Potatoes are more nutritious, faster growing, need less land and water and can thrive in worse growing conditions than any other major crop. They provide up to four times as much complex carbohydrate per hectare as grain, better quality protein and several vitamins – a medium-size potato boiled in its skin has half an adult’s daily dose of vitamin C, for example. They also contain B vitamins, plus many of the trace elements poor people, and grain, lack. (New Scientist)

So if everybody decided to cut grains and switch to potatoes as a staple, then farmers would plant potatoes instead of grains. Over time, potatoes would likely become cheaper due to economies of scale and innovation. (Disease and perishability are the main challenges to potatoes.)

These types of arguments ignore the role of prices and innovation. Increased demand for a good increases its price, encouraging increased production and innovation, as well as substitutes. So even a low-carb, high-meat paleo diet might be possible worldwide. A large increase in demand for meat would lead to a rise in price that would set about efforts to reduce costs through economies of scale and innovations. Furthermore, meat substitutes would also expand to meet the demand (insects are a cheap alternative).

Suppose your sky god decreed it morally good to steal, rape, and kill; and morally wrong to live peacefully. Would the atheists then be living immorally for abstaining from these activities? Clearly not. The theist argument presupposes that theistic morality corresponds to our intuitive morality. If theistic morality just codifies our innate moral sense, then it’s at best supplementing it; it’s not the source of morality.

The more interesting case occurs if theistic morality contradicts our intuitive morality. In this case, we say that god’s moral code is wrong, not that our innate one is wrong. So god is fundamentally constrained to codifying the morality inherent in human nature. If god deviates from that, we deem his morality to be wrong.

The problem with the theist argument is that morality is a collection of evolved instincts, not a set of rules passed down from on high (by gods or rulers). (I suggest reading Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue for the argument from evolutionary psychology.)

So: if you follow intuitive morality, then you will act morally. If you follow theistic morality, then you may or may not act morally (depending on how closely the theistic morality corresponds to intuitive morality—usually very closely, otherwise it wouldn’t survive long.) The real question is this: if one is simply following god’s rules, how can we be sure that they will behave morally? As soon as god gives them the green light to steal, rape, and murder, they can override their innate moral qualms with religious justification.

While this is probably not true (richer countries are happier than poorer ones), even if it were, it still doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t strive to become wealthier. To make that inference, you’d have to hold that temporary happiness is worthless and only long-lasting happiness matters. But temporary happiness is valuable and desirable. Even if we’re stuck on a “hedonic treadmill”, we can still get happiness from running.

There’s a direct parallel to the free market system. Entrepreneurs innovate in order to reap profits, but competition always eats away those profits. Profits are always temporary, lasting only as long as it takes for competitors to enter the market. Yet these fleeting profits still provide a powerful motivation for entrepreneurs. Likewise, fleeting happiness is still happiness and still worth pursuing.

So if money buys temporary happiness, and temporary happiness improves our quality of life, then it follows that economic progress matters. And since the level of economic progress depends on how free the market is, economic liberalization is the only way to go.

Grandparenting behavior seems to be a cultural universal. Parents want their grown children to produce offspring, and they seem to care a lot about it. Grandparents enjoy lavishing their love on their grandchildren. The grandmother on the mothers’s side tends to invest a lot in helping out with the baby (for good evolutionary reasons).

This implies that these behaviors have evolved, which in turn means that grandparents must have had a sizable impact on their grandchildrens’s genetic success. So it must have been fairly common for people to live long enough to become grandparents. Conclusion: paleolithic humans routinely lived long enough to see their grandchildren grow up. They lived long enough to reproduce and see their children reproduce.

So how old would that have been? A conservative estimate would be that the grandparent had their child at 16 and this child had the grandchild at 16 as well. The grandparent would be 32 at the birth of the grandchild. Since grandparenting behavior extends past infancy, let’s take a conservative estimate of 4 years. So we can expect that it was common for our paleolithic ancestors to live at least to 36.

Taking a more realistic estimate, we could assume that the average age of childbirth is 22 and that grandparents were around until their grandchildren were on average 6 years old. That brings the figure up to 50. And an average age of 50 is nothing to scoff at. I’m not sure how late the evolved grandparenting behaviors last, so 6 is still a conservative figure. In fact, with generations of 16 years, one could be a great-grandparent at 48.

Just another argument that puts the lie to the notion of a short-lived paleolithic ancestry.

Long live paleo man!

“Both creationists and socialists distrust invisible-hand processes and cannot conceive of order emerging except through some sort of centralised top-down control.” —Roderick Long

A statheist is an atheist statist. In other words, statheists reject supernatural explanations of the world but believe that the state is necessary for creating social order and managing society. Now, anti-statism (aka market anarchism or libertarianism) is relatively obscure compared to atheism—and much less obvious—so statheism is nowhere near as egregious an error as creationism. Yet it’s very important to point out the statist error to atheists, who claim to be proponents of reason, since it’s in many ways similar to the errors of creationists.

There’s a certain incongruity of being an atheist and a statist, namely that many atheist arguments are closely related to anti-statist arguments. As atheists, they have no trouble rejecting top-down creationist explanations of the universe. They laugh at the idea that the universe was centrally planned by a supernatural being (“Cosmic Socialism”). They see clearly that the order and complexity of the universe and of life has emerged through bottom-up natural processes. As Dan Dennett would say, they don’t need a skyhook because they have a perfectly good crane.

But when it comes to the order and complexity of large-scale society, statheists balk at the idea of emergent order. They are “Political Creationists”, holding that social order can only come down from a powerful state. They employ faulty “state of the gaps” logic in their feeble attempts to rule out the possibility of a stateless society (e.g., “Only a state could provide roads/education/laws/courts/etc”). As usual, the problem boils down to a lack of understanding of economics. Don Boudreaux writes:

While there are some exceptions – Indur Goklany, for example – of natural scientists who understand economics, far too many of them see the world as posing physics or engineering problems rather than as posing economic ones.  The two problems are very different from each other.

Economics explains how social order emerges through the decentralized market price system, a “crane” theory. Statists keep their heads in the sand, content with a top-down “skyhook” theory of social order. They cling to an almost supernatural conception of the state: all-powerful, wise, and benevolent. In reality, the state is none of these: its power is derived from the support of its subjects, who could easily overpower the state if they revolted; its wisdom in managing society is extremely primitive compared to the information aggregation of markets, as seen by the utter and universal failure of central planning (and the spectacular success of free markets); its benevolence is largely a myth, as policy makers usually have more incentive to favor special interests at the expense of the general public.

Ultimately the problem of social order boils down to this: There are only people, all imperfect and selfish to some extent. There are no super-people to rescue us from this anarchy and selflessly govern society. So how can we find a way to cooperate amongst ourselves, to avoid conflicts? Is it really best to give one group of people a bunch of guns and tell them to enforce social order while hoping that they won’t abuse this power? That’s a terribly uncreative, skyhook solution. No, a much more sensible position would be to reject the monopoly solution and look for a crane, a bottom-up, competitive, polycentric solution. And as economists have long insisted, markets are just the crane we need—incredible decentralized systems for coordinating cooperation among billions of people and directing production so as to best satisfy the wants of consumers.

If statheists wish to fly the banner of reason, they should seriously re-examine their belief in the skyhook we call the state. They will find that there’s a perfectly good crane to replace it.

The leading candidate for a primal infant care manual is Jean Liedloff’s 1975 book, The Continuum Concept. Based on her observations while living with hunter-gatherers, she recommends following the evolutionary logic. From the website:

• constant physical contact with his mother (or another familiar caregiver as needed) from birth;
• sleeping in his parents’ bed, in constant physical contact, until he leaves of his own volition (often about two years);
• breastfeeding “on cue” — nursing in response to his own body’s signals;
• being constantly carried in arms or otherwise in contact with someone, usually his mother, and allowed to observe (or nurse, or sleep) while the person carrying him goes about his or her business — until the infant begins creeping, then crawling on his own impulse, usually at six to eight months;
• having caregivers immediately respond to his signals (squirming, crying, etc.), without judgment, displeasure, or invalidation of his needs, yet showing no undue concern nor making him the constant center of attention;
• sensing (and fulfilling) his elders’ expectations that he is innately social and cooperative and has strong self-preservation instincts, and that he is welcome and worthy.

This is in contrast to mainstream practices such as: formula-feeding, leaving the infant alone to sleep, leaving the infant to cry.

Another valuable resource is the work of Judith Rich Harris. In her paradigm-shifting book, The Nurture Assumption, she convincingly argues that parents have no effect on how their childrens’ personalities will turn out. (The evidence shows that half of the variation in personality is due to genetics, the other half to the influence of the peer group.) She concludes that the Western obsession with nurturing children is a big fat waste of time. Since personality is immune to parental nurture, parents can breathe a collective sigh of relief—no longer are they to blame for their childrens’ failures. Nor do they have to worry that they aren’t spending enough “quality time” with their children, giving them enough affection, driving them to sports practices and music lessons, etc. Children turn out fine so long as they have a peer group.

This agrees perfectly with the anthropological evidence. In hunter-gatherer cultures, infants stay in their mothers’ arms until they are weaned. The mother doesn’t bother to speak to her infant as it wouldn’t be able to understand (and it will learn to speak from other children). Then, the toddler is handed over to an older sibling, usually a sister, who is given full responsibility over the child and is expected to dominate it. The parents play a very hands-off role. Harris writes:

The idea that parents should have to entertain their children is bizarre to people in [traditional] societies. They would fall down laughing if you tried to tell them about “quality time”.

There is a good reason why this trait evolved in children. Parents and children only share half of their genes, so from the selfish gene’s perspective, there are conflicts of interest. We would expect parents and children to try to manipulate each other for their own benefit, and that each would develop defenses against such manipulation. The child may try to get more than its fair share of food by crying, whining, being cute, etc. (It only shares half its genes with its siblings, after all.) The parents may want their daughter to stick around and take care of her younger siblings, while it may not be in her own best interest to do so. Hence children resist the efforts of their parents to shape their personalities.

Harris’s advice to parents is simple: 1) follow the evolutionary logic (i.e., don’t bother with obsessive nurturing), and 2) raise them in a good neighborhood, where there is a good peer group. Children are socialized by their peer group, so this is the most effective thing you can do for them.

Finally, when it comes to health, paleolithic nutrition is the most important element. For an infant, this means breast milk and then paleo foods. Please—don’t feed your baby soy formula. Sun is also important: it’s a tragedy that so many people shield their babies from getting any direct sunlight on their skin.

The fact is, gluttony and sloth are symptoms, not causes, of obesity. Just as children “overeat” because they’re growing (taller), people also overeat when they’re growing (fatter). This explanation makes a lot of sense: if your body is storing away calories in the fat cells, then the other tissues will have fewer calories available to use. Hence, you will hungrier and less active, in exactly the same way as a lean person who is underfed.

As Taubes explains in detail in the book, a diet high in refined carbs causes chronic high insulin levels, which causes insulin resistance in the lean tissues, causing a compensatory increase in insulin. Insulin is the storage hormone, so with the lean tissues being less responsive, the fat tissue takes up the slack. The fattening continues until the fat tissue becomes insulin resistant, but then one is at risk of becoming diabetic. The basic story is that bad nutrition causes hormone-driven fattening, which makes less fuel available to the lean tissues, causing hunger and lethargy.

It’s hilarious that obesity “experts” think that the gluttony/sloth hypothesis stands securely behind the law of energy conservation. Energy conservation only says that fattening and caloric excess must occur together—it says nothing about causality. They’ve just assumed that caloric excess causes obesity. Taubes has caught them making an embarrassing, elementary error. It’s the fattening that causes the caloric excess. When your body wants to get fat, it adjusts your hunger and energy levels in order to create the caloric excess required.

The bottom line is that gluttony and sloth are effects, and not causes, of obesity. Now stop blaming the victims for a lack of willpower and tell them the real cause of their obesity. (If they don’t lose the weight after that, then you can blame them.)

One of the main points that Taubes stresses is that hunger is a physiological, and not a psychological phenomenon. He discusses Edward Adolph’s rat feeding experiments from the ’40s which clearly showed that food consumption is regulated by caloric need, and not by volume, mass, or even taste! For example, when the rats’ food was diluted they kept eating until they got enough calories, even though they ate a much greater volume and mass of food. And when calories were directly injected into the rats’ stomachs, their intake dropped accordingly.

The implication is that trying to eat less by using tricks like drinking water or eating more fiber to create a sensation of fullness are futile. You’ll be hungry until you actually put real calories in there. (I should add that trying to eat less is a horrible way to lose fat: the cost is all the negative effects of semi-starvation and you generally regain all the fat when you return to normal eating.)

Hunger, and hence food consumption are hormone driven: we eat to get enough calories. Period. Just as children eat a lot because they’re growing, fat people “overeat” because they’re growing (fatter). In neither case are they growing because they’re overeating. Their bodies need more food in order to grow, so their appetites are correspondingly larger. When thin people “overeat”, they don’t get fat, they just aren’t as hungry for the following meal, at which they “undereat”. The bottom line is that you don’t control your hunger—your caloric need does—so you’ll end up eating the “right” amount over the long term.

(Incidentally, Taubes points out that, if our hunger weren’t regulated by caloric need,  it would require a feat of incredible accuracy to maintain a constant weight over a period of several years. A few extra calories per day would add up to major fattening in the long term. Of course, that’s not what happens.)

The fact is, overeating is really quite rare—because it hurts. If you don’t feel sick, then you haven’t overeaten. For most people this happens maybe once or twice a year. If you ate a lot, but feel alright, that’s just calories in the bank which will delay your hunger. Eating big, nourishing meals is nothing to feel guilty about—you’re giving your body the calories it needs to function, and if it doesn’t need them right away, it won’t trigger your hunger as quickly.

Securing cooperation is the fundamental challenge in establishing a civil society. It would be nice if we could all just get along, but we all have incentives to cheat and steal on occasion. These incentives become magnified as the society grows and relations become more anonymous, since it becomes more and more difficult to know whether other people are trustworthy. There are various ways to solve this problem, but if left unchecked these incentives would lead to social chaos.

Religion is a particularly effective, if crude, method of securing cooperation. In general, religions lay out moral rules (which often happen to be social ones) and set up strong incentives to follow them. Eternal life in heaven is an infinitely great reward for being a cooperator; eternal damnation in hell is an infinitely great punishment for being a cheater; and the judge is omniscient, so it’s impossible to “get away” with anything. Societies with these religions would have a competitive advantage: greater cooperation means more trade and more production—in a word, prosperity. These societies would grow and spread—by conquest or consent—until they came to dominate. So religion is a hack that gets people to behave in large, anonymous societies.

On the individual level, there are strong incentives to portray oneself as a believer. Being genuinely religious makes you more trustworthy, as you can be counted on to cooperate and not cheat. Displaying (advertising) your religiosity to others is a signal of this trustworthiness, it creates a good reputation. Thus, being religious has material incentives: more people to trade and cooperate with. Once a religion gains a foothold, the incentive would be for everyone to jump aboard.

Yet I don’t think that religion could get a foothold with these incentives alone. Religion—a cultural universal—fundamentally rests on our psychological willingness to believe in the supernatural. Evolutionary psychology plays a large role. So religion is a particularly infectious meme that exploits an innate human irrationality and produces the byproduct of social cooperation, creating strong incentives to be religious.

This explains so much about religious behavior. Why do the religious often ask what keeps atheists from stealing and murdering? Because that’s supposed to be the function of religion. (Note that this question is self-contradictory: on one hand, it tries to argue that only religion can be the source of morality, while on the other hand, it presupposes that theft and murder are inherently wrong—regardless of what god says.) Why are the religious so hostile towards atheists, and why are they less hostile to believers in contradicting gods? Because genuine belief in any type of divine justice makes one more trustworthy; atheism makes one an unconstrained danger. Why do people invest so much time and money in religious affairs? To signal to others that they’re believers and therefore trustworthy. Why is questioning religion taboo? To avoid undermining the social order.

But there’s plenty of hope for truth. As other institutions replace religion in enabling social cooperation, religion becomes redundant and people can freely satisfy their intellects without undermining the social order. Religion is supported by mass belief and cultural momentum. It has already started to come undone, and will only unravel faster as mass support shrinks.

The scientific research in the field of nutrition and health has been deeply muddled, as Gary Taubes has forcefully argued. This is because they haven’t adopted the guiding paradigm of evolution, the theory underpinning all of biology (and this due to government distortion of science). Without a theory to interpret the data, they’re adrift at sea without a rudder, facing a bewildering array of disconnected facts with no way of relating them. Only evolution can make sense of the facts, but if they accept that, they’ll have to admit that they were wrong and that the evolutionary health proponents were right. I look forward to the day.

In this excerpt from The Protein Debate (HT Robb Wolf), Loren Cordain beautifully makes this point:

Although humanity has been interested in diet and health for thousands of years, the organized, scientific study of nutrition has a relatively recent past. For instance, the world’s first scientific journal devoted entirely to diet and nutrition, The Journal of Nutrition only began publication in 1928. Other well known nutrition journals have a more recent history still: The British Journal of Nutrition (1947), The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (1954), and The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (1988). The first vitamin was “discovered” in 1912 and the last vitamin (B12) was identified in 1948 (1). The scientific notion that omega 3 fatty acids have beneficial health effects dates back only to the late 1970’s (2), and the characterization of the glycemic index of foods only began in 1981 (3).

Nutritional science is not only a newly established discipline, but it is also a highly fractionated, contentious field with constantly changing viewpoints on both major and minor issues that impact public health. For example, in 1996 a task force of experts from the American Society for Clinical Nutrition (ASCN) and the American Institute of Nutrition (AIN) came out with an official position paper on trans fatty acids stating,

“We cannot conclude that the intake of trans fatty acids is a risk factor for coronary heart disease” (4).

Fast forward 6 short years to 2002 and the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine’s report on trans fatty acids (5) stating,

“Because there is a positive linear trend between trans fatty acid intake and total and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol concentration, and therefore increased risk of cardiovascular heart disease, the Food and Nutrition Board recommends that trans fatty acid consumption be as low as possible while consuming a nutritionally adequate diet”.

These kinds of complete turnabouts and divergence of opinion regarding diet and health are commonplace in the scientific, governmental and medical communities. The official U.S. governmental recommendations for healthy eating are outlined in the “My Pyramid” program (6) which recently replaced the “Food Pyramid”, both of which have been loudly condemned for nutritional shortcomings by scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health (7). Dietary advice by the American Heart Association (AHA) to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) is to limit total fat intake to 30% of total energy, to limit saturated fat to <10% of energy and cholesterol to <300 mg/day while eating at least 2 servings of fish per week (8). Although similar recommendations are proffered in the USDA “My Pyramid”, weekly fish consumption is not recommended because the authors of these guidelines feel there is only “limited” information regarding the role of omega 3 fatty acids in preventing cardiovascular disease (6). Surprisingly, the personnel makeup of both scientific advisory boards is almost identical. At least 30 million Americans have followed Dr. Atkins advice to eat more fat and meat to lose weight (9). In utter contrast, Dean Ornish tells us fat and meat cause cancer, heart disease and obesity, and that we would all would be a lot healthier if we were strict vegetarians (10). Who’s right and who’s wrong? How in the world can anyone make any sense out of this apparent disarray of conflicting facts, opinions and ideas?

In mature and well-developed scientific disciplines there are universal paradigms that guide scientists to fruitful end points as they design their experiments and hypotheses. For instance, in cosmology (the study of the universe) the guiding paradigm is the “Big Bang” concept showing that the universe began with an enormous explosion and has been expanding ever since. In geology, the “Continental Drift” model established that all of the current continents at one time formed a continuous landmass that eventually drifted apart to form the present-day continents. These central concepts are not theories for each discipline, but rather are indisputable facts that serve as orientation points for all other inquiry within each discipline. Scientists do not know everything about the nature of the universe, but it is absolutely unquestionable that it has been and is expanding. This central knowledge then serves as a guiding template that allows scientists to make much more accurate and informed hypotheses about factors yet to be discovered.

The study of human nutrition remains an immature science because it lacks a universally acknowledged unifying paradigm (11). Without an overarching and guiding template, it is not surprising that there is such seeming chaos, disagreement and confusion in the discipline. The renowned Russian geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (12). Indeed, nothing in nutrition seems to make sense because most nutritionists have little or no formal training in evolutionary theory, much less human evolution. Nutritionists face the same problem as anyone who is not using an evolutionary model to evaluate biology: fragmented information and no coherent way to interpret the data.

All human nutritional requirements like those of all living organisms are ultimately genetically determined. Most nutritionists are aware of this basic concept; what they have little appreciation for is the process (natural selection) which uniquely shaped our species’ nutritional requirements. By carefully examining the ancient environment under which our genome arose, it is possible to gain insight into our present day nutritional requirements and the range of foods and diets to which we are genetically adapted via natural selection (13-16). This insight can then be employed as a template to organize and make sense out of experimental and epidemiological studies of human biology and nutrition (11).