Diamond's main point

I think Jared Diamond's main point in this excerpt was that "it's all about how you look at it." I think he's really trying to say that, sometimes, over the course of history, we tend to just take for granted that if we did it, it is an improvement. There's a lot of judgement built into history. It's not the bushman gatherer in the Kalahari defining the best way to go about setting up a civilization, it's Europeans who have been practicing agriculture for generations. Jared challenges the reader to step back and question the judgements we make when it comes to "advancement." Is the notion that "might is right" an innate human viewpoint? Is more really better (more people, more products, more wealth, more land)? Maybe it is. There's a lot to be said about striving for constant expansion in all realms; it's created the realities you and I live in. I think Diamond's statement that agriculture is the "worst mistake of the human race" is a stretch. The life of a hunter-gatherer wasn't some leisure-filled Utopia (infanticide...? origins of armed conflict in effort to kill off portions of the population seen as competition for resources?) I also find his modern example of the ethnographic study in New Guinea especially problematic because there are a ton of other factors at play there. All in all, I think he does a good job distinguishing the contrasts in lifestyle and certainly highlights the difference of opinion held by historians.