Food for Thought Dietary change was a driving force in human evolution

Scientific American ^ | December 2002 | William R. Leonard

[PatrickHenry]

About the author:
WILLIAM R. LEONARD is a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University. He was born in Jamestown, N.Y., and received his Ph.D. in biological anthropology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1987. The author of more than 80 research articles on nutrition and energetics among contemporary and prehistoric populations, Leonard has studied indigenous agricultural groups in Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru and traditional herding populations in central and southern Siberia.

[PatrickHenry]

Another crevo thread.

[MEGoody]

"Thus, in an evolutionary sense, we are very much what we ate."

Well, then why is everyone worried about what we eat now? Our bodies should just evolve to better handle the Big Macs, large fries and giant chocolate shakes.

[js1138]

The sound of the server crashing to its knees under the weight of crevo posts. (slow just now)

My fourth grade health book -- printed during the Pleistocene -- recommended eating a wide variety of foods. Has something changed?

[Right Wing Professor]

Noooooooo!

Actually, I've been occupied elsewhere, with another literalist who seems to have taken it as his personal mission to drive the Roman Catholic vote away from the Republican Party. Sure hope the next evangelical revival goes well, because given their rein, these guys could get the conserative vote to, oh, let's say, maybe as high as 15%.

[onedoug]

"And God said: 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.' And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them."

...I think is the primary answer, though not necessarily contrary to that posed here, which would theorize some semblance of mechanism.

[f.Christian]

To: Marathon

Missionaries have said for years that American educational/media institutions are far more closed than in places like Russia. This underscores their point. What was it someone said, to find real communists these days you have to visit an American university?

2 Posted on 03/27/2000 10:56:24 PST by Marathon

[f.Christian]

Do you think if you feed a horse sushi and strawberries it will turn into a yuppie?

[KarlInOhio]

Well, then why is everyone worried about what we eat now? Our bodies should just evolve to better handle the Big Macs, large fries and giant chocolate shakes.

The problem is that medical science is preventing that step in human evolution. If they keep on doing heart bypass operations to save people, then the genetic superiority of those who can survive "Super Sizing" their fast food meals cannot be exploited. However, if Hitlery takes over the country's medical system and drives it into the ground, people will no longer be able to survive their heart attacks.

Please look for my book "All I really needed to know about eugenics, I learned at McDonalds" coming to bookstores and drive-thrus near you.

[Khurkris]

It is well known and long established that civilization occured because of mankinds need to make beer.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

I haven't caught up with the last thread yet.

[Seruzawa]

Nah, actually human civilization evolved in order to better serve the needs of our dogs.

[Reeses]

Improved dietary quality alone cannot explain why hominid brains grew

The author completely misses two boats:

1) Our brains as well as other genetic development really took off upon the invention of war, which is in effect high-speed evolution. If you match two tribes together in a battle, the smartest tribe usually wins. That is the reason our brains grew. Darwin knew this, yet modern liberal university professors are in denial because it doesn't fit in with the socialist utopian / narcissistic view of humans.

2) The author didn’t even read Atkin’s diet book, else would have learned that matching calorie intake to calorie consumption is an oversimplification. The author is too deep into the world is flat community that he can’t bring himself to realize he may have been wrong all these years.

[stanz]

Reads like a course in primate morphology. It's interesting to note that Goodall reported that in cases of infanticide and cannibalization of infants by females among wild chimps at Gombe, the infants born to those females weighed more and were larger-brained than infants born to non-cannabalizing females. This is just another example of the correlation between relative brain size and "choicest" diet.

[stanz]

Our brains as well as other genetic development really took off upon the invention of war, which is in effect high-speed evolution. If you match two tribes together in a battle, the smartest tribe usually wins. That is the reason our brains grew

I thought it was cooperation in the hunt and the eating of meat that contributed to the growth in brain size. Before you can fight, you need to eat. Social organization follows and you need socialization to wage war.

[capitan_refugio]

Surviving "Super Sizing" is not the solution. If "Super Sizing" gives a portion of the population a reproductive advantage, then it is a good thing in terms of natural selection. The older proportions of the population are, by-and-large, not the reproducers or the child-rearing portion of the population. As such, the older portion is useful to a community to the extent they can guide, educate, and assist the younger portion. Otherwise, they would simply be a drag on the available resources.

Note, many of the diseases related to a the typical poor American diet tend to show up in older people - coronary heart disease, hypertension, loss of teeth, osteoporosis, etc. Diseases due to malnutrtion tend to strike the yougest members of a population. Malnutrition is a leading cause of death in the third world. Diet and the availability of food has been an important factor in the development of modern human history (since the time of the first pasoralists).

Modern medicine and the availability of a steady food supply has lengthened the human life span. I am making no judgement whether that is a good or bad thing. To the extent that we can adapt to the less healthy parts of our diet through our prime reproductive years, the selection process is working properly.

[Reeses]

I thought it was cooperation in the hunt and the eating of meat that contributed to the growth in brain size.

Then dogs should have brains as big as ours. It was the first murder, the first human with a temper, the first human who decided to rob and rape, that set the ball rolling of our advanced genetics.

[xrp]

I figured it was the Gray aliens from Zeta Reticuli that came down in flying saucers and replaced some of our primate ancestors' DNA with the alien DNA to spawn the human race.

[f.Christian]

To: Dimensio

As I see it, evolution is an ideological(RELIGION)* doctrine(DOGMA)*.

If it were only a "scientific theory", it would have died a natural death 50 - 70 years ago; the evidence against it is too overwhelming and has been all along. The people defending it are doing so because they do not like the alternatives to an atheistic basis for science and do not like the logical implications of abandoning their atheistic paradigm and, in conducting themselves that way, they have achieved a degree of immunity to what most people call logic.

488 posted on 7/29/02 5:18 AM Pacific by medved

Great quote. Thanks for posting it.


294 posted on 10/18/02 11:59 AM Pacific by AnnaZ


*...my additions!

[hillsborofox]

"Thus, in an evolutionary sense, we are very much what we ate."

Then, no question, I am an individually-wrapped, itty-bitty Snickers Bar. (Happens this time every year.)