| History visualized. |
[May. 15th, 2012|12:09 pm] |
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| |  impressed | ] |
Thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) gunnermk42 for sending me this. I remember spending hours poring over a historical atlas when I was a kid; one of the wonders of the modern world is how elegantly such information can be brought to life.
Both versions are well worth watching (full-screen is best.) The slower version is more informative, but one of the very cool things about the fast version is how you can see the same territories re-establishing themselves over and over again. Not quite "geography is destiny," but close.
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| Sometimes you win. |
[May. 11th, 2012|03:38 am] |
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| |  exanimate | ] |
I just received the first real indication I've had that the method I've been developing for my dissertation for the past two years or so is effective biologically, not just mathematically and computationally. In other words, it does what bioinformatics is supposed to do. This makes me profoundly happy.
Now, I'm going to bed. |
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| Yeah, about that "caveman" thing ... |
[May. 9th, 2012|03:54 pm] |
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| |  geeky | ] |
I'm deeply skeptical of attempts to reproduce the "natural" diet, exercise plan, etc. of our ancestors, for a couple of reasons.
First of all, you can't recreate the environment in which humans evolved. You just can't. That world is gone. You could, I suppose, move to central Africa and try to live a life as much as possible like the way you think people lived a quarter of a million years ago, but the environment has changed considerably in that time and in any case, most people in the modern world aren't going to change their lives to that degree just to get into shape.
Second, who's to say that our remote ancestors even had the ideal environment for their bodies? We're a young species; a lot of our anatomy is obviously best suited to an arboreal lifestyle, and the transition from semi-quadrupedal tree-dwellers to bipedal ground-dwellers isn't really complete -- many of the knee and back problems which even very healthy people tend to develop in old age can be traced to this, as can the not-so-trivial problem that childbirth is more difficult and dangerous for humans than for practically any other mammalian species. It's reasonable to suspect that our physiology, too, is the result of many quick-fix compromises over the last few million years, more so than most animals'.
So the best thing, it seems to me, is not to try to live like our ancestors did in a world that no longer exists, but to come up with diet and exercise plans that work well for us, as we are, in the world in which we live. Weightlifting is an example. No non-human animal does anything even remotely like it, and it's a safe bet that early humans didn't either -- but there's a fair body of evidence that there's no other single type of exercise that carries the same level of whole-body fitness benefit that repetitively moving heavy weights in carefully planned and controlled motions does. Running is probably the second-best form of exercise in terms of overall benefit, but running with shoes on a concrete or asphalt track is very different from running barefoot (with feet conditioned to it by a lifetime of never even having heard of shoes) through long grass. Bicycling? Again, completely alien to our ancestors.
I'm all for looking at our biology for ways to improve our health, and studying our evolution is certainly one way to do that. But assuming that we're going to come up with any kind of "natural, and therefore healthy" lifestyle based on dim ideas of how long-ago proto-humans lived in a vanished world is just silly.
(Originally written in response to this Slashdot story.) |
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