Actually, I agree; it's not that something is automatically good because our ancestors did it; it's that our bodies are tuned to the biological expectations of our species. I have no doubt that there are changes we can make that will extend our health and lifespan. And I also agree that we shouldn't necessarily their lifestyle (or whatever we assume their lifestyle was). I would just argue that a good starting point is the environment that our physiology expects. We can then build (or take away) from there, but we should do so cautiously, and modern science has a nasty habit of reducing an entire spectrum of the environment (i.e. sunlight) to one or two measurable factors (vitamin D, for instance) and coming to ridiculous conclusions.
In any case - are we doing better now? our brains have shrunk over the last few thousand years, and I'm not so sure about lifespan. Early agriculturalists seemed to have lived relatively short (and diseased) lives, but the hunter gatherers before them may have lived quite a lot longer, especially if you factor out the early vulnerable years (i.e. taking the average of lifespan from adolescence or adulthood rather than from infancy) and the dangers of their environment. I suspect that if we took our current humans - with our 80yo-ish life span - and put them in the wild, we would go extinct.
That's it for me on this exchange. Best to you!
fiddlehodl@nostrplebs.com / FiddleHodlHomestead
npub1kw…khx95
2024-04-10 22:28:43
in reply to nevent1q…elxv
Author Public Key
npub1kwk98e8t2p3t0um50e3luulxwyt5mtcxvc80w8w89fcuju0dmzfsgkhx95Published at
2024-04-10 22:28:43Event JSON
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"content": "Actually, I agree; it's not that something is automatically good because our ancestors did it; it's that our bodies are tuned to the biological expectations of our species. I have no doubt that there are changes we can make that will extend our health and lifespan. And I also agree that we shouldn't necessarily their lifestyle (or whatever we assume their lifestyle was). I would just argue that a good starting point is the environment that our physiology expects. We can then build (or take away) from there, but we should do so cautiously, and modern science has a nasty habit of reducing an entire spectrum of the environment (i.e. sunlight) to one or two measurable factors (vitamin D, for instance) and coming to ridiculous conclusions.\n\nIn any case - are we doing better now? our brains have shrunk over the last few thousand years, and I'm not so sure about lifespan. Early agriculturalists seemed to have lived relatively short (and diseased) lives, but the hunter gatherers before them may have lived quite a lot longer, especially if you factor out the early vulnerable years (i.e. taking the average of lifespan from adolescence or adulthood rather than from infancy) and the dangers of their environment. I suspect that if we took our current humans - with our 80yo-ish life span - and put them in the wild, we would go extinct.\n\nThat's it for me on this exchange. Best to you!",
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