanize the subject, as in his story of the efforts of a Derbyshire, England couple to save their son afflicted with a serious genetic disease. But certain of these vignettes come across as merely gratuitous -- his visit to Dollywood adds no particular insight to his discussion of modern obesity, for example.

There are more than a dozen charts, mostly easy to interpret. Again, though, a few do not work so well (for example, legends obscured by small print and colors washed out in the transformation to black and white).

Pandora's Seed conveys commendable messages pertaining to human fate and that of our planet, though no truly fresh ones. It does so imperfectly, not quite clearing the high bar I had set for it when I first picked it up.

The enormous change brought about by the invention of agriculture is well documented. As Spencer Wells says in his book, Pandora's Seed, the transition to permanent settlements led "from villages to cities, which joined in empires with written records to pass on to future generations. What before was lost to posterity or decayed into vague myth was now written in stone." Numerous authors have dealt with this historical transition and its impact. (Probably one of the best such books is Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.) Mr Wells however has added a significant new dimension to the analysis. Humans guided the evolution of the plants and animals that they domesticated, but there is now genetic evidence that shows that humans were in turn themselves affected by these changes. Geneticists have now discovered numerous recent mutations to the human genome which resulted from the abrupt change in our environment and our diet. The story which the author develops explains in detail both the scope of these changes and the fact that the impact of those genetic mutations and the dramatic shift in the human environment is still unfolding. He goes on to consider the potential future impact of the tools which geneticists have now developed, which could permit designer children as in the movie Gattica. Thus the initial chapters of the book are powerful and enormously important.

Mr Wells is best when he is talking about genetic science, which he knows in depth. However, he also tackles issues such as our contemporary environmental challenge, psychiatric disorders and religious fundamentalism. I found these secondary discussions interesting in terms of the questions that are raised but ultimately they remain rather shallow and simplistic. For example he writes at length about the conflict between science and religion (or as he terms it mythos vs. logos) but he ends up sitting on the fence. I accept the dilemma that humans seek meaning as well as knowledge. But we need to take a position so as to sift away the myths of the past that frequently impair rather than enhance our capacity for adapting to the challenges of the contemporary world. Ultimately, as Karen Armstrong has written, humans will always tell myths just as they produce art. But the beauty of art (pun intended) is that art can provide meaning and depth to our lives without the risk of confusing it with knowledge or truth. Again Mr Wells analyzes the problem but leaves us stranded without direction.

In the final chapter the author summarizes the issues which suggest humanity is on an unsustainable and catastrophic course. He then proposes a `solution' by suggesting that we need to learn to `want less.' As a rallying call this slogan makes sense. But again it is a rather hollow call. The only realistic way we might bring about such a major change in the course of history is via regulation (and global regulation at that). The road to this goal will be arduous and will require that we build consensus, while defeating misplaced ideas and beliefs. Mr Wells has left us with just the slogan and no further practical guidance. But it is an important an important start and Pandora's Seed is an important book despite my few critical comments.

David Hillstrom
Author of The Bridge

Pandora's Seed is a light, almost trite, treatment of a subject which proceeds from a slender insight. In this respect it is a typical book--one might say pamphlet--of the times.

The premise is that the shift from hunter-gathering to farming had a deep impact on humanity's future. So far, so good. The primary contribution of this book is to summarize contemporary research about population genetics in support of its main idea. I found the idea of Goldschmidt's 'macromutations,' the FOXP2 sequence conferring language abilities, the changing 'waves' of disease burden over 15,000 years, selection pressure for lactase digestion, and other specific factoids very interesting. The book would have worked fine as a general summary, but the author overreaches. He takes these building blocks and tries to create an edifice that he wants to call 'transgenerational power'--the ability of one generation to affect others down the line-- but in the end the author doesn't make much use of it; it's just sort of a metaphorical umbrella hanging over the proceedings, and ends up either explaining too much, or too little.

The problem is that there isn't that much research to summarize, so most of the essay becomes speculation. The reader, for example, will spend alot of time wallowing through anecdotes about the Lower Austrian Psychiatric Hospital and Tuvalu in order to reach conclusory assertions such as the 'psychological mismatch between the densely populated, noisy agricultural world and the sparsely populated hunter-gatherer is almost certainly on of the reasons for the psychological unease felt by many people.' This may be plausible, but there is no research to show that this is true. As a result, all too many sentences end with a question-mark, as in the sense of 'could this be true?' Well, sure.

The author's gratuitous travel anecdotes are annoying; if his publisher paid for these 'research' trips it was exceedingly generous. Each chapter has the author visiting some location around the globe--Chicago, Tuvalu, Norway, England--usually to investigate some trivial detail or have a 'conversation' with somebody which could have as easily been accomplished by telephone. I knew I was in trouble from the first sentence in the Foreward, where he describes himself typing on his laptop, sipping wine at 36,000 feet, flying above the Arabian Sea.

The only thing more annoying is the number of sentences which begin with a variant of "As those of you who have been paying attention will realize..." as if the author was condescending to tutor a group of dunderheads.

Pandora's Seed is primarily a vehicle for a author to pad his resume a 'global adventurer'; along the way the reader gets treated to a few interesting crumbs of research and anecdote laced with condescension, which are, nevertheless a worthwhile expenditure of time to consume despite the poor taste left on the palate.

I'll just have to wash that down with a glass of wine while typing on my laptop (five stories above the ground in Detroit, Michigan.)

The premise of this book is great and it got me to plunk down my $20 for a copy. The idea that the change from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one paved the way for many of the medical and social ills that we face today is truly an interesting idea and worthy of its own book. Unfortunately, this very brief book does not do the subject matter justice.

This book suffers from two big flaws: (1) the author wastes too much time describing his travels around the world, his relationships with colleagues and other distractions that add little value to the book; and (2) the author bounces around from one idea to the next but rarely explores any concept long enough to develop any ideas before he's off to the next segment.

An example of first flaw can be seen at the beginning of the first chapter. He devotes more words to describing the history of his relationship with a colleague at the University of Chicago than he does to discussing the relevance of that colleague's work to this book. This together with his very lengthy and very unnecessary travel anecdotes take up far too much of the book's pages. I'm not sure if this is just bad editing or a deliberate attempt to stretch a short book out to a fill 200 pages.

An example of the second flaw can be found in the third chapter about disease. The chapter begins with a discussion of obesity and it appears that Wells is about to dive into a discussion of how the choice of certain grain crops is a factor in this disease. But before he explores the topic of obesity he cuts the discussion short and quickly moves on to the next segment, which is a discussion of how viruses spread from animals to humans and how they quickly spread across the world. Instead of a geneticist's deep analysis of the topic of nutrition based illnesses we get a very brief, very superficial observation about obesity being correlated to income and then he's off to his next segment about some other disease. Aside from the parts of the book where the author discusses his speciality (population genetics), which are in depth and interesting, most of the insights he offers on topics like medical and social issues are brief and don't really offer much in the way of in-depth analysis. It would have been better if Wells had stuck to 3 or 4 subjects and done a deep dive analysis of them rather than visit 10 subjects and breeze through them in this half-hearted manner.

I really wanted to like this book, the subject matter is interesting and it looked like it had such great promise but the unnecessary travelogue that takes up half of each chapter coupled with the lack of in-depth analysis of key topics make this book a disappointment. If you want some meatier analysis of the impact of the agricultural revolution on human health try reading Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma". If you want to focus on the environmental and social aspects of the rise of agriculture try Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel".

This book is an easy to read science book that traces the biological and social shifts that resulted from the change from being a hunter-gatherer species to being a cultivating species. It is a fast book to read, and easy for someone outside of the field to understand. There are a mix of interesting topics discussed, from emergence of diseases such as malaria and obesity, to changes in DNA, and potential impacts from global warming. As someone who enjoys reading Scientific American, I found this book quite fun and pretty much devoured it on an airplane.

It sometimes sticks to science, and other times meanders around from topic to topic.

There are a few things that detract... there are some more recent studies of Neanderthal's that contradict some of what the author discusses, and I found his theories on middle east peace to be weak and/or out of place... but outside of that the book was quite good.

In Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization the author, Spencer Wells, puts forth his thesis that the development of civilization, particularly the adoption of agriculture, has had a profound impact on the evolution of the human genome. In the opening chapter he cites some very interesting recent work by the geneticist Johnathan Pritchard and his colleagues to elucidate which parts of the human genome has undergone the most recent and intense selection pressure. No surprise they found that genes for skin pigmentation, lactase and alcohol dehydrogenase as well as genes involved in metabolizing sugars and fats all showed recent selection pressures. In the chapter the author also gives a brief overview of the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa (a much better review of this topic is available in Wells' The Journey of Man).
The rest of the book goes on to introduce themes as diverse as: global warming, the depletion of the world's fisheries, areas of origin for domesticated agriculture, the influence of historic weather patterns on the development of cultures and empires, industrial agriculture and obesity in America, the FOXP2 gene and its influence on brain language development in humans, the over-prescription of mood modifying drugs, and the rise of fundamentalism. That is a lot to try to cover and pull together cohesively in just 210 pages. Wells gives a very good, but brief overview of many of these topics and cites a number of very good books (some several times) that cover each topic in more depth. Three of the books he cites more than once, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel all deserve to be read on their own merits. Several very interesting papers by Svante Paabo, Johnathan Pritchard and colleagues are available online such as their paper "Sequencing and Analysis of Neanderthal Genomic DNA," which is available on the NIH website.
Excellent books on climate change and its influence on the development of civilizations are available from Brian Fagan, such as The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (cited by Wells) and Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (not cited). Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works and The Language Instinct are two excellent books on the cultural influences and the genetics involved in the development of language and the human mind. Wells mentions the interaction between genetics, malaria and the expansion of agriculture, but cites very little new information. Christopher Wills gave a much better explanation of the complex interaction of genetic polymorphisms, the several types of malaria and its vectors and agriculture in his book Children of Prometheus: The Accelerating Pace of Human Evolution which was published twelve years ago. The ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan does a much better job of describing the interactions between genes, environments, disease and diets in his book Why Some Like it Hot. When Wells goes on the ground and spends time with the Polynesians of Tuvalu, the native fishermen of Kerkennah or the Hadzabe hunter-gatherers of Tanzania to describe their traditional methods of food production and their culture, how it might indicate the types of changes that have occurred in "modern cultures" and how it is being impacted by modern development, he seems most in his element. Still, I could not help but think about similar travel logs written by Robert Kaplan, who delves into not just the current political and cultural influences in a particular geographic area from a boot-on-the-ground point of view, but also gives a historical context as well as a review of the most influential books previously written about the same area. I guess, in the end, I liked Pandora's Seed and felt that it brought up in a general way a lot of very interesting topics, but as I worked my through each chapter I kept thinking to myself, "there are better, more in depth books on this particular topic".

i like the author's writing and the work he is doing in human genetics, i'm not so sure about this book however. it's a bit odd and disorganized.

he has a really good idea. how has the genetics of human beings, shaped by nearly 200K years of evolution as a small group hunter-gatherer been changed by the neolithic revolution (growing plants and raising animals) of about 10k years? he looks at hypertension, obesity, diabetes then animal viruses, then religion.

the problem is unity around a big theme, or how the bits and pieces join together to tell a coherent story. as is the books is more like a broken pearl necklace, bits of interesting trivia without the connecting string through them.

the book could do with a rewrite paying careful attention to how each section supports and elaborates on the central theme. how is the genetics of human beings being subverted by a new way of living? or how what we are is in conflict with how we live.

it's an important issue and deserves the best possible study and presentation. it's an interesting and gripping book, hence i finished it, eager to learn more but disappointed with what i was unable to build in an organized re-memorable way after reading it. a shame but i suspect the author has lots more to say and i look forward to reading more from him.

If you are even remotely interested in how we (humans) arrived at our present state, this book will prove to be as fascinating as anything you have ever read. I won't go into the details other than to say that the author's ability to explain the complexities of population genetics is in large part one of the books' values. I found it worth reading several times- the first time as the MP3 audio version and then as a paper book so that I could mull over some of the more complex topics. Absolutely worth several reads and the author himself is excellent at narrating it.

Spencer Wells' latest work, "Pandora's Seed, The Unforseen Cost of Civilization" is easy to read and will hold the reader's interest.

Because it is Spencer Wells, who has pioneered with such impressive research into human evolution, i.e., "The Journey of Man", exploring the deep genetics of human evolution and global migration patterns, this latest work comes to the table with high expectations.

I like the fact that Wells is so competent in his ability to boil down esoteric material, much of which is complex and cutting-edge to its essentials. The early chapters of "Pandora's Seed" are very strong, particularly when it involves DNA and human evolution. The middle chapters, "Diseased" and "Demented" are still strong but begin to roam from Wells' central thesis. The final chapters move more into the realm of political analysis and conjecture.

Wells' central thesis harkens back to what anthropologists and ancient history types used to refer to as "the dawn of agriculture." Wells points to the huge shifts in human behavior and organization that were required to make the shift from hunting and gathering societies, (finders and collectors) into non-nomadic societies(creators and cultivators).

Along the way, Wells explores everything from hunting and fishing, creative art-and-schizophrenia, genetic beads, lactose intolerance, glaciation and the ice-ages, in-vitro fertilization, malaria, the HMS Bounty and breadfruit, sugars and starches in the diet, "Dollywood" tourists and obesity, declining worldwide stores of fresh water, the Kyoto Protocol, Islamic fundamentalism, Jerry Falwell and the deep-space mission of the Pioneer spacecraft.

It's an impressive tour-de-force that might be just a little too ambitious. However, it is still a good read.