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Modern Humans Far More Robust Than Ancestors
joeljkp writes "The New York Times has an article up discussing how modern humans are 'So Big and Healthy Nowadays That Grandpa Wouldn't Even Know You.' Despite the hyperbole, the article makes several excellent points regarding the impact of antibiotics and modern medicine on humans in their youth. The 'baby boomers' of today have an overall level of health far higher than their parents did in middle age, and reason stands that their children will have even better health to look forward to." From the article: "The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it. And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before. Even the human mind seems improved. The average I.Q. has been increasing for decades, and at least one study found that a person's chances of having dementia in old age appeared to have fallen in recent years."
That's impossible. Average IQ by definition will always be 100.
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Swearing is the crutch of inarticulate mother fuckers.
No if we could only find a healthy environment for all these healthy people to life their long lives in...
You sure that the smaller buildings were simply not more robust and able to survive the centuries?
The "shorter medieval man" myth turned out to be founded on the fact that it's easier to take in clothes than add material to them, so smaller outfits were more likely to be preserved. It's not a huge effect, but given enough time even a small effect adds up.
It's entirely possible that the overall average is an all-time constant 100 but that people being tested in recent years have consistently beaten the historical average.
"We would have even less arthritis if people didn't buy into jogging as some health benefit. It just kills your joints."
Most common forms of arthritis are either caused by an immune system malfunction (causing the immune system to attack otherwise healthy joints) or by an infection. Jogging is a high impact exercise, and as such if you already suffer from arthritis it may accelerate the disintgration of the joints but it does not cause arthritis. The high impact nature of jogging is one of its main advantages in a person with healthy joints as it accelerates growth in the impact area.
actually leaches and maggots are great for medicine.. leaches are applied to keep gangrene from forming by keeping blood flowing and maggots accelerate the healing of wounds by eating the dead tissue.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Actually, it has stayed the same. By definition, the average I.Q. is always 100.
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http://users.fmg.uva.nl/jwicherts/wicherts2004.pd
This study concludes the Flynn effect is a matter of how you tweak the numbers. It's weak enough it's not really worth talking about. Other studies have shown IQs have been declining in the West since the mid to late 90s.
Lookup the Flynn Effect for more information: "The Flynn effect is the continued year-on-year rise of IQ test scores, an effect seen in most parts of the world, although at greatly varying rates. It was named by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve after the New Zealand based political scientist James R. Flynn, its discoverer. The average rate of rise seems to be around three IQ points per decade...." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_Effect
Fewer wars, increased communication, increased cultural awareness... yeah we must be dumb.
We might note that this is a gratuitous mis-use of the term "robust", which is a well-known technical term in anthropology. It has nothing to do with state of health. It's basically a measure of bodily weight relative to height.
Thus, the Neandert[h]al (sub)species was "robust", the invading Cro Magnon people were "gracile". In common English speech, more common terms might be "stocky" versus "slender".
Ordinarily this wouldn't matter. But we're dealing with a topic in which the technical terminology is relevant. Using the technical term in some vernacular sense is understandable, but it's misleading. And it's likely to lead to dismissal by people knowedgeable in the subject.
You'd think that we'd want to avoid this in a forum that consciously targets "nerds" and "geeks" (two more technical terms that the public uses very differently).
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Except for the fact that the air and water are cleaner than they were 50 years ago, and keep getting cleaner. Older, less "horrible" animal farming techniques required cooking meat nearly crunchy just to make sure you didn't get trichinosis and other diseases that more "humanely" treated animals always got.
Firstly, I said water and soil. The air is definitely cleaner because we replaced a lot of coal with natural gas, cleaned up a lot of power plants, and destroyed our steel industry and sent it overseas. The water, though, is getting some pretty strange and complex dissolved chemicals these days, from mercury to MBTE to newer fertilizers, etc. A lot of that is getting into the fish, which used to be one of the healthiest things you could possibly eat. Now if you eat more than a couple servings a week you risk all sorts of poisonings. And the soil outside the Superfund sites is probably a lot worse off than it was 50 years ago as the runoff from new mining techniques and the aforementioned chemicals permeate it.
And over the last 50 years the United States made the transition from small cattle ranches to corporate ranches, and most cattle moved from grazing to corn-feed with growth hormones. Thus, the beef got a lot cheaper and a lot worse for you.
E pluribus unum