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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."
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.
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
No if we could only find a healthy environment for all these healthy people to life their long lives in...
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.
What I find funny is the line "The average I.Q. has been increasing for decades", because if it has, someone dropped the ball...
The average IQ is 100, by definition if IQ. That's what the tests are normalized for.
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.
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
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.