From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Apr 16 2003 - 13:29:37 MDT
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> The key point here is that it's usually the
> evolutionary biology that provides the hypotheses to be tested.
<snip>
> the evolutionary diet theorist
> does a study of twenty hunter-gatherer cultures and figures out what
> the ordinary balance of sodium and potassium would look like and says
> "Hey, this modern diet is way the heck out of range", and *then* you
> do the outcome study on *the balance of* sodium and potassium in a
> modern diet *compared to an ancestrally realistic balance*
Yes, we seem to be on exactly the same page here, Eliezer.
Stated simply, the paleodiet is the null hypothesis. It needn't be proved.
It need only be disproved.
For example mez makes the excellent and true observation that many diseases
of aging were "invisible" to paleolithic evolutionary forces. It is to mez,
then, to show that some proposed deviation from the paleolithic diet will
help to prevent or cure the diseases of aging.
I for one don't see how adding bread and milk will cure or prevent anything
whatsoever, other than simple starvation.
It is very interesting that the Old Testament calls bread the "Staff of
Life." No doubt this is because agriculture helped millions of ancient
people avoid starvation. Bread was "Mannah from Heaven" to the ancients, who
faced starvation perhaps due to their over-hunting of the wild-game upon
which they had evolved. But starvation is hardly a problem for most of us
moderns living in the first and second worlds. Gluttony is our new modern
enemy. The Staff of Life has become the Staff of Death.
-gts
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