By Lee Vincent, March, 2006

This talk could also be called the greatest irony in history. My subtitle is Sleeping with Pigs.

Some of you know that I have been for a number of years on the advisory board of the Yale Medical School’s Program for Humanities in Medicine, so this is a long –standing intellectual sideline for me.

What follows was largely cribbed from an article called The Worst Mistake in History by Jared Diamond, an article called Stone-agers in the Fast Lane by Melvin Konner, and a book, Health and the Rise of Civilization, by Mark Nathan Cohen.

You may have heard this: I read lately that close to half of all the people on the earth who have ever lived past the age of 65 are alive today, and a good deal more than half of all the people who ever lived past 65 at least were alive during our lifetimes.

We all believe that we are better off in almost every way than the people of the middle ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen and those who came after the cave people –the so-called hunter-gatherers. They were people who never learned or chose to settle in one place, stay there, and grow a crop intentionally.

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