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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It always makes me laugh when professors of nutrition warn of long-term health dangers. They are clearly just parroting rote since no long-term health dangers are known about Atkins, but they never tell you this. They never tell you when their professiorial expertise ends and the saloon-bar savant is taking over. As I have pointed out earlier in this thread it is unlikely that Atkins will ever have long term dangers because it is precisely the diet that the human body was evolved to cope with. (I acknowledge however the possiblity that our guts have changed over seven thousand years of a cereal diet.)
Glad to hear about probiotics. I have just put my mum on a course of them after a course of antibiotics was prescribed for her since there is the clear possibility that the one will kill off the other. However I was astonished that she hadn't heard of them even though they are advertised on the telly every ten minutes. This would seem to indicate that the elderly just blank out new stuff.
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| "I was doing some thinking this morning about how every meal in every culture involves some mix of protein and carbs. Everyone eats carbs, everywhere, which is why I find it hard to believe there was ever a time we lived without them. Every culture in the world has always been organized around the cultivation and consumption of one carbohydrate or another. |
Mankind is usually described as omnivorous and that is certainly true if we look at all the different races/cultures as has been debated here - various African tribes that drink blood and milk, Eskimos who eat fish and marine produce (seal, whale) and very little carbohydrate. So there are cultures that eat very little carbohydrate and appear to thrive. Very difficult for us to emulate them because we don't have wild meat available to us. Beef is much more fatty than wild meat such as venison and the extra fat is generally considered to be "bad" fat - it even accumulates within the lumps of steak and can't just be cut off. Sheep/lamb may be a bit more wild although they too are fattened for market.
Maybe the question should be what is the natural diet of modern Europeans - that is to say what diet have we evolved on. First of all our small jaws and teeth suggest that cooked food is our natural diet. I believe Neanderthals had larger jaws and may have been better adapted to raw food. We are definitely adapted to cooked food so the discovery of fire and learning to cook was a major development. Cooking enabled hard seeds and beans to be softened and certain poisons in beans inactivated by cooking vastly extending the range of things we could eat.
And processing of food began very early - you just need to watch Ray Mears on tv - there are lots of wild foods that have to be ground up and washed to remove poisons or bitter substances (eg acorns) and others that need to be squashed and squeezed to get the goodness out of them. I think it is the mechanical processing of food, which developed first with the windmill and then with steam driven mills in the 19th century, that has led to over-refinement as Cleave pointed out when he alerted the world to benefits of bran and roughage, as the Victorians called it. However lots of research since then has found that cereal fibre as we now call it has relatively little health benefit - certainly very much less than was suggested for a while. Vegetable fibre may be better but Eskimos/Masai don't get much of it and it seems to me uncertain that we need it as a part of all diets.
So how have we evolved to make use of food? The best example is probably lactose intolerance which is much more common in Europe than in the Middle or Far East. It is inherited of course and the story is that it has evolved in herders and dairy farmers. Even before farming arrived in Europe there were probably herders who like the Masai, Dinka etc ate a lot of milk and blood. So we (native Europeans) are adapted to a dairy diet. However milk has changed a lot since the agricultural revolution. Cows have been selected for milk fat production and so we get milk that is very fatty. Semi-skimmed is probably much more like milk used to be a few hundred years ago.
So Britain was probably settled on the one hand by lactose tolerant herders coming from the East but, as suggested by genetic studies and possibly backed up by language studies, also by Atlantic coastal boat people coming from north Africa and the Portuguese coast as the ice melted. These latter people were fishers and probably lived something like the inhabitants of St Kilda who continued with their traditional lifestyle until the 1920s/1930s or thereabouts, I believe. They fished and they collected eggs and birds from cliffs. Their diet was rich in the omega-6 oils that are said to be so good for our health (and probably are) and maybe for our brains (evidence more dodgy).
Additional evidence for the Atlantic boat people from Portugal came a couple of weeks ago in a story in New Scientist telling us that the Orkney vole is more closely related to a Portuguese vole than to Scottish or English voles and that it has been there a long time. I don't know how solid this is but it makes sense.
There has probably been strong selection for the fittest since we took up agriculture and started eating more starchy staples. We need to remember that altho' farming arrived in Europe about 8,000 years ago it did not reach places like northern Scotland until more like 2,000-4,000 years ago and our adaptation to it is variable and for some people may be quite recent. Colonisation of northern Europe by modern man has only occurred in the last 8,000 years or so and during that time the extreme blonde Nordic type and the pale/ginger/freckled Irish type appear to have evolved. They are able to scavenge more vitamin D from sunlight especially at the beginning and end of the summer because the sun gets too weak for six months of the year to provide any D. Shortage of D makes us vulnerable to TB, makes women's pelvises mal-adapted for childbirth and can cause heart failure in babies in severe cases - very intense selection.
And that brings us to the Mediterranean diet - much of the literature on this seems to attribute its effect to red wine, although garlic, onions, legumes and other fruit and veg are also mentioned. However not mentioned is that there is much more sun in the Mediterranean and much of the value of the Mediterranean diet may be attributed to confounding with effects of sun. I think I was the first person to suggest this a few years ago and it has since had an airing in The Independent and elsewhere.
As far as obesity is concerned there is a question mark now over such measures as body mass index - a relatively high BMI is apparently not correlated with ill health. A big stomach, pot belly, may be a more important sign of ill health. But as pointed out earlier in this debate Venus figurines show us that fat women have been revered - presumably as a sign of plenty - and there must have been other times when humans had a very plentiful diet when new territories were opened up, eg as the ice retreated, and new foodstuffs found.
Hope these ideas are grist to the mill - cheers, Oliver
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Oliver
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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What I don't understand in this formidable tour d'horizon, Ollie, is how you equate it with neo-Darwinism. To alter a population at the genetic level (let's say to being lactose-tolerant) you'd have to
a) have this particular mutaton arise
b) make it so powerful on reproduiction as to expunge all the other powerful effects on reproduction
c) to produce a 'new' population.
Now look, we all know how we cherish our children; we all know how we select mates; we all know how decisions about how many children to rear are made; we all know the chances of survival into adulthood of these children....
.....and you're honestly saying this could take more or less complete effect in the few hundred generations that our species has been around? Not possible, I'm afraid.
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Seems to me you have got into evolution-denial Mick and where does that put you or leave you?
It is difficult to conceive of whales, for example, evolving from land dwelling creatures but there is no problem in seeing how one gene such as lactose intolerance can become very common in a few generations if there is heavy selection.
In our society at the moment selection is virtually nil - even the weakest children survive. A story will be emerging soon of 16 babies in south east England with heart failure caused by insufficient vitamin D. Their parents were all dark skinned and so make vitamin D at about one sixth the speed of a person with white skin. The babies were all breast fed and so did not benefit from the vitamin D supplement in bottle milk that saves so many others. It was the end of winter when vitamin D in their mother's breast milk was lowest. All babies came in to hospital as emergencies near death. Three died, two were scheduled for heart transplant. The rest made miraculous recoveries when given the vitamin together with other emergency measures. Without modern medicine all those babies would be dead and there would be 16 less dark skinned babies in England.
Now scroll back to the end of winter in central Europe 5,000 years ago. Supplies of food are short, animals were killed for the feasting at the mid-winter festivals in December because there would not be enough hay to feed them later but by February/March there is little food left. It's April and the spring plants still haven't grown but there is still hay in the barn for the cows and they are still producing milk. Some of the babies can't digest the cows' milk so they become thin and emaciated. They develop an infection of some kind and die. Other babies able to digest the cow's milk survive to form the next generation.
However we must remember that not everybody in Europe is lactose tolerant. It is just one of the selections that was occurring on one particular gene. And at the same time languages were emerging/evolving. What more can we learn about these first Europeans who colonised this northern territory as the ice retreated - it was a territory incredibly rich in food in summer but they had to develop the means of surviving the winter.
I am not sure if these are questions that interest you and others Mick, but they are the questions that have led me to take an interest in the many other ideas you and your colleagues have raised about language etc. More comments would be very welcome - seems I could have silenced everybody else Mick.
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Oliver
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Seems to me you have got into evolution-denial Mick and where does that put you or leave you? |
Seems to me you're hung up on the Great Divide, Ollie. No Applied Epistemologist bothers to fight battles everybody else is fighting. However I am a neo-Darwinist doubter. A much different thing.
| It is difficult to conceive of whales, for example, evolving from land dwelling creatures but there is no problem in seeing how one gene such as lactose intolerance can become very common in a few generations if there is heavy selection. |
Obviously. If lactose-tolerant humans had as much time as whales did I wouldn't be making this point.
| In our society at the moment selection is virtually nil - even the weakest children survive. |
In all human societies the weakest tend to survive. That's one of the things that differentiates humans from animals -- we can cosset even the grossest handicapped children. And do. And don't say. "Oh well our ancestors didn't" unless you can show one human society that doesn't cosset the weak. And leave Sparta out of it.
| A story will be emerging soon of 16 babies in south east England with heart failure caused by insufficient vitamin D. Their parents were all dark skinned and so make vitamin D at about one sixth the speed of a person with white skin. The babies were all breast fed and so did not benefit from the vitamin D supplement in bottle milk that saves so many others. It was the end of winter when vitamin D in their mother's breast milk was lowest. All babies came in to hospital as emergencies near death. Three died, two were scheduled for heart transplant. The rest made miraculous recoveries when given the vitamin together with other emergency measures. Without modern medicine all those babies would be dead and there would be 16 less dark skinned babies in England. |
Actually, Ollie, your example merely shows that a given population can be grossly affected when outside its own natural range. By all means apply this line of argument to Early Man if you wish but this isn't cogent for your general point about mutation in a given area.
| Now scroll back to the end of winter in central Europe 5,000 years ago. Supplies of food are short, animals were killed for the feasting at the mid-winter festivals in December because there would not be enough hay to feed them later but by February/March there is little food left. It's April and the spring plants still haven't grown but there is still hay in the barn for the cows and they are still producing milk. Some of the babies can't digest the cows' milk so they become thin and emaciated. They develop an infection of some kind and die. Other babies able to digest the cow's milk survive to form the next generation. |
But Ollie, apply this very example to your argument. A lactose-tolerant gene arises in a single child in Generation X. For a start nobody would know since up to that point nobody could drink cow's milk. But anyway, let's say this miracle happens and all right this little kiddie survives and all his contemporaries...er...die off because nobody can...er...think of a way of...er...well, you'll have to fill in the details since I can't imagine any circumstances where the kids wouldn't survive somehow. But anyway this super-babe grows up and looks around for a mate....only a lactose-intolerant person is available...let's hope it's a dominant gene...er...now we'll have to wait for another of these unfortunate winters of yours...er...come off it, do you really think world domination is available using this mechanism?
| However we must remember that not everybody in Europe is lactose tolerant. It is just one of the selections that was occurring on one particular gene. And at the same time languages were emerging/evolving. What more can we learn about these first Europeans who colonised this northern territory as the ice retreated - it was a territory incredibly rich in food in summer but they had to develop the means of surviving the winter. |
So let me get this straight. It's so powerful that it got everywhere....but not everywhere. I understand the 'gene' achieved dominance in Japan in about two generations...just a thought.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| In all human societies the weakest tend to survive. |
And an interesting question it is as to why species tend to be rather protective even of their weak and feeble members. Isn't this rather unhealthy for the species?
Surely by now, all the species that looked after their cripples ought to have been selected out in favour of those species that eliminate undesirable genes from the pool.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Yes, and as soon as somebody actually tried we either strung them at Nuremburg or exposed them in countless Channel 4 documentaries. One would have to conclude that this behaviour has actually been selected for in the gene pool (or whatever mechanism applies) and it is not difficult to see why. People with physical and mental 'handicaps' all too often turn out to have just the thing that is required in unusual circumstances. [Look at our dyslexia!]
It appears that carrying around apparently redundant people is the larger version of carrying around apparently redundant genes. The price has been found worth paying.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| People with physical and mental 'handicaps' all too often turn out to have just the thing that is required in unusual circumstances. [Look at our dyslexia!] |
Depends on the severity of the 'handicap' but generally the infirm and the insane have been shut away, often imprisoned in effect, where they can neither contribute to society nor propagate their genes. Dyslexia hardly counts as it wasn't recognised, let alone understood, till recently...'understood' should be in quotation marks.
All manner of physical and mental afflictions would have been undoubtedly relatively widespread in any given population, though impossible to gauge how extensively, but surely illness and suffering must have always been a constant concern, then as now. Those who could afford it would receive treatment, those who had naught had to rely on charity or in some cases cash in on deformites, in essence appealing to an awareness of 'it could have been me but for fortune'.
It's only in a totalitarian state that cripples and the mentally ill are disposed of in the name of economic or genetic efficiency as part of an overall dehumanising trend..
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| It's only in a totalitarian state that cripples and the mentally ill are disposed of in the name of economic or genetic efficiency as part of an overall dehumanising trend. |
Ke-rist, you liberals! As far as I know one totalitarian regime had such a policy (the Nazis). Zillions of liberal democracies have pursued the same policies. Though Channel Four has only vouchsafed the name of Sweden thus far due to the fact that the liberal intelligentsia has a stranglehold over history, the media etc.
The truth is that eugenics was briefly fashionable and applied in any and/or all regimes of the period. Oh and by the way, Applied Epistemology rather hopes that eugenics comes back into fashion one day since it holds that all rational policies are worth constantly re-viewing.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| The truth is that eugenics was briefly fashionable and applied in any and/or all regimes of the period. |
True, but presumably it wasn't effective, or too expensive, or other pragmatic (not necessarily moral) considerations applied, since -- as you point out -- it dropped out of fashion. In fact, I suspect it might have been economic considerations which prevailed, the Nazis found gassing an expensive procedure. However, no liberal democracy would be able to implement such policies, no matter how sensible, these methods of limiting or determining breeding/population can only be efficacious in state-controlled countries. But it isn't really fair to fling about labels like "Liberal", Shaw was an advocate of eugenics after all; just as relevant in a socialist as a fascist setting.
Stephen Hawking would have had a short-lived career, though some critics might say that wouldn't have been a loss to science.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| In fact, I suspect it might have been economic considerations which prevailed, the Nazis found gassing an expensive procedure. |
No, no. The Nazis were prepared to lose the war rather than have their programmes interfered with since they routinely gave preference to entraining Jews-to-the-camps over soldiers-for-the-front.
| However, no liberal democracy would be able to implement such policies, no matter how sensible, these methods of limiting or determining breeding/population can only be efficacious in state-controlled countries. |
No, no. The record of parliamentary democracies going in for much more efficient programmes (like eradicating natives in Australia and the Americas) than the Nazis ever managed is well recorded. And don't forget the Nazi state was rather more democratic than the ones we live in. The local populace was right behind them in pretty much everything they did.
Remember we are complete bastards, expecially when we think we're doing the right thing.
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Eugenics went out of fashion after the second world war because of revulsion at the way the Nazis pursued it. There were motions passed in international bodies like the UN condemning it. However measures such as castration for institutionalised men with low IQ persisted in some countries and some US states for some time after the war. However political ideas about genetics continued to be very influential and genetics continued to be used to explain and justify social class differences and still is today. In the 1970s I wrote about Sir Cyril Burt, an English educationalist who invented spurious results on twins to justify his educational theories, and it caused an uproar. I was attacked for example by columnist Melanie Phillips who would prefer to believe that Burt had not forged his data.
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Oliver
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Yes, I remember this affaire rather vividly. Everyone in Britain genuflected at the Burtian shrine for most of the twentieth century just as they have done for rather longer at that other great falsifier-of-data, the blessed Mendel. Not that falsifiying results makes them necessarily bad people. You gotta do what you gotta do in this business. It would be good to hear more on this though, Ollie.
Melanie Philips is another interesting 'type'. One has watched with envy her ability over the years to glide effortlessly from one fixed political position to the next. If only she would listen to the Applied Epistemologists' mantra: any fixed position should be abandoned as soon as you notice it's fixed. I suppose that could mean 'fixed' in the other, Burtian, sense too.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| In the 1970s I wrote about Sir Cyril Burt, an English educationalist who invented spurious results on twins to justify his educational theories... |
Has a link between intelligence and heredity ever been conclusively demonstrated? Burt clearly believed so, according to wiki:
| One of the conclusions in his 1909 paper was that upper-class children in private preparatory schools did better in the tests than those in the ordinary elementary schools, and that the difference was innate. |
"Intelligence" is largely a result of socio-economic factors, surely... the upper-class kids would've benefited from the advantages offered by the milieu in which they were raised. More revealing perhaps to test them at secondary school level, when the initial gap has had time to even out. A private prep school is an entirely different animal from the local primary school.
Maybe there's a natural equilibrium with or without eugenics. The better off are less disposed on the whole to have large families than their less well off counterparts, seems to be a lifestyle choice...and they're producing fat, spotty (and clever?) kids. It's claimed that heart disease, sometimes labelled the "illness of the affluent", is the biggest killer in western Europe.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| The Nazis were prepared to lose the war rather than have their programmes interfered with since they routinely gave preference to entraining Jews-to-the-camps over soldiers-for-the-front. |
This isn't the right thread but couldn't let the comment pass, it's obvious that the eradication of Jews and other undesirables wasn't for military reasons and a sizeable proportion of the German high command were not hell-bent on achieving racial purity in the homeland (which shows that propaganda is less effective among the well-informed, as Stalin knew only too well).
| The record of parliamentary democracies going in for much more efficient programmes (like eradicating natives in Australia and the Americas) than the Nazis ever managed is well recorded. |
Examples of ethnic cleansing though it wasn't called that then. Or now. That's what happens in barbarous, non-western countries.
| And don't forget the Nazi state was rather more democratic than the ones we live in. The local populace was right behind them in pretty much everything they did. |
Don't confuse compliance with acceptance. The people were too cowed to protest, opponents had been effectively silenced if not in exile long before the start of the Final Solution. Which is not to say that an atmosphere of hostility, hate even, didn't exist a priori fostered by state propaganda which reiterates the point that genocide can only take place under government-controlled circumstances.
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