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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?
Intelligent design at work :)
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.
Sort of. The average IQ scale is shifted on a consistent basis to keep the median at or near 100. That said, the definition of IQ isn't actually for the average 100; that would mean that we couldn't provide a measurement until the year (or month or whatever) had been tallied. The definition of IQ is relative to an offset.
That said, it's the IQ measurement that's changing; its actual norm value is in fact increasing, and has been for more than a century (basically, since it was formalized under the current system.) If we made a temperature system which was relative to the planetary norm, even though the measurement would have to be shifted downwards year to year to account for Intelligent Warming (sorry, I live in the Republican Religious States of America,) the temperature would indeed still be rising, even though the scale was being modified to keep it relative.
Just because the scale is renormalized doesn't mean what it's measuring isn't changing.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I think it's well documented that Diabetes (type 2 - NIDDM) is appearing
at a much younger age than before.
We would have even less arthritis if people didn't buy into jogging as some health benefit. It just kills your joints.
what I believe is likely the real reason.
Life was just plain a lot harder then.
It's as simple as that. We've moved from an agrarian society to an industrial one to a service economy. Life is easier. No more scythes or plowing with a horse. No more mining coal with pick axes. No subsistance farming or clearing new fields by hand (unless you want to, I suppose). People are more educated about what's healthy and what's not, no more mercury based patent medicines, or blood letting with leaches.
The article has it half right - modern medicine play a large part, but I believe the major effect is because it's able to recognize and address the true nature of ailments, not because it's making the human body more robust. That is, it's a remedial effect more than a prophylactic one.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Are there any credible reasons to believe that humans in general are growing physically stronger and more durable, rather than overreliance on technology (in particular, antibiotics) actually having the opposite effect?
Fuck Slashdot
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.
Does anyone else feel a strong urge to smack those smarmy bastards who are so convinced that drugs and chemicals and such are making us weaker?
"Ooh, but the cavemen didn't have glut--"
"Fuck the cavemen. They were chased by saber-toothed tigers and lucky to live to the age of 20."
I say pump me full of drugs, corporate America!
And it took less than one decade for the average IQ to drop below that of a rock.
*Sigh*
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
It's called evolution. get used to it.
No, it's not called evolution, it's called technology. We, Homo Sapiens, evolved our brains 200,000 years ago, but didn't really start to use them until 50,000 years ago. Surely there is something more than biological since we're discussing this via a computer terminals connected to a worldwide network instead of banging rocks against treetrunks, especially if there was a 150,000 year gap in between where we did so, with the same biology. See this wikipedia article.
We have essentially the same genes as 3 generations ago. Evolutionary change takes much, much longer than that,
We just live in a much better environment these days. Had our ancestors gotten to live like we, they would have been just as healthy.
From what I've read so far the information is relative to the US only. There is other information about European areas as well, but I wonder what there is to know about Asia and areas that are significantly less developed?
I have noted in the past that I seem to be a lot more healthy than just about everyone else I know. My health increases further as I avoid certain foods such as milk, bread and pasta.... things with excessive processing and preservatives. But those things didn't exist in the same form "back in the day." So I think there has to be more to it.
I have to assume part of what I experience is linked to the community in which I live, but still... if I am not an anomoly, then there's even more improvement that can occur.
I will wrap up TFA...
Americans and Europeans of today, who have health insurance, are bigger, fatter, and healthier than people who were too poor pay their way out of conscription during the Civil War.
Boo War!
Hooray Health Insurance!
they work for Wal-Mart. Then they have neither the insurance to cover nor the income to afford the drugs and treatments mentioned.
Can't muster the self-discipline to keep yourself in shape and poison-free in a society filled with healthy alternatives, free information about the risks you take, and a gym around every corner? Get your genes outta the pool, bub. :)
However, it should be noted that the evolution of the mind and the evolution of the body are at odds right now, much more so when you factor in both of the world wars which were just so luckily placed at the crux of vast technological revolutions. Just as brains were becoming as important to have as muscle in terms of succeeding in society, everyone with the traits of courage and physical prowess heads off to the slaughter. One should not understimate the impact of a massive war on the evolution of the species: Each of the millions upon millions of army-duty worthy men that died in those wars would've otherwise possibly taken up one of the female population and continued his bloodline. Instead, someone else, someone quite possibly smarter but not as physically endowed (those that piloted instead of fought on the ground, or worked as doctors, cryptographers, etc), took his spot. I'll always wonder how much this changed the direction of civilization... Without such an evolutionary boost to intellectual traits, would we have arrived at such a tolerant society so quickly? I say tolerant because in a remarkably short span of time, racial prejudice has been outlawed and homosexuality has been brought into the main light of society as an acceptable way of life. If I'd lived 50 or 70 years ago, I'd never have been able to predict society would move forward so quickly.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
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.
One thing this article misses is the impact of the industrial revolution on health. People are healthier today than they were 150 years ago or even 75 years ago, yes. The 19th and early 20th century had people in the industrialized world in rather unhealthy conditions with quite poor diet. The real question is looking at the health of people century by century over the last 10,000 years in a variety of places and cultures. Changes in medicine, population patterns (rural to urban) and diet have changed health, but not in the ways implied by this article.
Consider disease.
Antibiotics and modern medicine have changed disease in a big way. However, how common were major wide-spread outbreaks of disease 5000 years ago? The flu of 1918 and the plague of the Middle Ages were widespread because of increased travel and contact among peoples compared to say in 1500 BC. AIDS is a modern example of a disease that has spread quickly globally today, which would not have reached many populations in earlier times. People's in Western Hemisphere were almost totally isolated until 500 years ago. Australia as well was isolated.
Diseases brought from Europe such as small pox were the primary cause of the annihilation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Native American peoples had no immunity to such diseases.
Some diseases such as polio and small pox were common 1000 years ago and have been all but eliminated today, but probably were not so common in 3000 BC. Other diseases that have been eliminated such as leprosy seem to have a long history in some populations, but probably not all.
Consider nutrition.
In modern times people in the industrialized world by and large never want for calories. Excess calorie consumption is a far greater public health threat than lack of calories. However, this is not true world wide as famine kills hundreds of thousands in Africa in particular.
500 years ago, a lack of abundance of calories at some point during a person's life was fairly common globally. Also, poor nutrition from an unbalanced diet was far more common in Europe 500 years ago than today. Poor nutrition is a major problem today in South Asia and other areas.
How was the diet of peoples around the world in 2500 BC? Because the world was far less populated then, nutrition on average may well have been better than in 1500 AD.
The diet of woodlands Native Americans 600 years ago was probably as balanced as the diet of modern US residents. This was not necessarily true of the Native Americans of Central America, who relied more heavily on corn agriculture.
Much of this information on disease and nutrition can be ascertained from looking at skeletal remains.
One thing we do know from archeology: humans today are generally larger than they have been over the past 10,000 years. This is probably because of an abundance of calories throughout their lives, although reductions in disease may also be a factor.
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
My European ancestors tended to live to be around 40, but my Native American ancestors tended to live to 75 years and beyond -- one Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother lived to be 107. Native Americans truly did tend to live longer, but I don't see many studies on it, despite the fact that this pretty well-known. Why, I don't know. But I can guess some of the reasons they lived longer: better eating, more excercise, and most espceially, not a smany chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes in their bloodlines.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
You sure that the smaller buildings were simply not more robust and able to survive the centuries?
The buildings are not smaller. Their doors were shorter.
One reason is that given already, to withhold heat, but another is security. They're often intentionally shorter than people by a head.
While it may be a bit annoying to stoop to enter and leave your home it isn't any big deal really, but someone trying to storm your home is either going to get a knock on the head or be forced to crouch on entry (slows you down and exposes your neck/head as a target as you pass through).
KFG
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.
while our obsession on anti-biotic this and that has created a world where people lack immunities to bugs that our ancestors would of shrugged off. as anyone should know when you are born you share the same anti-bodies as your mother for the first two weeks of life for protection while the baby's own anti-bodies learn from them. this is how polio became such a problem it's a weak virus but when has no immunity it's devastating. also it doesn't just stop there.
l 1 90/1023
it's also what we eat. the human body evolved to basically eat animals for fat and protein and fruit/veggies for the rest, this may surprise people but we did not evolve to eat grain or dairy(other then human breast milk) yet the majority of our current food has the following.
* Highly processed foods that are deficient in important vitamins and minerals
* Synthetic food compounds
* High in refined sugars
* High in saturated fat
* Deficient in fiber
* Mega-size portions
* High in calories
you can drink milk only because of a recent mutation of a human gene. a normal human would not be able to eat any kind of dairy with lactose in it because once they reach maturity the gene for that gets turned off. this was about 6,000 years ago. the rest of the stuff in cow milk other then the nutrients are things we are not evolved to eat and might be the cause of some of out illnesses, along with the lectains in grain which can even block the absorption of protein.
more information.
http://www.earth360.com/diet_paleodiet_balzer.htm
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/318/7
to assume we know better then nature is the epitome of ignorance.
"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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.