ParanoidObsessive posted... Oh, true. I meant in the immediate aftermath.
From a holistic biological perspective, the discussion becomes more complex. For instance, agricultural created civilization, which led to advanced medicine, which can cure things no nomadic hunter-gatherer could ever have dealt with. So that seems to be a positive. But then again, modern medicine is mostly focused on solving problems that were themselves created by civilization (like health problems caused by fatty foods, or how most diseases stem from close proximity to animals, which stems from domestication, which mainly took place in permanent agricultural settlements). So if you put all the health-based negatives that stemmed from civilization (which might even include things like war or robbery) on one side and balance them against the positives, you might not get a net positive result.
Agriculture really only becomes a net positive if you consider all the advanced aspects of civilization (like art and science and TV and computers) to be worth the freedom and health we gave up to get it.
Yeah, there are a lot of factors involved that make the evaluation pretty complicated and ultimately subjective. It can be interesting to delve into the finer details of it, though as we've both said, it's entirely an academic exercise because it's not like mass extinction and a reversion to pre-agricultural societies is really an alternative.