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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."
Who would have thought it given the current events of the world?
I think we may have peaked with the baby boomers. They got to ride the wave of new medical advances and didn't have the weight of fast food (har har) holding them back.
Our generations (current teenagers up to 30-somethings) have grown up with McDonalds and more, and with obesity on the rise with no end in sight, I think we'll begin to see another decline with our generation, with arthritis, diabetes, and heart disease all coming on earlier.
they work for Wal-Mart. Then they have neither the insurance to cover nor the income to afford the drugs and treatments mentioned.
The article talks only about how health has improved over the last few hundred years. This is almost entirely due to nutrition and sanitation. The article fails to mentions the much more interesting point that we are probably still less healthy than our ancestors of 2000 years ago. Hunter-gatherers are on average taller than Americans today, and there has never been a documented hunter-gatherer cancer death. Read accounts of the original Spanish explorers in the Carribean and Florida. They saw how much taller and healthier the hunter-gatherer tribes were.
m ondmistake.html
http://www.agron.iastate.edu/courses/agron342/dia
http://www.paleodiet.com/lindeberg/
The ideal human diet is high in meat and animal fat. For the last several hundred years "civilized" humans have been highly reliant on grains and short on quality fats and proteins, which has been disasterous for human health. Only in the last hundred years has meat and fat consumption risen to reasonably healthy levels in wealthy countries. The effects of increased meat and fat intake was clearly documented in post-war UK and Japan, where deliberate efforts to raise egg and dairy consumption had dramatic effects on heart disease and general health.
Hey, with modern advances in insulin pumps, prosthetic feet, and scooters, it'll be no big deal! I hope to start marketing a scooter that's basically designed as motorized wheelbarrow. It will be sold with a free prying bar and some barrow-lube to help people remove themselves from the scooter when they get to their couch.
Women dig out-of-towners, and occupying soldiers are just about the manliest out-of-towners anyone will ever meet. Plus, during an occupation, soldiers typically have the best food, sundries, and other assorted things that are great to have. The point being, it's entirely possible that the drive for war exists precisely because we evolved to wage war as a way of periodically spreading and mixing different gene pools. Just something to think about.
Although we are no longer subject to predation, there is still sexual choice. I don't know that this would apply to everything.
However, size I feel would be greatly affected. In both men and women (at least in European cultures) being tall lends sexual advantages and over time these will begin to alter a populations average genetic make up.
How many women are looking for short, dark and handsome?
LIVE, Love, die
"Antibiotics and modern medicine"? Let's be clear about the real reason that humans today live longer than their predecessors: hygeine. The good, old, mundane bar of soap (and its liberal application to the human body) has had a much more profound effect on human health than all the doctors in history and their medicines combined.
You assume because miserable conditions exist that this is the desired state of things. What you rule out without providing a reason for excluding it is that miserable conditions may exist because we do not yet know how to prevent/eliminate them.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
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Suicide only increases misery in most cases. Also if theres a hell, suicide only increases the likelyhood of going there. So it's not much of an escape, I'd say drug-use beats suicide because it removes misery also.
But you are right, most people are commiting suicide, look at the world. There are plenty of people who die saving lives, who die protecting the country, and who die with honor every day. Then there are people who just, die in the most irresponsible way they can think of. If you want a death with honor,join the military and fight in the war. If you want to die protecting your friends and family,become a cop. Die trying to save lives, or trying to make the world better, otherwise suicide is in my opinion simply fear of life. Is life miserable for most people? Yes. Does that mean we should collectively stop living? No. Or at least I don't think so.
I think however I'm outnumbered here, so there will be plenty who would rather end the world than fight to save it. Ending life is always easier than saving it.
I don't understand your reasoning. We went to the moon in the 1960's. We spend 300-400 billion a year on defense. Eliminating misery has never been a concern, not ever, there is no evidence of it in history, not even in this country. Let's see, we are in the country that created the "ghetto", that created "segregation", that didn't allow women to vote, that works longer and harder with less vacations than any other country on the planet, with both some of the richest and poorest people living next to each other in the same country.
If our goal were to decrease world misery, shouldnt we start by reducing the workday? extending the weekend? reducing the work day to a 4 hour a day maximum, or adding friday as part of a 3 day weekend would do a lot to reduce world misery. I think everyone on this website would want to work less hours so they can spend more time with their families, friends, or doing things they enjoy. Instead we are working more hours than any other country. So don't tell me we don't know how to eliminate world misery when we are creating our own environment. We are the ones who want to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with almost no vacation time, and we don't even have a reason to be doing it.
We know how to prevent the miserable conditions, and we WANT people to be miserable. Can you with a straight face, tell me or anyone that the third world is this poor and starving to death when the third world is mostly farming land, rainforest, and has all the gold, oil and diamonds on the planet? Starvation only exists because we want people to starve. Poverty only exists because we want or need people to be poor. Ghettos only exist because we create them. It's not like these situations formed by accident, just read the history books.
The solution? We can work for quality of life, we can work for happiness, we can work to reduce misery, and it does not take a lot, just a simply change in priority. First we have to love ourselves and care about how we feel. Once we care about how we feel, then we can care about how other people such as our neighbors feel, and yes we could have a better environment for everyone if we worked to improve it. Sadly, we are working to increase misery. We have not even invited Africa, perhaps one of the largest continents on earth into the WTO, despite the fact that we get oil, gold, diamonds and other natural resources from countries, we go out of our way to avoid trade. This is why countries are poor, it's a matter of trade, and if there are sanctions, or debt it makes countries artificially poor forever.
So I don't understand your point, it's not difficult to be rational. I assume you are rational and you want to work hard today so you can work less hard tomorrow. You'd like to have robots doing most of the work so we can all work 4 hours a day. Hell you'd like to globalize the economy so we can all work 4 hours a day even sooner, but guess what, we have a globalized economy now, and we still work 8 hours a day, and now it takes 2 incomes to survive.
That's all true, but the biggest breeding factor for soldiers historically is rape.
Traditionally, when conquering a city, soldiers will rape all the women and pillage its riches. This is one of the main attractions of the soldier profession. Killing all the males is optional, but also has obvious evolutionary implications.
During WW2, certainly the Red Army practiced this to the fullest, and I would guess that it was practiced by more civilized armies more than was publiciced too.