ArthurDeVany.com

I came across an 11 minute clip of my talk to the CR Society in Phoenix a few years back.

Have a look at Art’s CR Talk.

An overweight hispanic doctor has a new diet book out; a hot diet for latins. Is this credible? A well-known evolutionary psychologist is far over weight; does he not understand the Paleolithic mind after all?

Don’t those slimfast meals look awful?

The world awaits the next fad diet book. It is not that they could not work, though many could not possibly work, they just don’t. If there were a graveyard for useless books it would be filled by diet books, self-help books, biographies of politicians, and religious books.

I am monitoring the comments and deleting those I find to be objectionable, thoughtless, or lazy. Life is a lot easier this way.

I am constantly amazed that in this run for political office we seem to expect that politicians have answers to questions the markets can answer themselves. It is because government has intruded into so many areas of our lives now that we ask politicians how they will solve problems. Why have second-rate brains with short political horizons and bad incentives design any of our institutions and practices? That ought to be up to the people who buy the products and markets.

There is no energy crisis. Demand and supply set the price of energy. At the present price there are good incentives to produce more energy, but domestic production and exploration and the true alternative energy source — nuclear power — are politically blocked.

The upcoming seminar is essentially fully booked, just 2 seats left the last time I checked.

I remember when my little blog went over one million hits in total. It took a few years to get there. Now, just this month, there were 2.75 million hits.

I found this fantastic image in Donald Prothero’s book Evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters. It shows the degree to which humans are neotonized chimps. The juvenile chimp looks almost human. The aged chimp, well, looks like a chimp. Neotony or arrested development in the sequence is one of the tools that evolution uses to adapt genes to new uses. Just turn on or off some genetic switches at different times and you get different forms, even a new species within the hominid line.

It is fun to see the progression shown here as what happens to humans as they age. They progress through the neotonized development sequence and come to take on a resemblance of the species from which they evolved. As we age, we do tend to take on a look somewhere between the juvenile chimp and the aged chimp. Brows enlarge, chins go forward, the face sinks in the central region and the posture changes more toward the forward sloping head and chin of the mature chimp.

Prothero mentions Auldous Huxley’s novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan in which Jo Stoyte hires a “mad scientist”, Dr. Obispo to extend his life. Years later, when Stoyte is more than 100 years old, he is found alive living in the basement of his mansion, still alive but all grown up into an adult ape. Count Dracula and other vampires would face the same fate; living that long extends our arrested development into the full cycle of the ape from which we were derived through neotony. Dorian Grey may not die, but he would not look like his picture either. He would resemble an ape.

Aging does bring the death of beauty; we only get so many summers even if we stave off all the other damage. The swan in us dies.

You ought to read Prothero’s book to guard you against Ben Stein’s awful new movie Expelled. The foolishness and lies of the intelligent design proponents are taken apart in an absolutely devastating way. Not one shred is left standing. Creationists fare even worse if that is possible.

There were ethical lapses in the Tuskegee Experiment, though the standards of the times were far different from now. Similar syphilis experiments were done in Oslo and some starvation studies around this time led to self-mutilation among subjects. Here is the probably somewhat self-serving time line from the CDC. Here is Tuskegee Institute’s own account of the Experiment.

The Tuskegee syphilis study was approved by many health authorities and papers on the experiment were published as early as 1936. Syphilis was an almost untreatable disease at the time (many famous authors are thought to have died of it, such as Nietsche). Treatment was poison such as mercury and arsenic and it was ineffective and dangerous.

Syphilis was a serious problem with black men, with an infection rate of about 35% versus the white infection rate in Macon County, GA of less than one percent. (I played minor league baseball in Georgia and Macon County in 1956 where I was first exposed to racial segregation. I had never seen institutionalized racism before and hated and was shocked by it. It was worse then personal racism because it was institutionalized and supported by government.)

The two points generally taken from the Tuskegee experiment that are wrong are: 1. that the government infected the men — the men were already infected and the infection rate was very high among black men and was a danger to themselves and their wives and children, and 2. that when politicians and ministers mischaracterize the experiment, they drive blacks out of the medical system where effective care might be found for syphilis and other diseases. Syphilis and AIDS infection rates are higher in the black than in the white community and it is essential that the infected seek medical treatment to protect themselves and others. The black community is actually more at risk and creating a false impression that Tuskegee was a government plot puts blacks more at risk.

The willingness of blacks to believe that the government created the AIDS virus is a legacy of Tuskegee, but it needn’t be if the truth were told. The experiment and the Nazi experiments produced a change in medical practice, standards, and law. Here is Brown University’s summary:

Although there were no guidelines in 1930 to influence the formulation of a prospective study of patients with an untreated chronic disease, when the Judiciary Council of the American Medical Association issued a report, on December 10th, 1946, on the ethics of experiments involving human subjects the investigators of the Tuskegee Study took no steps to revise or terminate their investigation. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was in violation of all three requirements proposed by the Judiciary: (1) the voluntary consent of the person on whom the experiment is to be performed must be obtained, (2) the danger of each experiment must be previously investigated by animal experimentation, (3) the experiment must be performed under proper medical protection and management. See also The Nuremberg Code.

In the aftermath of the Tuskegee Study the government reevaluated its research practices to prevent another Tuskegee. The National Research Act was signed in 1974, which created the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioural Research. The group identified the basic principles of research conduct and suggested ways to ensure those principles were followed. See also The Belmont Report

Furthermore, regulations were passed that required all studies using human subjects be reviewed by an Institutional Review Board, which read the study protocols and decided whether they met ethical standards.

So, the federal government made a major effort to prevent further abuses such as those in the Tuskegee Study. This strong and positive response is a sign that ethical people condemned the experiment and insisted on a strong governmental response.

Tuskegee can never happen again in this country. That is what politicians and ministers ought to be telling blacks and whites.

We may have reason to be cautious about some of the clinical trials now being done. Some of the ads I see on TV recruiting subjects are questionable and the pace and contracting out of clinical trials will surely create some lapses. On the other hand, medical advances require experiments and there are always potential ethical and medical risks associated with them.

There is a lot of hard work to credit for the lack of terrorist attacks on the US since 911. Here is a good review of a The Terrorist Watch a book by Ronald Kessler, that describes the transformation of our intelligence community and the work they are doing.

The author of the book is a former reporter for the WSJ and Washington Post who specializes in intelligence and his comments on the assertions and practices of the ACLU and the media are pretty damning. For example on the ACLU we find this

“The fbi . . . is all over the library threat, seizing library records at will under the Patriot Act,” Naomi Klein wrote in the Nation. . . .

Kessler’s simple refutation:

Five years after the enactment of the Patriot Act, the number of searches of charge-out or computer records conducted at libraries under the business records provision of the new act was one.

The review describes other wildly false claims and close to treasonous revelations made by the NYT of important programs that ended their usefulness.

I think you know that I do not like BMI as a measure of body composition. I, like most athletes, have a rather high BMI of nearly 28. BMI is a crude measure of fat, but fails to distinguish skeletal, muscle and organ mass from fat. It further fails to note the distribution of fat in the body. We know that visceral fat is the most dangerous. Here is a quick list of why that person with the big tummy is not so jolly.

Indices like BMI also do not monitor the regional fat distribution (e.g., visceral vs. sc) (57, 66–68). This distinction is significant epidemiologically, because visceral fat accumulation predicts higher risk of peripheral insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, adult cardiovascular disease, hypoandrogenemia, elevated free (salivary) cortisol, reduced concentrations of SHBG, IGFBP-1, LH, and high-density lipoprotein, and impoverished daily GH production (22, 26, 28, 69–76). From Endocrine Reviews 26 (1) 2008.

The problems for those who have high visceral fat are really quite staggering.

A figure from Endocrinology Reviews, entitled Modifying muscle mass - the endocrine perspective by Solomon and Bouloux.

It is interesting to see the effects summarized by muscle tissue type. Glucocorticoid (a catabolic hormone), vitamin D deficiency and T4 (thyroid) deficiency primarily attrit fast twitch muscle fibers. The article further points out the influence of inflammation on satellite cells that repair and grow muscle.

Of course, disuse also promotes muscle atrophy and long term disuse may even cause the important satellite cells to cease to proliferate. The end result of long term chronic disuse is poverty of muscle, so called sarcopenia in the aged. Intense exercise increases androgens and decreases myostatin.

This should answer a few who think antioxidants are not important or that you get enough in your food. Reducing inflammation is important to retaining or increasing muscle mass. Natural and supplemental antioxidants are tools for preventing sarcopenia and aging. I get so much sun that I have all the vitamin D I could ever require, though the EF diet offers plenty as well.

A further insight from the Nature Reviews Genetics article The human Y chromosome: an evolutionary marker comes of age is this passage on migrations out of Africa and the stage at which an anatomically modern human body developed.

Human origins and expansions out of Africa. Members of the genus Homo seem to have expanded out of Africa to colonize accessible parts of the rest of the world whenever climatic conditions allowed. There is evidence for Homo erectus in Georgia (Caucasus) and Java (southeast Asia) 1.8–1.6 mya52, 53, whereas subsequent expansions of Homo heidelbergensis reached Europe by 800 kya54. Many features of modern anatomy appeared in Africa by 160 kya55, and anatomically modern human fossils are found in Israel at 100–90 kya56, although they were subsequently replaced by Neanderthals57. Modern human behaviour, as illustrated by the frequent use of diverse materials for tools, long-distance transport and art, developed even more recently, becoming common only 70–50 kya in Africa and later in other parts of the world58.

The crucial feature of the timing in the evolution of modern body and modern human behavior is that the modern body preceded the modern brain. Descartes (I think, therefore I am) had it backwards. We think because we act. The brain and the body are a unity.

We neglect our bodies and our brain suffers with it. Purposive action is the canonical human characteristic. Our brains are so capable because they are part of a body with wondrous capabilities.

An excerpt from The Human Y Chromosome: an evolutionary marker comes of age by Jobling and Tyler-Smith in a 2003 issue of Nature Reviews Genetics 4 (2003). Not Genghis Khan, but another man living at the same time and place is responsible for eight percent of the Y chromosomes in Central Asia. He must have been a sneaky, busy guy for I think Genghis would have done away with him.