https://redfortyeight.com/2021/12/18/the-creation-of-inequality-google-books/
https://redfortyeight.com/2021/12/18/a-warning-to-take-the-eonic-effect-into-account/
https://redfortyeight.com/2021/12/18/moral-origins-the-evolution-of-virtue-altruism-and-shame-kindle-edition-by-boehm-christopher/
https://redfortyeight.com/2021/12/18/the-dawn-of-everything-gets-human-history-wrong-climate-capitalism/
Original title of Jacobing essay:
No, Large-Scale Societies Don't Need Massive Inequalities

I commented on the Dawn of Everything a few days ago, and then took the critical review at Climate and Capitalism and discussed that in some other posts.
The idea that is proposed about the arc of evolution re: equality, etc, is about as equally dubious as what it wants to replace. But the recent research remains of interest.But the fact remains we have still almost no evidence here. And the theories of evolutionary morality are based on Darwinian fantasy.

Whatever the case I reject his book on the spot because it starts to pontificate on evolution but never discusses the issue of Darwinism as a pseudo-theory. Any book that can't discuss that theory is either confused or dishonest. Increasingly scholars realize the problem but have to conform to the university canon and have to invent some discussion that never discusses the issue of Darwinism. I suspect that with the Dawn of Everything. How can two scholars at a university write such a books and assume the basics of Darwin? Professors are caught in the evolutionary dogma system and can't escape. I am not a professor and won't stand for this hypocrisy. I can't be fired if I don't indulge the pretense. This book needs to be rewritten with a clear discussion of the author's stance on Darwinism and an answer to the clear falsifications of that theory which has wrecke almost a century of anthropological research. And this new research omits the clear evidence that evolutionary theory has been a botch and has confused the thinking of almost every social theorist for the last hundred years.

This book is strangely cockeyed. To attack Rousseau is a complete puzzle. His work is classic, and whatever its flaws was a seminal step to the democratic revolution. What great paradigm shift will we have in attacking Rousseau? His vies about man in a state of nature are perhaps dated/naive but I see nothing in this muddled book that comes close to the thinking of Rousseau.
The key attack seems to be:

Before the rise of agriculture, humans lived in small egalitarian bands. It's been downhill ever since, as our species trends increasingly toward domination and arbitrary hierarchy.

I can well see that this might be a cliche that needs revision, but the evidence is not so clear and I suspect this is another fake paradigm shit. And world history shows considerable trending toward creating equality, granting the dominance of slavery made democracy abort, e.g. in Athens, etc...Modern democracy arises in a clear dynamic moving against domination, so what are we talkkng about?

Enough of this junk. Let Wengrow acknowledge the disaster created by Darwinism and find a way to start over.

Serious consideration of the archaeological record puts to bed the myth that human history follows an evolutionary arc from simple and egalitarian to complex and hierarchical, challenging the assumption that democracy can work in small groups while scaling up requires domination.

Source: No, Large-Scale Societies Don't Need Massive Inequalities