Re: [Vo]:WAY OFF TOPIC Mistaken notions about human populations and longevity
--On Monday, May 21, 2012 5:57 PM -0400 Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com wrote: No doubt that is the biological root of the obesity problem. That is why fat people exist. I doubt there are any obese chimpanzees in the wild. Chimpanzees do not have fire and so do not cook their food must devote most of their day to chewing digesting a lot of raw food. Mastering fire cooking food has allowed humans to quickly fuel our large brains using a short digestive system. Ron
Re: [Vo]:WAY OFF TOPIC Mistaken notions about human populations and longevity
Ron Wormus prot...@frii.com wrote: Chimpanzees do not have fire and so do not cook their food must devote most of their day to chewing digesting a lot of raw food. Mastering fire cooking food has allowed humans to quickly fuel our large brains using a short digestive system. True! And we are so dependent on cooking, we could not survive without it. It has altered our very anatomy, including the teeth and stomach. Here is an excellent little book about that: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Human-ebook/dp/B0028P9BE6/ref=sr_1_1 Some interesting points from that book: Most animals, such as rats and chimps, prefer cooked food. And it tends to make them obese. Chimps that live in Georgia at the Yerkes center have no trouble making and controlling fires. They do not burn themselves or let the fire go out. They use butane lighters to start the fire, but I expect they could use a primitive technique such as rubbing sticks together. So they have the intelligence. They might have discovered fire long ago. If they had discovered it millions of years ago they would not be chimps in their present form, would they? - Jed
Re: [Vo]:WAY OFF TOPIC Mistaken notions about human populations and longevity
From Jed: ... You cannot draw conclusions about today's diet from today's longevity. To find out if our diet is healthy and promotes a longer life, you will have to wait 30 to 50 years. Chances are, it does not. Today's diets have caused unprecedented high levels of obesity. Obesity usually shortens people lives. See: ... I think the history books will look back at this period of our evolving civilization as one filled with bizarre contradictions, one that was exacerbated by the physiological proclivities of our bodies to eat everything in sight. Evolution had wisely designed us to gorge at every single opportunity presented to us because famine was always just around the corner. But once it became obvious that mealtimes would arrive on the dinner table regularly it pretty much shot such an incredibly successful evolutionary blue print to hell. Our civilization, fraught by the pitfalls of economic models that are primarily designed around the principal that making money is the only way to survive have yet to figure out how to stay alive while not killing the very prey it's trying to feed off of. Obesity, diabetes, heart failure, and a slurry of other physical maladies is the price we are currently paying for our civilization that has become too successful. C'mon! Admit it! You want to wolf down a bunch krispy kremes, don't you! ;-) Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
Re: [Vo]:WAY OFF TOPIC Mistaken notions about human populations and longevity
Here is a free book on life span. I am reading it now. http://www.amazon.com/Aging-Design-Thinking-Change-ebook/dp/B005KCO8SS/ref=sr_1_5?s=booksie=UTF8qid=1337631718sr=1-5 What I find interesting is what influence evolution may have on lifespan and why. Is long life a species survival strategy? Frank Znidarsic
Re: [Vo]:WAY OFF TOPIC Mistaken notions about human populations and longevity
fznidar...@aol.com wrote: What I find interesting is what influence evolution may have on lifespan and why. Is long life a species survival strategy? Among primates, yes. Species that take care of offspring, rather than laying eggs and abandoning them, must have a long adulthood. They cannot die off quickly the way salmon do after spawning. People and chimpanzees not only take care of their own offspring, they take care of orphaned members of the tribe, and they pass on cultural and technical knowledge. (People obviously more than chimps!) This created an advantage to surviving into old age. Especially during long span of history in which we had language but no writing, and the only store of knowledge was in people's brains and in epic poetry and stories. (Epic poetry is often codified knowledge in an easy-to-remember format.) For women, this created an advantage to living well past menopause which I think is unique to our species. Some anthropological studies show that elderly women transmit more information and do useful, life-saving labor in old age than men do, which may explain why they live longer than men, even after they are elderly and no longer able to do as much physical labor as young people do. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:WAY OFF TOPIC Mistaken notions about human populations and longevity
I wrote: . . . they pass on cultural and technical knowledge. (People obviously more than chimps!) This created an advantage to surviving into old age. Especially during long span of history in which we had language but no writing, and the only store of knowledge was in people's brains . . . A vivid example of this was in the movie The Seven Samurai. The village is in huge trouble, about to be attacked by brigands. Someone suggests they fight back. They debate this and go to the village elder to decide. He says: When I was a lad, after one of the wars, the villages all around were sacked, except one, where they hired Samurai . . . He had knowledge of a rare event 60 years earlier, in a society which was largely illiterate, in an isolated place where news and knowledge did not travel far. That movie, by the way, is probably the most accurate movie portrayal of Edo-period peasant living conditions we will ever see. Unless someone invents a time-machine, that is the closest we will ever get. You could not make something like it today. Experts may know how to make houses, and plenty of people still know how to ride horses or use ancient weapons, but you could not find people with that body type from the pre-WWII diet, or people who talk like that. Other movies set in pre-modern Japan seem utterly fake compared to it, even to me, and I am no expert. Even the other movies by Kurosawa are fake. It was made just beyond the living memory of the Edo period, 90 years after it ended. It was set in 1600, but the life style, weapons, food and whatnot were still current in 1868. It was similar to making a WWI epic today. There are still enough people around today whose grandfathers fought in WWI or flew Sopwith Camels to give a movie verisimilitude. There will not be anyone like that in 2070. It is interesting to think about the flow of time and receding memory, which recedes even with books, photographs and video. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:WAY OFF TOPIC Mistaken notions about human populations and longevity
OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson svj.orionwo...@gmail.com wrote: Obesity, diabetes, heart failure, and a slurry of other physical maladies is the price we are currently paying for our civilization that has become too successful. No doubt that is the biological root of the obesity problem. That is why fat people exist. I doubt there are any obese chimpanzees in the wild. But the recent explosive increase in obesity starting in the 1970s has more prosaic causes, in my opinion. The main causes are things like changes in food technology such as frozen food; new types of food such as high fructose corn syrup; and Federal subsidies for things like corn, milk and meat. In North America, middle-class and wealthy people have had access to unlimited amounts of food at very low cost since the early 19th century, but obesity was rare until the 1970s. Middle class people did not exercise much after the spread of automobiles 1920s, so I do not think sloth is the main factor. The problem is complicated, as described in books such as Prescription for a Healthy Nation but the main issue is recent changes in diet, and in what anthropologists call foodways. That is: when and where you eat, size of portions, what you select for each meal, who prepares the food by what methods, and so on. To me, the problem does not seem hard to fix. Just go back to the foodways of 1950. That's what I do, and my weight has not changed in 30 years. That is an example of a solution that is clearcut, direct, and yet also complicated and difficult to implement. Turning back the clock to 1950s foodways would involve many expensive changes, higher grocery costs, and also education. This resembles my solution to global warming: I say we should stop burning fuel and then break apart CO2 molecules into C and O2, remove several trillion tons of carbon from the air, and put it back underground. That is the direct approach that gets to the heart of the matter. Needless to say, you need cold fusion to do a thing like that. You also need my kind of imagination, which I shared with Arthur C. Clarke. I am not boasting about that! What I mean is that Clarke and I are both literal-minded people with the uncluttered imagination of a 6-year-old. Many people said that about him. They did not mean it as flattery. Given a problem we tend to ignore difficulties, politics, and so-called practical limitations. We gravitate toward the most direct method. Clarke and I looked at the problems with food production and farms, for example, which we were both pretty familiar with. Clarke grew up on a farm and I spent a lot of time in the countryside. We both early on and independently concluded that farms are wonderful but it would make a lot more sense to grow food indoors. We looked at automobiles and said they have their merits but there are too many. There is too much traffic and they cause too many accidents, so let us get rid of cars somehow. People say it is impossible, but I say things are sometimes easier than you think. In Atlanta voters will soon pass the SPLOST initiative to spend billions on highways. If people seriously want to fix the traffic problem, this is not the right way to go about it. Building more roads will only make the problem worse. Smart traffic lights maybe, but not more pavement. The first thing to do is implement widespread use of high-res video telecommuting. Then they should start dynamiting highways, permanently blocking streets, and charging a $20 toll to come downtown, the way they do in London. They should make the subway trains free, and charge people to drive, instead of doing it the other way around. I expect I am right about that policy. What I am describing is physically possible. It is probably the cheapest and best answer. But there is not the slightest chance that any politician in Georgia -- or anywhere in the U.S. -- would advocate this. Things can change though. Sometimes things change overnight, such as when two nuclear reactors blow sky high. Suddenly you get conservative Japanese politicians all in agreement that they should abruptly close down the nuclear power industry. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:WAY OFF TOPIC Mistaken notions about human populations and longevity
At 12:02 PM 5/21/2012, Jed Rothwell wrote: Here are age distributions for England and Wales, 1696: Age group, percent 0 - 9 27.6% 10 - 19 20.2% 20 - 29 15.5% 30 - 39 11.7% 40 - 49 8.4% 50 - 59 5.8% 60 and above 10.7% Laslet, p. 103. Those numbers are reliable. They kept good records in the U.K. So, 11% lived to their 60s, and there were more elderly people over 60 than people in their 40s or 50s. The average age was 27.5. One-third to half of burials recorded in a French 17th century record were listed as children, meaning they were probably under 20 -- too young to be listed by employment. If you reached age 20 and you were still healthy, and you had acquired immunity to measles and smallpox, you had a good chance of seeing age 60. You did not drop dead 7.5 years later. I can't find specific papers or data, but I suspect that the human population is not homogenous, consisting of several overlapping species (male, female for starters), and that the centenial cohort simply does not die off from disease. Their peak on a normal distribution might be at 60, so they would hardly show up for deaths at earlier ages. googling : human longevity long tail (in the statistical sense!) indicates that a fair number of people are looking for genetic markers to explain it. And of course, the people most WORRIED about it are actuaries: http://www.partnerre.com/reviews/article/stochastic-model-longevity-risk disclaimer : my usual speculative, ignorant rambling opinions, of course ...
