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Interview on Evolutionary Fitness with Robb Wolf of CrossFitNorCal

April 5, 2005 03:44 PM

Economist.jpg This cover of the Economist is a take off on a famous Time magazine picture of man evolving. The Economist has it right; the active human genotype is not suited to the life many moderns live. What follows is the introduction to my interview with Robb Wolf. Robb studied with Loren Cordain, a physiologist well-known to those who adopt an evolutionary perspective to health and diet; he has communicated with me for some years. He is now affiliated with the CrossFit program (link below), a program that incorporates many elements of my own approach to fitness and one I heartily endorse.

Robb: Arthur De Vany is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He has conducted groundbreaking research in many areas of economics, but is perhaps most noted for his work concerning decentralized, nonlinear systems. Professor De Vany is an accomplished athlete with an extensive background that ranges from Olympic weightlifting to professional baseball. As early as 1995, Professor De Vany had synthesized a holistic approach to health and fitness that he called Evolutionary Fitness. Many people currently involved with the CrossFit community, including me, can trace their own fitness odyssey back to Professor De Vany’s Evolutionary Fitness. We are profoundly grateful to Professor De Vany for sharing with us his work and insights. Would you please elaborate on how you came to form your ideas about Evolutionary Fitness?

Art De Vany: Like most truly complex endeavors, it is hard to identify a turning point or a key inspiration or insight. There are so many intertwined layers of science, learning, experience and so many different fields involved that I don’t know at what point they came together. Nonetheless, key elements are my interests in complex systems (which was integral to my understanding of power law behavior and intermittency as components of human action) and my interest in evolution. My training as an economist was extremely helpful since it gave me the perspective required to understand how a decentralized system allocates scarce resources in the self-organized human physiology. My interests in genetics and cognition also came into play as it led me to appreciate the key role of gene expression and how diet and activity alter what the genes express. At the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, my true home for the last fifteen years of my career, I was surrounded by cognitive scientists, brain scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, geneticists, biologists, and information scientists. These all come into play in evolutionary fitness.

The whole interview is available in the (free) first issue of CrossFitNORCAL's new journal The Performance Menu: Journal of Nutrition and Athletic Excellence (great stuff). Go to their web site at: CROSSFITNORCAL

One of the best questions Robb asked was....

Robb: In light of Evolutionary Fitness, what are your thoughts as to why brief, intense workouts elicit impressive gains in strength, power and endurance?

Art: This is the pattern of activity to which the human genome is adapted. Through all of our evolutionary past, human physiology and metabolism adapted to a pattern of intermittency and fight or flight response. It could not have been otherwise until the advent of agricultural only 10,000 years ago. This is the pattern of activity that promotes the true expression of the human genome and produces the optimal body composition of our ancestors. To live otherwise is to cause the evolutionarily adapted genetic information to be expressed in unhealthful ways. Much has been made of the so-called “thrifty gene” as a cause of modern obesity. This is a genotype adapted to episodes of starvation that conserves energy and causes weight gain in a nutrition abundant modern world. I think this is turning evolution on its head. Humans are an active genotype, as activity was essential and obligatory to the acquisition of food. A prone-to-fat, thrifty genotype would not survive this environment and would be reproductively less successful than an active genotype.

So, modern humans may fail to achieve the activity to which the active genotype encoded by evolution in their genes is adapted. The result is faulty gene expression, obesity, and ill health. When food is abundant at virtually no energy cost, the tie between activity and nutrition is broken. Activity declines and energy intake increases; that is the real thrifty genotype which encodes what we would call a lazy overeater which was an adaptation in the ancestral environment where this would seldom occur. In this modern world sedentism and over nutrition alter gene expression adversely.

· Evolutionary Fitness

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Posted by: Flower Online [TypeKey Profile Page] at September 12, 2006 3:38 AM

Posted by: Flower Online [TypeKey Profile Page] at September 12, 2006 3:36 AM

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