From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Apr 15 2003 - 02:33:53 MDT
Ramez Naam wrote:
>
> 1) Paleolithic humans had a life expectancy of around 18 years. Just
> because they were adapted to a certain diet doesn't mean that it's the
> healthiest diet for those who want to live much longer lifespans.
>
> 2) Related to point 1: Evolution selects for traits that maximized
> survival to reproduction, total lifetime fertility, and little else.
> Selection ceases after last age of reproduction. Selection is
> progressively weaker as less of the population is alive. Since we
> believe that only about 10 - 15% of the paleolithic population made it
> to age 40, and few of those survivors were reproducing, evolutionary
> theory tells us very little about what's healthy for humans past that
> age.
>
> 3) Humans are adapted to an environment with no antibiotics, no basic
> sanitation, minimal artificial heating and cooling, etc... However,
> each of those innovations has dramatically increases life expectancy.
This is not how Paleo diet theory works.
The way Paleo diet theory works is that you make sense of the human
metabolism by assuming that it evolved to fit a Paleolithic diet, then you
feed that metabolism whatever makes it work best, whether or not that
constitutes a Paleolithically realistic food supply.
Think of it as a two-cycle step:
1) Early humans adapt toward metabolisms making better use of the
available paleolithic diet. I.e., metabolism optimized for presented diet.
2) Modern humans deduce which modernly possible diet provides the best
fuel for the evolved metabolism. I.e., diet optimized for presented
metabolism.
Step 2 is not necessarily going to reproduce the diet found in step 1, BUT
there will be major similarities; a lot of modern diets will be "bad"
because they casually violate invariants that our metabolism treats as
engineering assumptions; and nothing about the human metabolism makes a
damn bit of sense unless you understand step 1.
Given the number of dietary problems that result from violating ancestral
invariants, and the incoherence of modern dietary science, it makes sense
to be cautious.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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