paleo

Sick of the Nerds running the Paleo Scene

by Ben Atlas on 04.1.2012.3:20pm · 5 comments

There is something common to all Paleo gurus. They are all embarrassed about the books they published just two years ago. On one hand this is not so bad, the testimony to the rapid crowd-sourcing of the young theory (and practice), but on the other hand these gurus are full of shit 95% of the time. The entire Paleo scene has evolved to be dominated by nerds, completely in the mode of thinking ala the post modern science, despite the claim to the evolutionary common sense, etc. OK, I get it, the organic chemistry is really important but these people have no clue about the basic anthropology and the broad range of disciplines starting with the history and philosophy. This shit is not Paleo, it is post neolithic.

There is no hope for this movement till it sheds the nerds from its evolutionary neck.

How to always tell if the thing is good?

by Ben Atlas on 03.24.2012.8:28pm · 3 comments

There is only one single measurement that applies to everything – the ability to walk away. So if someone asks you if your job is any good, if your relationship is good, if your village is good, etc. When you are free to walk away from each, and still for some reason your choice is to stay, then it is indeed very good. All explanations and justifications to the contrary are just trying to twist the crooked reasoning, not to feel particularly bad.

There are some interesting results of this formula. A visibly successful or powerful person might be hopelessly sinking in a swamp, no longer free to walk away, not even around the block. There are “good” jobs that are a life-long traps, never mind the relationships. In each and every case if you can’t walk away, it’s not that good.

This got me thinking. There is all this chatter about how bad or how good was the agricultural revolution for the human race. But fundamentally a human being found himself bound and tied to a spot on earth for his “livelihood”, you walk away, you starve. This is how it all started.

Red Meat

by Ben Atlas on 03.18.2012.11:08am · 0 comments

By the way of a tribute and to round the excessive linkage morning (apologies). Gary Taubes unplugs the NYT featured study about the dangers of red meat – Science, Pseudoscience, Nutritional Epidemiology, and Meat.

Distress Signaling in Plants

by Ben Atlas on 03.11.2012.11:00am · 0 comments

Ben-Gurion University study claim that plants communicate with each other through the root system. In an experiment, a selection of plants where exposed to a drought. The stress signal was evidently transmitted through the roots to the neighboring plants, the plants not exposed to the drought. These neighboring plants in response similar to the “drought plants” shut down their “Stoma” or pores on the surface of the leafs. Then the neighboring to the drought plants relayed the stress signal to the further plants that were not immediately bordering the plants exposed to the drought. Here is the paper: PLoS One – Rumor Has It…: Relay Communication of Stress Cues in Plants.

I am trying to think through the implication of this hypothesis, discovery. Can this imply an even more elaborate communication among animals and even people? Is our collective connectivity evolutionary rooted and hard-wired?

The Cowboys of Kurgan and the Indo-European Language

by Ben Atlas on 03.1.2012.11:46am · 0 comments

Scheme of Indo-European migrations from ca. 4000 to 1000 BC according to the Kurgan hypothesis. The magenta area corresponds to the assumed Urheimat (Samara culture, Sredny Stog culture). The red area corresponds to the area which may have been settled by Indo-European-speaking peoples up to ca. 2500 BC; the orange area to 1000 BC

In his book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution Gregory Cochran mentions the Kurgan Hypothesis (wiki) in relation to the vast spread of the Indo-European Languages. For all the European languages that stem from the same root, there must be a single tribe that expanded or dominated into this vast area. There are several theories on where was the Urheimat or the home of that tribe. One of the theories places them in the Kurgan region of the southern Russia.

According to Gregory Cochran’s operational theory there must be a genetic or cultural advantage for this to occur. Given the fact that the presumed Kurgan expansion overlaps with the birth of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, the Kurgan people must have had something that gave them the advantage, even over the advanced tribes already exposed to agriculture.

Gregory Cochran theory is that the Kurgan people where lactose tolerant pastorals and the dominance of milk in their diet gave them the several advantages. They were mobile and unlike the agriculture tribes were not bound to their crops. Milk allows a larger extraction of calories from a square mile of pastured land even compared to the calories one can obtain from the meat itself. Kurgan people were probably an aggressive “cowboy” band that moved around with their herds. The resultant birth of all Indo-European Languages is not a small feat.

The reason I bring this up is because there seems to be the two divergent notions in the late human evolution. On one hand the birth of agriculture gave the strategic advantage to the tribes and the same time introduced the hierarchy, inequality with the vast number of people subjugated to the slave-like life. There must be the genetic pressure to breed obedience as the survival strategy for the vast majority of people. On the other hand there is the “cowboy” advantage of the mobile warriors from Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan who were pivotal to the spread the genetic mutations and the development of the modern human.

Extreme Paleo – Eating Raw Elk Organs

by Ben Atlas on 02.29.2012.4:09pm · 0 comments

I am told this is a Finish woman, based on her Finish German accent (she speaks Finish in the end). She consumes raw kidney, heart, liver and lungs of an elk. Easily the most nutritious meal a human can have. ►click to continue

Race, Fate and Creed in “The 10,000 Year Explosion”

by Ben Atlas on 02.29.2012.7:19am · 2 comments

I am reading the 10,000 Year Explosion, and I can’t even begin to describe how important and revolutionary is the small volume.

For people who follow the Paleo narrative there is this ideas that we are built for the hunter gatherers lifestyle and diet and the agricultural revolution is a catastrophe. Gregory Cochran would probably agree with the catastrophic influence of the agricultural revolution but he would also demonstrate that the genetic mutations didn’t stop but instead accelerated at the furious pace to adapt to the new environment and diet. This mutational change is ongoing.

For example lactose intolerance went from 100% to 90% lactose tolerance in the northern European populations, for example. Or take the skin color as an example. There were two factors that favored the change to the light skin. First was the move out of Africa but the decrease in the vitamin D sun exposure could still be compensated for the hunters gathers with the vitamin D they got from meat [particularly organ meat]. But after the shift to agriculture and the drastic reduction of the meat portion of diet, the light skin was a mutation that increased the absorption of the vitamin D from the sun. Eventually and for this reason the white skin mutation prevailed in the European regions.

P.S. The reason why Gregory Cochran is so politically incorrect is because the very idea of the ongoing, rapid and very tribe and geography specific mutations, also undermines the popular assumption that sometime 50,000 years ago we all came from the same village and therefore we are all the same. Gregory Cochran says look at the variations in dogs, all bred from the same wolf in the span of the last 10-15 thousand years.

The Death Match between the Genes and the Pathogens

by Ben Atlas on 02.26.2012.7:38am · 0 comments

Let say the “common knowledge” aka the “common science” ascribes all major human variations to genes, you know from schizophrenia to homosexuality, etc. In many cases this creates some evolutionary dilemmas, as it becomes difficult to explain why there is such a prevalence of a trait that can put a “host” at a presumed disadvantage. Resolution requires some very heavy lifting. In my previously posted lecture – Robert Sapolsky on Metamagical Schizotypal Thinking, he argues that the reason we still have so many schizophrenics is because they often have a cousin who is a shaman, a rebbe, etc. In other words there is a shadow, highly beneficial for a group trait and this might explain the evolutionary advantage.

But there is a radically different way to explained this. Let take the Toxoplasmosis as an example. Suppose there is a microbial pathogen, an organism that can change the behavior of a mouse (or even a man) to the extent that it not only stops fearing cats but gets attracted to them! Indeed in that Atlantic article that I linked to, the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey maintains that the spread of schizophrenia parallels the domestication of cats in Western Europe (urban Paris).

Now Gregory Cochran takes the pathogen hypothesis to the most politically incorrect and logical conclusion, her writes on his blog – Depths of Madness:

“I’ve said it before, but it’s probably time to say it again. The most likely explanation for human homosexuality is that it is caused by some pathogen. It’s too common to be mutational pressure (and we don’t see syndromic versions, as we would in that case), it’s not new, identical twins are usually discordant (~75% of the time), and it’s hell on reproductive fitness. There is no way it is adaptive: the helpful gay uncle notion, group selection, compensating advantage in females, etc: these range from impossible to bloody unlikely. It doesn’t exist in most hunter-gatherers: you have to explain what it is you’re even talking about when you ask them. Presumably with diagrams.

As for Freudian explanations, exotic-becomes-erotic, etc: just reading the social-science literature on the subject is enough to make you wonder if the human brain really does exist to cool the blood.

A fair number of the smarter people interested in the subject agree with me. Not that they think it proven, but they agree that it is the only theory out there that makes any evolutionary sense.”

This of course opens up the hellish possibility that the pathogens, unlike genes, are transmittable.

P.S. A pathogen will interact with a human organism much like a BPA. And we know what these plastic bastards are up to:

BPA May Be Linked with Heart Disease – Time.
BPA and the Single, Spacey, Sex-Starved Male – Psychology Today.
How plastic food containers could be making you fat, infertile and sick – Chris Kresser.
BPA’s Obesity And Diabetes Link Strengthened By New Study – Huffington Post.

Segmentadely Sleepless

by Ben Atlas on 02.22.2012.12:04pm · 0 comments

File under many things that the post-industrial modernity inflicts on people. The modernity causes diseases by confining people into buildings without the sunlight. It also causes the shift in the natural bi-modal sleep patterns. Again this is something I wrote about before but now even the BBC magazine comes around – the myth of the eight-hour sleep.

Natural Sunlight in the Work Enviroment

by Ben Atlas on 02.21.2012.9:41pm · 1 comment

A while ago on the advice of Paul Jaminet I stopped wearing any shades outside. And now there is the mounting evidence about the importance of the natural sunlight – NYT. In this context it’s time to ponder why, for over a hundred years, buildings and especially work environments have been deliberately designed to ignore and even block out windows and the natural sunlight? Just another crime of modernity.

Fat, Lies and Religions

by Ben Atlas on 02.20.2012.8:39am · 0 comments

When people speak they tend to swap elephants with mice. They say religions are about “beliefs” but they forget to mention that the practical, day-to-day religious emotion is guilt. Every religion as it’s method bans or objects to one of the natural human drives and desires. This creates the fundamental tension as a mere human has to summon all the energy on the manufactured guilt. The flip side of this arrangement is that it opens the back door for the real elephants to comfortably walk in.

Take the western nutritional habits. Look at people around you, they are constipated with the manufactured guilt about fat, eggs, red meat, etc. In other words all the nutritional foods that out body craves because humans evolved to digest these foods easily and they pack the vital nutritional punch. No, these foods don’t make you fat; instead carbs, glutenous bread, sugars and the processed, chemically enhanced food make you fat. At the same time while the “consumer” is preoccupied with stripping his food of the most flavorful and nutritious morsels, at the same time the elephants of the processed, sugary junk walk in unmolested. And there is a lot of it, pretty much everything on the inside of a supermarket. On the perimeter there is fat, meat, fish, fresh produce but on the inside is mostly poison, guiltless poison.

The Progressive Vegetarianism as a Religion

by Ben Atlas on 02.11.2012.10:27am · 0 comments

Most western vegetarians tend to be progressive, idealistic and ideological. They object to the consumption of animals on the “humane” grounds. Which is a sort of a contradiction. It presumes that animals should be treated like humans but at the same time rejects, for cultural and ideological reasons, the animal nature of the human being. Peculiar attribute swap works only one way. And this denial of the animal nature of the man, the insistence that we are the elevated above the animals creatures, is the point where Vegetarianism betrays its religious roots. At least in India it’s a pure religion. But in the west we must adapt to the post enlightenment language and thinking. The enlightenment was a radical change unable to rid itself of the religious ideas that the transformative light of the human mind is destined to rule the earth and nature and the belief in the perpetual “progress”. This is what western vegetarians borrow from the enlightenment. The reason why the proclaimed atheists can still get away with being clearly possessed with the flamimg religious intensity about the animals.

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