Art De Vany: August 2005 Archives

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Our Muted Conversation

August 27, 2005 06:17 PM

Charles Murray has a thoughtful and even optimistic essay on the state of the current conversation about group differences. It includes a good review of recent research on male/female and white/black differences in intellectual accomplishment. It dares to discuss the emerging science about group differences and it is only a beginning as the power to unravel the genomic information we all carry becomes available. Nothing in his review is sexist or racist, though he will be accused of both no doubt, it is just straight-ahead, unblinking science. It may prove inconclusive or wrong, but the evidence is gathering that much of it will stand for a long time.

It is time to unmute the conversation and begin to discuss the meaning of equality, not as equality of outcomes, but of freedom to achieve. Beginning with the increasingly more untenable premise that everyone is equal as a premise for social policy leads to poor policy that may restrict choice and freedom in order to force inequality where it cannot exist.

This is a followup to new research that I reported in my post on male/female intellectual differences. Charles Murray.

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Troop Levels, Enlistments, and Reenlistments

There is concern that our Armed Forces are not meeting recruiting goals. This USA Today story is indicative of the issues.

The problem is that a lot of these stories have the logic wrong. They tend to see a low enlistment rate as a serious problem without seeing that the high reenlistment rate is part of the explanation. And they portray the changes in bonuses and other benefits as indicative of the problem; they are not. They reflect the flexibility the armed forces now have to fine-tune enlistments and retentions and of the responsiveness of an all volunteer armed forces to uncertainty.

Recruiting goals for new enlistments are set in advance of the recruiting and retention process. The goals, therefore, do not reflect the actual results over the year. If, for example, reenlistments are higher than expected, then the requirements for new enlistees declines. The objective over each year of a multi-year horizon is to maintain a stipulated force level (total number and some composition of the number over areas and specialties). Congress basically sets the overall force level in the budgetary process, with input from the DoD. All of the flows, in and out, are stochastic and so a more real time process is in operation in response to experience through the recruiting year.

So, as Tom Saving and I showed in our 1982 Review of Economics and Statistics paper (the research was done years before, beginning with my simple model for the Air Force in 1977), the enlistment, retention and force level variables are like a bath tub. The flow in is enlistments, and the flow out is the inverse of the retentions, the level in the tub is the inventory of personnel. If you reduce the outflow, the force level rises with a constant enlistment rate. But then you go over the mandated force level. So, you have to turn down the enlistment rate. Similarly, if enlistments rise, then the force level will rise too unless the reenlistment rate declines. And it is all uncertain, except for the mandated force level.

So, it is a balancing of enlistments and retentions that controls the force level. If, because of high training costs of existing personnel, you want to retain more of them, then you have to lower new enlistments lest you go over the mandated force level. This is often confused, as you see in so many news stories. The number of new enlistees is not just the flow of those willing to join the service; it is this flow limited by the number that the services are able to take without exceeding the mandated force level.

Paradoxically, the enlistment flow reflects both demand and supply. The demand for new enlistees depends on retentions, so force level and retentions constrain how many volunteers can be taken. This turned out to be a Big Deal when I explained it in 1977, as the debate on a volunteer armed forces was very active, to the Air Force Human Resources Laboratory for whom I did the original study that Tom and I extended in a large research effort from that point forward. The critics of the all volunteer armed forces claimed that the elasticity of supply of volunteers was so low that paying more to secure enlistees would not be adequate inducement to secure the supply required to maintain the force level. Big Error. They failed to realize that the inflow was determined not only by supply, but by demand as well. The success of the current All Volunteer Armed Forces shows the errors of these critics in a convincing way.

Tom and I went on to show that the true supply, corrected for the force level constraint and requirement to curtail enlistees based on the retention rate, was more than enough to have an all volunteer armed force. What the military had been doing in order to not exceed the mandated force level was skimming new recruits for testing scores and other qualitative measures. The result was that the quality of the new inductees varied with the retention and force level: high retention led to higher quality screening of new inductees. And the converse during low retention. It was necessary to avoid going over or under the mandated force level and to deal with the inherent uncertainty of the inflows and outflows.

The military, now being all voluntary, is able to "tune" the rates of retention and accessions through bonuses, pay, retirement and other benefits. This has enabled them to maintain a uniformly high level of enlistee quality, and it shows in our military. They are extremely able, well-trained, and effective.

Michael Yon, to whose work I donate ten percent of my book sales, has breathtaking coverage of Our Warriors in Action. Disciplined, generous and kind, dedicated to one another, and very very lethal.

We could not have this quality of soldier with a draft. There is no sound reason for a military draft. The draft is not "cheaper" because it does not take the inductee's opportunity cost into account. The social costs of a draft are far higher than the budget that Congress approves to pay volunteers.

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Brains, Men and Women

August 26, 2005 05:25 PM

I couldn't pass this up for it is something that you just know to be true when you are a high level academic. You meet fewer astonishingly brilliant females than males, even adjusting for population size. And, you meet a lot more patient, detail-oriented females than males. That is just how it is and both approaches contribute to knowledge. But, the big ideas tend to come from males.

Bigger brains among males is part of the reason. But, another is the high variance among males relative to females (biological constraints on birthing and that little short, high variance y chromosone that makes a male). Men are more often geniuses and more often on the very low end of the intelligence scale. The variance in males is useful in creating a variety of behaviors that might turn out to be adaptive in a changing environment. Hunting requires a diversity of strategies. It would be devastating in females. Raising children requires a pretty restricted policy.

Then again, there is the carnivore connection. Men are the hunters in all known hunter-gatherer populations. Predators have larger brains than other species. The larger brain is for two reasons: one, hunting is a high intelligence activity and two, predators (men) obtain high levels of essential fatty acids in their prey for brain development. Women eat less meat and obtain fewer essential fatty acids.

Even if you disagree, the article is worth a look. By the way, I am treating the comments area now as a discussion forum on which I will comment sparingly. Brains by Sex.

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Major Surgery and the Brain

I had long thought my mother's decline in brain function was a result of the trauma of her hip surgeries. She had two, having twisted a femor on one side and broken the femur higher up on the other side. She was never the same again, even after the first one. Personally, I think had she let it heal or died she would have been better off. But, that is now, not then when the decisions had to be made.

Now comes this study, whose results I don't doubt, that bypass surgery is injurious to the brain and may lead to Alzheimer's. The mechanisms are likely similar in both hip and bypass surgery: major trauma, blood loss, reperfusion injury, and inadequate antioxidant protection to prevent the damage of momentary ischemia, followed by reperfusion injury when blood flow returns.

It is an issue we all need to consider at some stage of our lives; a major intervention with adverse effects on the brain later. Go to Surgery and Brains

My choice: forget the surgery. Keep your brain first. If you die sooner, not likely given the odds of these interventions, you are better off. Of course, these are my choices only. Not my advice to you.

Interesting, why is this disclaimer necessary? Because the medical profession has perfected its control of medical advice. Only a licensed doctor can give medical advice.

I would love it if this were true of financial advice. The law would require that you make no investment unless you have a prescription from an economist. If only licensed Ph.D.s in economics could write investment prescriptions it would be a boon. Then, the next step would be to make it harder to get a Ph.D. now that I have one. Let me point out, because I seem often to be misunderstood, that I am being facetious. I dislike intensely the current state of the medical industry. Without this heavy government involvement, we would take more responsibilty for our own health and a diversity of views would be heard. The system is predicated on the belief that we are too dumb to take our health into our own hands.

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High Intensity Training Can Lead to Over-training

You know by now that I don't like to put up abstracts from journals. But the recent discussion of my post on avoiding injury in high intensity training prompts me to put this up. Note that no abstract is a substitute for the real article (though this one is so straight forward it is pretty reliable) and studies come and go; they may be published, but often are overturned by later research. Don't put too much into any one study. Another reason I do not write to the content of abstracts but from a theoretical perspective that tries to put the body of research together.

The point of the experiment reported in the abstract is that the body doesn't seem to monitor over-training in high intensity resistance training as well as it does in high intensity endurance training. Daily training at max 1-RM for 2 weeks was enough to put the subjects in an over-trained state. Yet, the hormonal response did not show this adequately to protect the athlete. So, there is a higher probability of over-training in high intensity resistance exercise.

It is not hard to see an evolutionary reason for this; continuous high intensity work is not what our ancestors were adapted to because the Paleolithic existence did not impose those kinds of demands in an unremitting manner. There were bursts of high intensity, involved in all fight or flight responses as well as the activities of the hunt, but there was variation in metabolic load, with abundant leisure and intermediate loads of all kinds. Ancestors were the first cross trainers.

Power law variation avoids this over-training and uses all the energy pathways to varying degrees.

Note also, the over-trained athletes got weaker as the training progressed.

The abstract follows, pardon the BibTeX format; that is how I keep my bibliography since I use TeX to write my books and articles. I use it because TeX is the best program for mathematical typesetting.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (3)

Injury and High Intensity

August 25, 2005 09:40 AM

Fong asks such an important question. I have taken it from the comments to post it here.

"I hope you can expand your theories on fitness to include injury prevention when training fast twitch muscles. While I note the usual advice of "warm up-stretch" and "do not play in pain", I hope you can look into why and how this type of injury occurs for everyone no matter how careful.

Just as you have personally experienced, almost everyone who is active in sports and exercise will eventually experience a painful injury that may set them back from exercise from weeks to years.

Unlike repetitive-type injuries that come from slower workouts which have a more graduated and repeated feedback signal - high intensity workouts
injury happen quickly and often without any signs to easy off during workout. These include strains, tears, pulls even heavy cramping.

This "sudden injury" nature of high intensity workouts may even be THE limiting factor and darwinian filter - allowing someone like yourself to fully express your genes while "ordinary" folks exercising in the general same way would have long ago suffered enough injury to modify their workout to a lower intensity.

My own anecdotal experience is that high school athletes performing at state level are often not fit for combat vocations in my country's conscript army because of a muscle-skeleton injury received during sports. The funny thing is that they continue to compete at the state level despite their injury."

My incomplete thoughts on this...

First, a little about incentives. There is, of course, a volitional aspect to how much one can do when injured. What would disqualify a military conscript from service has a lot to do with the willingness of the person to enter service. Thus, what would seem to keep a conscript out of the service might be a relatively minor injury; one that a motivated athlete might easily work through.

Now to the topic. I can say personally that I have had only one injury from my training as I moved into the higher intensity work. That was a torn biceps tendon. I ignored the inflammation, which was caused by mechanical friction or impingement of the tendon in the shoulder. The impingement was caused by a prior, not very good surgery. Inflamed tissue is weak; remember inflammation is like a process to increase the permeability of tissues, so it weakens membranes and connective tissue.

Sudden movements are extremely taxing on tissues, particularly tight or weak tissues. I know at least three people who tore a tendon in the thigh from slipping on ice or walking down hill. President Clinton did it too. You are more apt to be injured this way than training at what is called high intensity in my experience.

In reading the literature one finds there is no consistent definition or measure of high intensity. In aerobic work it is measured as percent of VO2max or watts. In weight lifting it is often measured as a percent of maximum weight, the so-called RM (1 repetition maximum). You can also see it measured as total work or volume. Fong is adding to this list the onset duration of the force generated; that is the time or degree of acceleration in the beginning of the movement. This might also be called "jerking" the weight when it is done improperly.

There is also the problem of integrating the work load over a longer period of time; a rep, a set, a work out, a week, a month and so on. High intensity might be measured by the volume over a longer time period. Or by the peaks and valleys. The complexity of the pattern. And so on. Clearly, high intensity cannot only refer to what you do in the gym or in your work out routine.

This is too complex to tackle here, I am dealing with it in the book. But, I do have a few guidelines that I use.

1. No sudden onset of force. Start smooth at the beginning of a movement and then accelerate through part of the movement, but not to the end. In other words, smoothness at the ends of the range of motion. Acceleration in between and at different parts of the movements on different days.

2. I do not take a percentage of my max wattage or my max weight. I don't know what any of these are, except that all the cycle machines seem to peak at 600 watts, so that is my max. Too many people get hurt trying to do a max lift; I never do this.

3. Keep the volume down. Fatigue is a primary cause of injury. Forcing a depleted muscle through another rep is just asking for trouble. There are no phosphates left in the muscle; this is a protection measure to avoid injury. Listen to the message. If, over a period of days or weeks, you find your blood pressure drifting upward you are way over doing it. Each work out should feel good and lower your blood pressure, with a slight elevation of your pulse during the post-work out period.

4. Don't count repetitions. Go for the burn and then stop. Your core body temperature should rise also. Both are signals of good hormone drives. It is your hormones that you are altering in the workout.

5. You want to push hard enough to ascend the fiber hierarchy, but going beyond that is of small value. That is, trigger all the fibers from ST to FTa to FTb/z. Then stop and move on to the next exercise. High volume training causes a convergence of muscle fibers composition: ST moves toward FTa and FTb/z moves toward FTa. So, you become an FTa sort of person. Pretty good, but not good enough for me. I go after FTb/z and that requires less volume.

6. You might expect that I have a slightly different perspective on intensity. I do subscribe to the complexity of the movements as a measure of intensity. Intensity is involving the most muscle volume you can engage in a movement. So, intensity, to me, is more about the total muscle volume in a movement, than straining hard. I never, ever strain; I work out hard, but that is a matter of tolerating the lactic acid a bit.

7. Finally, I like to pay attention to the most I do in a day or in an hour and the least I do. I want a lot of difference between my highest intensity and my lowest intensity activities. If I sleep well and deeply and have a good strong movement of some kind in a day, that is a really good day. Another way to think about this is in terms of METS, a measure of how far your maximum energy expenditure is above your resting metabolic expenditure. I call this metabolic headroom. It is a measure of how far from equilibrium you are. When there is a large difference between the most you can do and the least you can do, you are living far from equilibrium. When the two are equal, you are dead. Exercise capacity is the best predictor of longevity in a model that controls for a variety of other measures.

My favorite picture of a powerful, free, far-from-equilibrium creature is the dolphin. Powerful and smooth swimmers who have so much FT fiber that they leap far above the water for the pure joy of it. Their playful leaping is probably an adaptation that lets them engage their FT fibers often enough to keep them powerful, but playfully and intermittently so they are not injured. If they did high volume leaping, their FTb/z (or even wilder type) fibers would degrade into more ordinary FTa or even ST fibers.

What is the meaning of RM, sets, or reps to a dolphin? Or to a hunter-gatherer? Both are known to follow a power law in their activities; they can't help it because they are part of the natural world. So, a playful, burst/rest intermittency is the natural way to live and train.

Training is a lot like playing for me. When I finish here I am going over to the field with my 8 pound medicine ball. I throw it as far as I can and then run after it and do it again. I build to maximum throws gradually. And I vary how fast I run to pick it up (not all that far at that weight). I vary how I throw it: underhanded, overhanded, side ways and straight up over head. Its fun and a great full-body work out. I'll take my visiting granddaughter with me and we'll play at this.

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Aging

August 24, 2005 02:01 PM

Just to get things back on track I am putting up the link to the PBS TV show I participated in on life extension. This is reprised, but with a new issue in mind, and there are many new readers who may not have seen it. You can watch it on this link. Life Extension.

The show is edited. One thing you can't see is how much moving around and fidgeting I do relative to the other guests. How do these guys sit so still? Fidgeters do spend a lot of energy.

You may be interested in my discussion of the statistics of aging and the difficulty of forecasting life expectancy based on maximum ages.

Also of note is that I am (correctly) called a fitness theorist. I am not an experimenter, I am a theorist and that does seem to confuse some people. Both have their role, but I see the lack of theory as the biggest limitation on health and fitness research. I have been a theorist all my career and I have used those tools and skills to try to forge a new model of health and fitness. Any good theory integrates knowledge and is disciplined by experiment and factual data.

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Minor Changes

Just a few minor changes to the configuration of my blog.

1. I have deleted all the Harry Potter and other posts, including some very old ones, that added little or nothing to the discussion. My fault for starting this and I hope this will end it. Sorry some comments were removed with the posts.

2. I have also stopped having comments emailed to me directly. A few were a bit toxic and I just don't want to battle anyone on what I have to say. But, I don't want to shut off comments, though many bloggers do because everyone gets ugly comments. So, comments remain in effect though I will seldom see them directly and, so, may not respond.

3. I expect to have Chapter Two finished late next week or early the following week. This has been a hard chapter; from this point forward the pace should pick up. I am going to finish this thing as quickly as I can; it has been a massive effort (more than 10 years) and it is hard to let go of the baby, but the time has come. Got three other papers I am committed to writing; one with Taleb on financing artist careers, one on aging for a conference, and one on Paleolithic energy dynamics.

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Deaths in the NFL

August 22, 2005 01:44 PM

It is too soon to say how Thomas Herrion, the latest NFL football player to die, died. Mr. Herrion died soon after the game. The single most important factor contributing to sudden athletic deaths is a preexisting heart condition. Most are undiagnosed. There is a lot of impact and bruising in a big time football game. But, there is a great underlying cardiovascular stress. The rushing and extreme bursts take time for recovery and the pace of the game often does not allow for this.

A very large person, in terms of body mass, has less vascular volume per unit of mass. And they have less heart mass and pumping volume as well. Organs do not scale fully with body mass. Height is also a factor because a tall person has a high column of blood whose mass must be supported by the heart.

NFL players are big, but they are fat too. Fat is a burden and adds no motive power. It does add shock absorbing tissue in football, but little else. The inertia it adds may be of some help to a defensive tackle. They become harder to move by others as well as on their own volition.

Most athletes are too fat to perform optimally. Lance Armstrong dropped fat and added lean body mass over the years, see my post, and this added about 10% to his power to weight ratio. In an earlier post, I showed that lean body mass was the underlying factor in the performance of superior high school wrestlers. And, I mentioned some time ago that Ivan Lendl ascended to his superiority when he dropped body fat.

And now comes this brief note in JAMA by Dr. Joyce Harp...

Using publicly available stats on height and weight, she calculates that BMI (mass in KG divided by height in meters squared) of NFL football players puts most of them in the obese class. I can't get the doctor's article but here is a brief restatement of its calculations (and that is all it can be in a 2 page note) Dr. Hart's BMI stats for the NFL.

Now a caution about BMI. It is an easy to do stat, but it doesn't measure lean body mass, the determining factor in performance, or fat. Yet, it does indicate obesity when the numbers get large. But, it is not so good at lower BMI, where a lot of people who work out or are athletes will register. A BMI of at least 25 is common in an athlete. Mine is almost 28.

Muscle weighs a lot more than fat, something like 1.5 times as much. Dr. Forbes, who did the earliest and possibly best work on body mass measured the Washington Redskins (who I watched in their workouts at Georgetown University as a child) and found them all to have a high body mass index. He cautioned long ago against applying BMI to athletes.

But, pro football players are too fat, as Dr. Hart documents. A few years ago, the LA Rams trained at UCI and I often watched their practice and weight lifting (they lifted outside in a tented compound). Only the running and defensive backs looked to be muscular and lean. All the rest, particularly, the offensive line men were fat.

Don't keep track of your BMI. Keep track of your body composition; muscular and lean beats anything else. True in endurance athletes and high performance sports. But, this is even more important as you get older. There the risks are from too much body fat and too little lean muscle tissue. Aging individuals tend to lose muscle mass and gain fat. When their BMI rises, then their body composition must be changing in a highly unfavorable way. Sacropenia, too little muscle mass, is a risk for older individuals. That is why the BMI stats show this perplexing (to those who are ill-informed) pattern of decreasing mortality risk with higher BMI among the aged. These individuals have higher lean body mass and less sarcopenia.

If you use the wrong measure, you do get paradoxical results. Stay lean, but keep your lean body mass.

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The VIOXX Trial

August 20, 2005 09:34 AM

By now you have heard about the damages awarded by the Texas jury in the death of Robert Ernst, a 59 year old produce manager at WalMart. The amount totaled $253.4 million for loss of income, mental anguish and loss of companionship to his widow, with $229 million in punitive damages.

A juror said "It could have been prevented" implying that had Ernst not taken VIOXX he would not have died. This is clearly wrong. The probabilities are shifted by all the factors in the case. There is nothing that can be done, ever, to turn a probability down to zero. It is looking for guarantees, which juries often do, when there are none

Mr. Ernst was a marathoner and an aerobics instructor in addition to his work. And he had clogged arteries. No information is given regarding his body weight, heart rate complexity, or his marathon participation and training. Nor of his aerobics activities as an instructor. No biomarkers are reported either, such as those you have seen from my post Top Ten Reasons not to Run Marathons are elevated or depressed in marathoners: tHCL, BIL, ALP, HDL and LDL, neutrophils, S100beta, CK, TNF-alpha and so on.

I presume some of these biomarkers were entered into trial evidence, along with cardio data, particularly echocardiograms that show cardiac disfunction. Then again, you never know. Often an expert witness just comes in and renders an opinion. The jury takes it or leaves it. In this case, they accepted an expert's opinion that is being challenged by Merck as unscientific.

I don't and can't know how sound the expert testimony was, but as an expert witness in many trials and as a court-appointed expert to the District Court, I have seen a lot of it come into trials that has been famously labeled "Junk Science" by Peter Huber in his fine book Gallileo's Revenge.

Without trying to reach any conclusion on that point, consider the probability calculation that has to be made here. One has to determine by how much the odds of death for Ernst were shifted by taking VIOXX.

First, it is likely that his marathoning was a factor in his decision to take the drug. Marathoners suffer great injury and repetitive stress and do take pain medication, probably at a higher rate than the general population. But, put that aside. Here is the right way to do the calculation.

Consider the conditional probability of death for Ernst, given his age, biomarkers, existing heart condition and his marathon and aerobics activity. It is clear from the marathon studies I cited that his risk of death was well above the general population of his contemporaries, even of those with similar heart conditions. Now, estimate the shift in the probabilities of death at ages going forward of taking VIOXX, given his condition and activities. Hard to do, but that is the right way.

There is more. Ernst's heart condition, though perhaps preexisting to some degree, was worsened by his marathoning and aerobics activities. Paradoxical I know, but only because of the unfounded opinion that aerobics are good for your heart which the citations I give on my post clearly refute. So, there is some contributory negligence on the part of Ernst for risking his heart with his marathoning and aerobics life style.

The most decisive data, which readers will know from previous posts, would be the complexity measure of Ernst's heart beat, by far the best measure of cardiac function and predictor of impending collapse. I would put Ari Goldberger forth as an expert with these data, they could use past recordings and do the statistics on them. And, a witness who knows the risks of marathoning. Then the jury would be properly informed in reaching its judgement.

I don't know the answers to these hard calculations, but I bet the jury doesn't either.

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Tall and Myopic with Acne and Possibly Elevated Cancer Risk

August 19, 2005 05:06 PM

The youth of America and of other prosperous countries tend to be taller than their parents. They also tend to suffer from myopia (nearsightedness) and acne. They watch a lot of TV and play a lot of video games. These are all related, it seems. But first a story.

The generation of Japanese children who went through school during World War II do not have the degree of myopia of the preceding or later generations. Why? It seems that two things are involved. First, their schooling was interrupted by the war. Second, their food supplies were compromised and they did not eat as much refined white rice.

It is known that close, two dimensional eye activity, like reading, TV and video games, compromises eye sight. And simple carbohydrate in the diet adversely affects the development of the eye. Even if you have a gene for myopia it takes epigentic events to express it, like diet and visual activity. So, these Japanese children did not express myopia.

Evolution seems to have made eyes for seeing in a 3 dimensional world. There is a bit of a disconnect between the eyes and the brain when a two dimensional image is viewed. The same thing seems to happen when you day dream; you aren't really seeing what your eyes are taking in because your brain is someplace else. You lose visual intelligence when this happens.

My friend Don Hoffman has a gem of a book called Visual Intelligence and I recall conversations with him about this. (I have to read the book more carefully to recall more precisely what he has to say about this.) The point is that the eye only "sees" when its intelligence is connected with the brain in some fairly real way.

Seeing a lot of two dimensional images (reading, TV, computers) and not working your eyes enough in the real world dulls vision. I limit my reading and computer work and ALWAYS get outside every day to see the three dimensional world. The mountains that surround us here in Utah are a blessing in far and near visual contrast and color. They are great for the eyes. I make sure not to wear sunglasses on these walks, at least for part of the walk and in the evening for all of the walk.

Wearing sun glasses all the time dulls the sense of contrast and image richness of the eye. It also compromises its acuity. You are not using all your visual intelligence when you see the world through shaded glasses. And, by the way, the cells that detect color and contrast don't get used enough. So, they lose their sharpness. Be sure to expose your eyes to full spectrum light every day. It is a good way to "work out" your eyes and to ward off depression too.

Diet affects the eye in many ways. It is the organ of the body with the highest vitamin C content for one. It also requires a lot of vitamin A. One of my colleagues told me she could see vitamin A deficiencies in many of her students because their pupils were dilated.

But, the real kicker is the simple carbohydrate. As Matt (I think) pointed out Loren Cordain has shown, convincingly I think, that carbs cause the eye to develop differently. It tends to elongate and throw the focal point off the retina. Myopia is the result. I know. I was raised on Wheaties for breakfast and late evening snacks. I was pretty myopic as a youth (it kept me out of the big leagues because a myopic eye can't track a curve ball).

As for the acne, Loren has another great paper (all his papers are great) on acne. He points to carbohydrate there too. There is plugging of ducts, inflammation (a common by product of carb loading), and excess sebaceous gland production. This creates a ripe environment for bacterial invasion to compound things.

What about height? Well simple carb consumption, as you know by now, elevates insulin. It also raises IGF1 (insulin like growth factor). These promote growth. Excess calories also go into growth. Glucose competes with vitamin C for entry into cells. High carb diets are lacking in vitamin A. Vitamin A is also a crucial developmental vitamin, for the eyes as well as other organs and tissues.

Put it all together and we get a generation of tall kids with weak eyes and acne. Troublesome enough. But, IGF1, being a cell growth factor, also is linked to cancer. Since cancer cells are metabolically more active than many other cells of the body, they may capture more IGF1 for their own growth relative to other cells. Thus, IGF1 may promote cancer. Anything that promotes growth may also promote cancer. GH users do seem to be more at risk for cancer. High IGF1 is sought after by many pro athletes and body builders. There are stories about body builders who contract cancer and there does seem to be a link.

Add on top of all of this the high Omega 6 levels of teen diets in their vegetable oil laden french fries, cookies and other baked goods. Simopolous, a solid scientist and the editor of an early landmark book on evolution and health, Evolutionary Aspects of Nutrition and Health (Karger1999), in her book the Omega Diet more or less says that cancer cells seem to feed on Omega 6 fatty acids.

I hope I am wrong about the cancer part for our youth. But, I don't take chances with my grandchildren in their diet and outdoor activity, to the extent a grandparent can influence that.

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The Media, John Lott, and the BTK Killer

August 18, 2005 04:33 PM

Simple facts and honesty go a long way with me. But, what isn't said or reported is just as important as what is. The selective reporting of events and facts is like a fog that doesn't let you see what is further off in the dim light.

False reporting is worse. Deliberate omission of information is an extreme form of bias. Factually incorrect reporting, knowingly, is plainly dishonest. But seeing causes where there are none is often just a naive error of someone who hopes to do good.

I see so little reporting that does not suffer these errors that I scarcely read the news any more. I go for factual reporting, even knowing that many facts are not reported and they might affect my opinion. Our only defense is many sources, and the blogs have been a big help in that regard.

Why is there so little skepticism in the media and such a rush to find causes where there are none? It is partly because reporters want to do good. And they want to be heard. Sensationalism may help, at least in the short term. And then, there is no memory in the system. What incentives does a reporter have to act with sufficient skepticism? Not much, I would say based on the evidence. And, what does your average reporter know about science or probability?

E. T. Jaynes, in his monumental book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, shows how false or misleading reporting encourages irresponsible claims. Talking of weather variations and prognostications of global warming or freezing at the slightest rise or fall in the temperature (seeing causes when there are none), he says those shouting "...will receive the most full and sympathetic coverage by the news media, who, with their short memory and in their belief that they are doing a public service, amplify 1000-fold the capacity of the disaster-monger to do mischief. They encourage ever more irresponsible disaster-mongering as the surest way to get publicity." Many groups, racial baiters, environmental pressure-groups, and gun control lobby groups are the are egregious in using this tactic.

For a sophisticated scientist he makes this almost plaintive point: "The right of the public to be protected against the fraud of false advertising is recognized by all; so when will we have the right to be free of the fraud of sensationally false and irresponsible news reporting?''

Never is the answer I think. But there are people who carry on and one of them is John Lott. He has given a remarkable interview at Strike the Root, a web site devoted to Henry Thoreau, about his gun research and his new book, The Bias Against Guns. It is amazing that this one guy has changed the landscape on gun research. He may be the most important social scientist you never hear about.

One of his simple and powerful points is the story you don't hear: guns are used to stop crimes four times more often than they are used to commit them and the ratio of crimes stopped by guns to murders by guns is 250 to 1.

Just think: had any of the BTK killer's victims been armed she might have ended his string of victims. I don't carry a gun or own one, but there is a case to be made that females would be safer if more of them were armed and lethal. There would be fewer BTKs, Green River Killers, and Ted Bundys in this world.

A few armed females makes these murderous chain killers uneasy when, at present, they have little to fear of their victims. It increases the chances their run of victims will end in their death rather than in their chosen victim's. And victims are spared down the chain. Don't just mourn the victims of this serial killers, let them take measures to stop these depraved and mad men.

The media bear responsibility for the bias against guns and the female body count of these chain killers. It is a simple case to make; females are easy targets for determined and experienced killers (we all are, but they are even easier). Why are instances where guns protect victims almost never reported (John noted one story buried far back in the NYTs that reported this fact)? How many victims are the result of this bias?

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Minor Memories

This George Will column reminds me so much of my time in the minor leagues of professional baseball.

I was just out of high school and on a Hollywood Stars contract (a strange connection when you realize all the papers and a book I did on Hollywood years later) in 1955 when I was optioned down to the Class D Georgia-Florida league my first year. So, I got more per month than most of the players, who earned about $170 per month. But, I still had to eat on the $7 a day we got. Hard for me to do at my size then.

At 208, I was big in those days, circa 1955, and they called me Big D. Or they called me Superman or Clark Kent. I was very strong, having been an Olympic style lifter. I wore horn rimmed glasses and looked a bit like George Reeves, who played Superman on TV. So, the name stuck.

So did the other name because of my Hollywood Stars contract; I was called the Hollywood Hot Dog. I did sort of dress like Joe College, and I left early that year to go to college. My manager and a few team mates called me Professor, strangely prophetic as I think of it now. One reason for this was probably my horned rimmed glasses and the other was that I knew where the town library was and actually had a library card that I used. No one else had one or knew where the library was; they hung out a lot at the local pool hall, which was colorful and actually kind of pleasant.

In those days, I even developed a taste for Dr. Pepper and southern girls, though I married my high school sweet heart. She is still my wife.

I did enjoy those southern nights and the friendly crowds. I either struck out or hit a home run and the crowds loved and hated me, as my students learned to do at the University. I played right field, just in front of the black bleachers. Yes, the ball park was segregated, a rude shock to me when I arrived from Southern California. I had a great banter going with the bleachers and really enjoyed my life as a pro athlete.

I had some dreams, but no illusions of making the big leagues. I found so few educated or learned people in baseball that it had little appeal to me. But, what a great summer on those southern beaches at Brunswick and Saint Simon Island. I must go back there some day. Even though you can never go back.

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Top Ten Reasons not to Run Marathons

August 17, 2005 09:23 AM

With my apologies to David Letterman, here are the top ten reasons not to run marathons.

10. Marathon running damages the liver and gall bladder and alters biochemical markers adversely. HDL is lowered, LDL is increased, Red blood cell counts and white blood cell counts fall. The liver is damaged and gall bladder function is decreased. Testosterone decreases.

From Wu, Worl J Gastroenterol. 2004 Sep 15: 10 (18): 2711-4, "RESULTS: Total bilirubin (BIL-T), direct bilirubin (BIL-D), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) increased statistically significantly (P<0.05) the race. Significant declines (P<0.05) in red blood cell (RBC), hemoglobin (Hb) and hematocrit (Hct) were detected two days and nine days d after the race. 2 d after the race, total protein (TP), concentration of albumin and globulin decreased significantly. While BIL, BIL-D and ALP recovered to their original levels. High-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) remained unchanged immediately after the race, but it was significantly decreased on the second and ninth days after the race. CONCLUSION: Ultra-marathon running is associated with a wide range of significant changes in hematological parameters, several of which are injury related. To provide appropriate health care and intervention, the man who receives athletes on high frequent training program high intensity training programs must monitor their liver and gallbladder function."

9. Marathon running causes acute and severe muscle damage. Repetitive injury causes infiltration of collagen (connective tissue) into muscle fibers.

From Warhol et al Am J Pathol. 1985 Feb: 118 (2): 331-9, "Muscle from runners showed post-race ultrastructural changes of focal fiber injury and repair: intra- and extracellular edema with endothelial injury; myofibrillar lysis, dilation and disruption of the T-tubule system, and focal mitochondrial degeneration without inflammatory infiltrate (1-3 days). The mitochondrial and myofibrillar damage showed progressive repair by 3-4 weeks. Late biopsies showed central nuclei and satellite cells characteristic of the regenerative response (8-12 weeks). Muscle from veteran runners showed intercellular collagen deposition suggestive of a fibrotic response to repetitive injury. Control tissue from nonrunners showed none of these findings."

8. Marathon running induces kidney disfunction (renal abnormalities).

From Neyiackas and Bauer, South Med J. 1981 Dec; 74 (12): 1457-60, "All postrace urinalyses were grossly abnormal...We conclude that renal function abnormalities occur in marathon runners and that the severity of the abnormality is temperature-dependent."

7. Marathon running causes acute microthrombosis in the vascular system.

From Fagerhol et al Scan J Clin Invest. 2005; 65 (3): 211-20, "During the marathon, half-marathon, the 30-km run, the ranger-training course and the VO2max exercise, calprotectin levels increased 96.3-fold, 13.3-fold, 20.1-fold, 7.5-fold and 3.4-fold, respectively. These changes may reflect damage to the tissues or vascular endothelium, causing microthrombi with subsequent activation of neutrophils."

6. Marathon running elevates markers of cancer. S100beta is one of these markers. Tumor necrosis factor, TNF-alpha, is another.

From Deichmann et al in Melanoma Res. 2001 June; 11 (3): 291-6. "In metastatic melanoma S100beta as well as melanoma inhibitory activity (MIA) are elevated in the serum in the majority of patients. Elevation has been found to correlate with shorter survival, and changes in these parameters in the serum during therapy were recently reported to predict therapeutic outcome in advanced disease."

From Santos et al Life Sci. 2004 September: 75 (16): 1917:24, "After the test (a 30km run), athletes from the control group presented an increase in plasma CK (4.4-fold), LDH (43%), PGE2 6.6-fold) and TNF-alpha (2.34-fold) concentrations, indicating a high level of cell injury and inflammation."

5. Marathon running damages your brain. The damage resembles acute brain trauma. Marathon runners have elevated S100beta, a marker of brain damage and blood brain barrier disfunction. There is S100beta again, a marker of cancer and of brain damage.

From Marchi, et al Restor Neurol Neurosci, 2003; 21 (3-4): 109-21, "S100beta in serum is an early marker of BBB openings that may precede neuronal damage and may influence therapeutic strategies. Secondary, massive elevations in S100beta are indicators of prior brain damage and bear clinical significance as predictors of poor outcome or diagnostic means to differentiate extensive damage from minor, transient impairment."

Other studies indicate confusion in post-event marathon runners.

4. Marathons damage your heart. From Whyte, et al Med Sci Sports Ecerc, 2001 May, 33 (5) 850-1, "Echocardiographic studies report cardiac dysfunction following ultra-endurance exercise in trained individuals. Ironman and half-Ironman competition resulted in reversible abnormalities in resting left ventricular diastolic and systolic function. Results suggest that myocardial damage may be, in part, responsible for cardiac dysfunction, although the mechanisms responsible for this cardiac damage remain to be fully elucidated."

3. Endurance athletes have more spine degeneration.

From Schmitt et al Int J Sports Med. 2005 Jul; 26 (6): 457-63, "The aim of this study was to assess bone mineral density (BMD) and degenerative changes in the lumbar spine in male former elite athletes participating in different track and field disciplines and to determine the influence of body composition and degenerative changes on BMD. One hundred and fifty-nine former male elite athletes (40 throwers, 97 jumpers, 22 endurance athletes) were studied. ...Throwers had a higher body mass index than jumpers and endurance athletes. Throwers and jumpers had higher BMD (T-LWS) than endurance athletes. Bivariate analysis revealed a negative correlation of BMD (T-score) with age and a positive correlation with BMD and Kellgren score (p < 0.05). Even after multiple adjustment for confounders lumbar spine BMD is significantly higher in throwers, pole vaulters, and long- and triple jumpers than in marathon athletes."

The number two reason not to run marathons,

2. At least four particiants of the Boston Marathon have died of brain cancer in the past 10 years. Purely anecdotal, but consistent with the elevated S100beta counts and TKN-alpha measures. Perhaps also connected to the microthrombi of the endothelium found in marathoners.

And now ladies and gentlemen the number one reason not to run marathons,

1. The first marathon runner, Phidippides, collapsed and died at the finish of his race. [ Jaworski, Curr Sports Med Rep. 1005 June; 4 (3), 137-43.]

Now there is a recommendation for a healthy activity. The original participant died in the event. But, this is not quite so unusual; many of the running and nutritional gurus of the past decade or two died rather young. Pritikin, Sheehy, Fixx, and Atkins, among many other originators of "healthy" practices died at comparatively young ages. Jack LaLanne, the only well-known guru to advocate body building, will outlive us all.

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Hearts of Marathoners

August 16, 2005 10:58 AM

We have had this discussion of longevity, cardio events, and aerobic exercise before. It continues here.

Though it is very hard to find much evidence on these issues I came upon a good abstract looking into cardio events and marathoners. It suggests a connection in its opening line (unfortunately I can't get to the article itself) and it describes and measures a mechanism for the relationship.

It seems that marathoners have somewhat high homocysteine levels, not good. And their levels go up after a marathon.

The article begins with this ominous line: "There is evidence of an excess of acute cardiovascular (CV) events in marathon runners." It then goes on to show that total homocysteine (tHcy) is elevated by participation in a marathon event. Further, 20% of these marathoners were at or above the tHcy level that signals cardio risk. After the marathon, 50% of them were above the risk threshold.

The link to the abstract in Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases is at Marathoners and tHcy.

B12, B6 and Folic acid are important in limiting tHcy levels. They are and have been part of my nutritional arsenal for many years. Of course, I would never think of running a marathon. The long grind and sweating are probably factors in depleting these important, heart-protective nutrients. I will put a post on my nutritional supplements, but there are comments scattered among earlier posts that describe them.

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Doctors, the ADA, and Diabetes

My wife and I have had an issue with the American Diabetes Association for many years. We know the diet recommendations are wrong, and there are hints of politics in them (I have lost the link to that story).

Whenever my wife goes into the hospital, an event we dread, she is put on the ADA diet for diabetics. Then we begin the fight to get her off it and onto an ala carte menu so she can choose her food. Or she just picks a few things that are served and goes hungry. A bit dangerous when you are a Type 1 diabetic and must administer insulin exogenously.

The hospital seems to feel it must follow the ADA protocol. It may risk litigation if it doesn't I suppose. The feeling seems to be among her doctors is that they can control her blood glucose by simply administering more insulin. But, I warn them, doing that risks making her fat and a Type 2 diabetic in addition to her present Type 1 diabetes. It is as though I am speaking in some strange language; the point just doesn't compute for them. The diseases are entirely different they respond. They are but it is true nonetheless, as even a simple understanding of the physiology would show.

How can that be? Well, eating simple, glucose-laden meals and driving up her blood sugar requires extra insulin, over and above what my wife requires to live and process a healthy diet. The extra insulin injures and turns down her insulin receptors, leading to insulin resistance. From there Type 2, or insulin resistant diabetes is but a short step away. She can develop insulin-resistance just like anyone else.

Well now, this sort of "shoot them up with insulin to cover their high glucose" has led to exactly this sort of hybridized diabetes. Some Type 1 diabetics are also becoming Type 2 diabetics through this insulin-resistant inducing process. It has been named Type 3 diabetes. Now there is a great solution to the problem, give it a name.

Dr. Rosedale, a name readers here are by now familiar with, has a post on Dr. Mercola's site on Type 3 Diabetes.

The importance to healthy readers, and body builders in particular, is that insulin increasing diets and eating patterns, so often recommended because insulin is said to be anabolic, can progress to insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes. There are large segments of the body building and aerobic communities who are insulin resistant and well on their way to Type 2 diabetes. There is an undocumented, but very real, and large segment of both communities who have developed Type 2 diabetes. See the Scull of Doom post and the post on Redgrave.

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Running with Greyhounds

August 14, 2005 07:32 PM

Intense sprint training and mild caloric restriction makes greyhounds faster. Trainers have known this for some time, but research now verifies this long-standing practice of mildly restricting caloric intake leading up to a race.

The primary effect seems to be a better body composition, less fat and more lean tissue relative to body mass. The abstract from the American Journal of Veternary Research is here Greyhounds.

It turns out that the same thing could be said about Lance Armstrong. Over the 7 year period from age 21 to 28, he made an 8% gain in muscular efficiency from his training. Typically 3 to 6 hours a day. He went from 374 watts at an O2 uptake of 5.0 l/min at age 21 to 404 at age 28.

His V02 max was 6.0, just below Indurain's 6.4, the highest recorded for a cyclist. Indurain was perhaps the greatest climber of all the cyclists, though Lance comes close.

The largest factor in Lance's improvement over the years came from leaning down. He reduced body fat and total body weight from 78 kg to 72 kg for a gain of about 10% in power to weight ratio. Combining his increased musclar efficiency with his improved body composition gave him an 18% gain over the 7 year period of his dominance in the sport.

Just like the Greyhounds and other athletes I have mentioned, a lean body helps a lot. His body fat ranged between 8.8 and 11.7%. By age 28 his lean body tissue was up and his body fat was lower. The rest is history.

Why is it that people so overestimate the value of eating enough? Do they all have Jewish mothers? Or are they oversold on the value of nutritional aids? Given a choice between eating and not, the better choice usually is not eating. That is because we live in a calorie-replete world. In our former lives as hunter-gatherers the better choice between eating and going hungry was probaly eating. Its not a good choice now.

Stay lean.

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Evolutionary Fitness for Cops

From one of NYPDs finest comes a question about fitness for cops.

"I'm a 41 year old Detective with the NYPD. I also train law enforcement personnel in Officer Survival methods for a private training facility. Obviously fitness is a component of surviving. It is difficult to motivate cops to engage in any type of fitness training even though their lives may depend on it.

My question is:

What would you recommend to an officer in fair shape regarding a training program or protocol taking into account that most cops sit in a car or at a desk most of their tour, but may have to chase someone then fight for their lives?

Please take into account that most cops don't get proper sleep due to shift changes and or working odd hours."

Great question. It turns out that sitting isn't so bad; rest is important. But, you have to do the right things to make the sitting constitute recovery. I do understand the fight or flight issue; that is the essence of my training.

Brief, high intensity workouts of no more than 30 minutes 2 to 4 times a week will do the job. Any more than that is too tiring and will compromise their abilities.

Example work out.

Thrusters. db in each hand and an inflated ball against the wall. Small of back to the wall. Drop into a squat, keeping the ball against the wall, explode upward as you also thrust the dbs over head. Do 20 with a light weight, then 5 with a heavy weight. Head high and spine against the ball will encourage excellent posture. Drop to parallel thighs the first set, a bit less the second set and really explode up the second set.

Six 15 to 30 second sprints on a reclining bike. Max effort. Rest no more than half a minute of easy cycling between sprints. Work to get the rest down to 10 seconds.

Dead-lifts, bent legs. Keep the arch in the back and focus on getting the weight onto the heels. Engage the buttocks fully. 8 reps easy first set. Rest 20 seconds and do 4 hard ones. Eventually an officer should be able to do a double body weight dead lift.

Bent over bb rows. 8 easy ones, 4 hard ones. Pure form. Bring the weight high one work out and low the next.

Power front squat. Use a smith machine and set the lower stops so the cop can hold the bar across the chest with elbows high in a half squat position. Don't over extend the wrist, set the bar partly on the deltoids to support it. Set the bar on the upper stops at shoulder height. Get under the bar, lift it from the stops and lower slowly to the lower stops and then accelerate up. Do 8 with an easy weight. Then up the weight and do negatives, only lowering the bar to set it on the lower stops. Help raise the bar to the upper stops whence the cop takes it again to lower it slowly to the lower stops. No more than 4 of these.

They are done. During all these exercises make sure your trainees pull in their belly button and take it high into the abdominal cavity.

Twice a week at this, upping the pace as they progress will give excellent results. A third day is useful, but it should be stretching, throwing heavy medicine balls, some indoor sprinting and light play. Have them balance on a single foot when they brush their teeth or shave. Alternate feet on alternate days.

When in the car suck in the belly button hard and high and hold it for a minute. Arch the lower back. Grip the wheel hard and push it. A few deep breaths to relax.

No jogging, treadmills, or long stationary cycling. It will just wear them down.

Cut the carbs like pasta, donuts (I know), bready sandwiches, pizza, rice and soft drinks. A cop will stay more alert on less food rather than more food. Lean and hungry works. Read the greyhound post coming up soon.

You will find other work outs at CrossFit.com.

I have great respect and admiration for you cops. If there is any thing I can do to help you let me know.

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Sprint Endurance

I recall running now and then with some faculty at Texas A&M when I was there in the 1970s. I didn't know a lot then compared to now, so I ran like everyone else. I lifted weights too, which most of these runners did not do. More to the point, I never liked the slow, agonizing pace these guys ran at. I prefered to run hard and then walk and then run hard again.

Once in a while I would go on a longer run with these guys around the stadium and outer rim of campus. About half way through I would pick up the pace and then just sprint over the last part of the course. I wasn't trying to beat anybody, but I could run them all down and just blow past them in the latter part of the run.

I was never a particularly good distance runner, so why was I able to do this? This abstract gives some clue.

Sprints and Endurance from JAP.

No wonder I could run these guys down. My sprint training, intuitive though it was, elevated my endurance far beyond what slow jogging could do.

Notice the importance of intensity and brevity. Just 15 minutes of max sprinting over a two week period, with a day or two rest in between. I do these cycle sprints about twice a week. Then I sprint after fly balls and running the bases a bit hard when I go to softball practice. Altogether, half an hour to an hour of sprinting a month.

Try it, you'll like the results. Know your limits. Use good form. Don't time your runs. Don't run tired (this ruins your form). And let it happen. In three months there will be a world of change. Your body composition will dramatically improve too. No steroids needed to gain the benefits of sprints. You will find they can be a playful activity. I love to race my grandchildren.

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One Million

August 12, 2005 08:47 PM

This blog accumulated over one million hits in just less than five months of operation today. Well over. Visitors from 78 countries were here this month and we had 25,000 hits per day during August. The hit climb is interesting. The first month there were just 306 hits per day. This was in March. From then the progression is 1100, 4446, 7075, 10576, and 24671 for half of August.

The most hits, just below 50,000 in a day, occurred the day after my interview with T-Nation. Impressive. They seem to have a good following. The second most hits happened the day I put up the All You Need to Know About Zen, which I recently reprised.

I am truly surprised. My expectations, ill-informed as they were, had been based on a great web site, The Marginal Revolution, by my friend and former colleague Tyler Cowan and his friend Tamir. I think they had a million hits in two years. So, for my site to hit it in less than five months did surprise me.

Then again, so what? I do appreciate the audience, but I am not taken in by the response. My objective is to sell my book and maybe spread some hard-science, evolutionarily-based reasoning, and experience-based knowledge. That I may have begun to achieve. As to selling my book; total sales are now zero because it is not finished. But, I do see a real demand for it and will dilligently press ahead on the project.

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Chapter One of Evolutionary Fitness

August 11, 2005 06:57 PM

Chapter One is finished, reviewed and corrected and extended according to the comments of my reviewers.

It will be available for sale, for $10, as soon as I have time to get the sales mechanism up. You will be able to download it as a PDF file when your payment has cleared.

It is a terrific chapter, I think (so do the reviewers), but it doesn't have any secrets (the way most of these sorts of things are sold) or new technologies. It is inspiring even so because it shows how things work and why your mind and body were made for this way of life.

Other chapters will follow fairly quickly and will be offered individually for $10.

If you don't want to pay that, wait for the whole book (about 10 months) and buy it then. I don't know what it will cost then, but it won't be cheap. In the meantime, no complaints. Buy it or not. Your choice is fine with me.

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Reprise of Zen

The archives by now are loaded with 153 entries and I suspect many readers would enjoy looking over these earlier entries. After all, they do not go out of date the way items on a news-related blog might do.

This entry about Zen is just a way to show what is part of the archives. What amazed me about this entry is that it had the all-time highest readership at over 20,000 hits the day it came out. Perhaps just a coincidence, maybe not.

All You Need to Know About Zen

I was once a philosophy major, but I got bored with it. Only a few philosophers seem to know or care a lot about science and many love paradoxes and infinite set problems that are mostly just a confusion. I do admire the work of Dennet, the Churchlands, Popper and my friend and former colleaque Bryan Skyrms who uses game theory to study the dynamics of deliberation

I did read a fair amount about Zen and the Tao. Wonderful imagery and poetry, but the core of the knowledge in them is easily put in terms of complex systems theory and Bayesian inference.

Here is all you need to know about both.

The Tao is algorithmically incompressible.

To reproduce the information contained in a life sequence requires no less information than is contained in the sequence itself. There is no algorithm that is capable of reducing the information in a life sequence to a shorter statement. Each sequence is unique unto itself.

This means you cannot predict which among many possible stochastic paths originating from this point in time and space your life will move onto.

You can know something of the ensemble of paths and how your actions may condition the likelihoods of these paths. Your only moment of power is NOW, the moment when you can take actions that influence the distribution of future outcomes.

You learn of the possibilities from your experience with no regrets and you make your choices in the Now with the knowledge that they do not determine the outcomes only the possible paths on which your life may evolve. Thus you do not fear the outcomes or attempt to control things you cannot. Be a good Bayesian who uses evidence from your past to form expectations of the possibilities of the future and make choices that influence the distribution of possible outcomes in your favor. Never expect a distinct outcome to result from your actions.

All you can do is to try to influence the distribution of possibilities. You can never set the particular path or outcome that will be yours from this time forward. And, if you think you can look back and see some cause of events, you are probably suffering hindsight bias.

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Responses to comments

August 10, 2005 09:45 AM

Maybe CJ. But, as Rick notes aging athletes do suffer from inflammation a bit more than young ones. Cutting inflammation permits harder training and more skill practice. (By the way CJ, I invited Mark's wife to post something on how she went from size 14 to Junior Misses size after reading the Evolutionary Fitness Essay. Coming soon.)

Sudden changes do seem to be the way sports performance works; that is because a fine edge is the determining factor and a small change there can make a big change in relative performance. Still, I/we don't know if the bigger issue is inflammation or speed/power. They both are likely factors in steroid use. So are beliefs, true or false. If Jason Giambi, one of the greatest hitters, won't change his lucky pants, even when they are torn, then what do these guys believe?

The line of thought by just about everyone (readers here and others) on this issue is that strength and power are gained from steroid use. I don't dispute that, but then I really don't know that solid research points to this effect. I just don't know. What is interesting is that if steroids have this effect, then they somehow differentially affect the FT muscle fibers in some way. For example, if steroids affected the ST fibers, you would just gain endurance but not speed or power.

Remember, hormonal resistance is the bane of all hormone therapies. Put too much of the hormone in and the body shuts down production and desensitizes receptors. More in, less out. Testosterone injections eventually result in an increase, not of testosterone, but of estrogen as a metabolic byproduct.

I do wish I could find good references on steroids and performance and on use. The best I have seen was indirectly referenced and actually surveyed athletes to find that only about 20% used steroids. I know, big problem with honesty, but still there are so few reports of health issues that could be linked to steroid use among pro athletes I do question the grandstanding by Congress. (Get real Art, they always grandstand.)

Georgios. I do have to leave something for the book. It is far too hard to put all that technology together here.

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Steroid and Steroid-Free Leagues

August 9, 2005 04:25 PM

I still don't see the big noise over steroids in sports.

There is an easy solution. Let there be a steroid and a non-steroid baseball league, just as there are natural and unnatural body builder contests. Alternatively, cut the length of the season and the wear and tear on these athletes. The lengthening season and pre-season in the last decade are strong influences on steroid use for reasons I will go into below. Athletes resort to training, diet, and steroids to deal with the problem of performing at a high level over a very long season. There are few other alternatives that are as safe as steroids (the non-steroidal alternatives are more dangerous) for limiting the damage of a long season of competitive, high-level play. If baseball wants to reduce steroid use, then it should shorten the season and the pre-season.

It wasn't that long ago that pros were banned from Olympic and other "amateur" sports. Admitting them was just an admission that most were pros already. [Economics question: why did the great Soviet heavy weight Olympic lifter Alexiev hold more than 100 records? Answer below.] Why not allow steroid use, if professional baseball won't shorten the season (and it won't be)?

If fans want an alternative, then there is an opening for a steroid-free baseball league. You can see the steroid-free Yankees play the steroid-free Giants whenever you want to. Maybe I could play again.

I happen to think that steroids are used because they cut inflammation and this makes the player feel and function better. The gain in performance is through the season, not in individual instances. That is a player can perform consistently over the season with less of an August drop and still have something left for the playoffs.

Palmeiro could have accidentally ingested the steroid detected in his blood test, one of the most readily identified steroids, by taking any one of many pro-hormone, anabolic aids. He doesn't seem to be that unclever and seems honorable in his demeanor (I may be a poor judge though). If he says he didn't take them I am inclined to believe him. Had he been trying to avoid detection, I doubt he would have taken so readily detected a form of steroid.

The primary concerns of steroid use are two: cheating history by performing beyond what is "natural", and 2. health risks. The latter are minimal at best for moderate and well-informed use. There are no users suffering brain cancer or cardiomyopathies. Lyle Alzedo was the poster child for steroid opponents, but his brain cancer would be more likely to come from other sources that pro athletes use. Though I don't know that he did any of this. High IGF1 from GH injections is a known cancer risk. So is high insulin, which often accompanies high IGF1.

There may be some moon faces and hair loss from steroid use, pretty easy to detect. Suffers from rheumatoid arthritis go through this secondary effect of steroid use.

Pro athletes and very very serious amateur athletes suffer from a high degree of inflamation from repetitive use stress and injury. Their high glycemic diets often add to this problem.

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Sprint Training

August 8, 2005 04:34 PM

If you are wondering how these great sprinters train it is like the Cheetah. Explosive sprints and a lot of easy rest. They train their muscle fibers to be of the fastest type IIa and IIb.

I remember playing softball against Carl Lewis when he was in his prime. I didn't know who it was who hit the groundball to me at third base. But, I looked up and saw this lithe, smooth movement and tremendous speed. Though it was hard to reckon the speed because he moved so smoothly. He was slowing down way out in right field having overrun first base by the time I got the ball over there. It seemed like it took him most of right field to slow down.

Rather than have me go over the aspects of sprint and FT training, let me point you to an excellent discussion of the topic by John Shepherd of the Peak Performance Newsletter (a newsletter I have long subscribed to even though a bit too much is devoted to long distance running for my taste). This particular article is free Sprint Training.

Notice the importance of neural stimulation of the sort one gets in maximal (but relaxed) effort, of lifting weights that are sufficiently heavy, and of eccentric or negative exercises. Modern running theory also calls for forward foot flex (the big toe near the shin) and quick leg recovery (lifting the knee and bringing the upper leg back early, well before the foot has flicked upward). Then there is the idea of pulling through the stroke by rotating the legs: pulling from the front, not pushing from the back.

Why these guys look the way they do is the max recruitment of muscle and the huge GH surge that this produces. The only muscles that hypertrophy (get bigger) are the FT fibers. That is what they use almost exclusively in their sport and training. Me too.

By now you have seen my not-so-good attempt to imitate these guys in this picture.

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Sprinters

This morning's Spectrum had this great Mark Baker, AP picture of Justin Gatlin and his competitors in the 100 M at the 10th World Athletics Championships in Helsinki on August 7, 2005.

You just marvel at the powerful bodies of these sprinters.

Here is Gatlin a bit closer up. He is 6'1" and 183 pounds, same height but about 20 to 25 pounds lighter than I am. (Maybe I am too heavy for my height? I don't think so, but it is a mystery why I weigh so much and look so slender. My wife says it is because I am dense.)

And here from Wikipedia is the great Russian sprinter Valeri Borzov. I remember seeing him win the Olympic 100 M. Fabulous form. He had a Ph.D. in Physiology and you could see his superior knowledge even then in his superb form.

Then here is a whimsical picture from the BBC of Tim Montgomery, the current record holder at 9.78. The BBC Feature compares human sprinting with the Cheetah, Lion, and other animals. Humans fall just behind the Grizzly Bear; too bad for us.

As I have mentioned, if humans could find a way to express the wild muscle fiber FTz gene, these speeds would fall by the way side. Then again, a fast twitch muscle that powerful would rip out the tendons.

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Walking

August 6, 2005 08:44 PM

I used to walk long distances with my grandson in a carrier on my back. We developed a deep attachment, which continues to this day, during these long and very pleasant walks. Mothers who use jogging strollers are really missing something and so are their children. It is thought that a child sling may have been one of the earliest inventions; the same sling could also carry plants from a gatherering trek.

I walk a lot and comparative energy studies do support the walking efficiency of homo sapiens relative to jogging. The Masai are legendary walkers and can cover huge spans of ground in a day; the women usually do the carrying perhaps because of status or because the males have to be free for defense and hunting along the way. I don't know. Homo Erectus remains suggest the kind of elongated upper legs that would make him an excellent walker. His was the first homo body that had a truly modern form. It seems this kind of body was an essential vehicle for the mind that developed in subsequent years. No known hunter gatherers jog down their prey. They walk, run, and sprint, but do not chase prey at a jog. It couldn't be an effective strategy for any prey. On the other hand, hunter gatherers have been known to run down a horse over a period of days. The trick is to keep the horse moving and away from water. Then it drops with dehydration.

I prefer to walk after a high intensity session to relax and let the GH released keep fatty acids available for metabolizing. So, it I had any suggestion it would be to do the walk AFTER the workout to let this fat burning work efficiently.

As I have said, Dorian Yates walked a lot during his Mr. Olympia days. After a work out I believe, but don't know for sure. And many great thinkers, Darwin and Einstein, walked a lot to free their minds and think. Steve Reeves was a very serious walker with weights on his feet, wrists, and around his waist. He even wrote a book about walking after he dislocated his shoulder in a movie and could no longer train with heavy weights.

My father was quite a walker and I sometimes went off with him in the afternoon. It was a nice time for both of us. My wife and I walk after dinner each evening. Activity is a signal to the genes to direct nutrients to muscle and organs rather than to fat.

The kind of mechanism Widsith cleverly describes is almost surely true about jogging. It does remodel the body and any energy that flows over the aerobic pathway sends a signal to the genes to direct energy to fat. If you deplete fat stores often, your body rebuilds the inventory. So, jogging is a hard way to lose weight, though it can work.

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Anaerobic Exercise Uses More Energy

August 5, 2005 03:25 PM

I have often been asked why I stress anaerobic exercise over aerobic. I do so because anaerobic metabolism is so much less efficient (about 5 times less) than aerobic metabolism. So, it is the easiest way to expend large amounts of energy in a short time span. In addition, the muscle mass built through this form of exercise burns energy continuously. I might add that anaerobic does not create the ROS damage to the mitochondria.

For an explanation of the relative energy efficiencies of both forms of metabolism have a look at this site at UCSD Relative Energy Production.

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Muscle Web Sites

From the Web Spider of the journal Current Biology here is a list of muscle sites.

Copy and paste these urls into your browser. I don't want to format them as links. The Brandeis site is my favorite, but the link is broken. Browse your way around the faculty pages for some great research.

Introduction to Muscle Physiology and Design http://ortho84-13.ucsd.edu/MusIntro/

Hypermuscle: Muscles in Action http://www.med.umich.edu/lrc/Hypermuscle/Hyper.html

Hosford Muscle Tables http://www.ptcentral.com/muscles/

The MUSCLE Home Page http://www.rose.brandeis.edu/users/muscle/

Reedy’s Muscle Database http://note.cellbio.duke.edu/Faculty/~Reedy/Muscle/MuscleDB.html

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Evolutionary Models of Literature

My point of view on evolution and fitness is sometimes misunderstood. I get comments that seem to indicate that I am trying literally to live like a Paleolithic ancestor and thus should not use weights or ride motorcycles or do any of the things that I like to do and that this modern world permits me to do.

This is a confusion of a model of fitness, based on evolutionary theory and evidence and, in my case, a complex systems model that puts the physiology in place, with a literal life as a hunter gatherer. I am using a Darwinian perspective to inform a model for a fit life in this modern world. Here is a wonderful book review that helps to make these points. It describes the attempt to place the criticism of literature within a Darwinian perspective. This is published by the Skeptics Society, of which I was a card-holding member for some years, though not now. By now, psychiatry has been given a Darwinian model, psychology, economics, history and many sciences have also been given an evolutionary grounding. Though literature is a bit far afield of the topic of fitness, the way the evolutionary model is used is completely consistent with what I am trying to do in my chosen topic.

The book review follows, with full citation to the eSkeptic Newsletter for this wonderful piece of work.

Reading Homo sapiens
by David Michelson

In 1995 Michelle Scalise Sugiyama reviewed Joseph Carroll’s Evolution and Literary Theory for Skeptic. In her review Sugiyama observed that
Carroll’s book is the first major work in over a century (since Taine, 1879) to situate the creation and interpretation of literature within the sphere of human biology … Carroll’s study is at once the wrecking ball of poststructuralism and a possible blueprint for a new, biology-based literary criticism. Whether or not his bid is accepted, only time will tell. 1
In the decade since she wrote her review, Sugiyama and a growing number of literary scholars have set their collective sights on Carroll’s and likeminded literary theorists’ vision for a biologically informed branch of literary studies. 2 This mushrooming school of young literary scholars and seasoned professors has arisen in opposition to the rather insular culture of anti-scientism and radical political posturing that is commonplace in most English and cultural studies departments today. Those English professors who use their lecture podium as a pulpit for radical political views have been remarkably effective at inculcating students in varying degrees of allegiance to social constructivism (commonly referred to as poststructuralism, postmodernism, or deconstruction but here collapsed for convenience sake into the term preferred by the authors in The Literary Animal: constructivism). 3
In its most virulent form, constructivism regards the scientific method as no more truthful than any other means for understanding human social life and artistic production. Predictably, however, constructivists endow their alternative, subjective models of human behavior with the same explanatory potential as those arrived at in the sciences by repeatable experimentation. As E.O. Wilson notes in his preface to The Literary Animal, this
cleavage between naturalism and social constructivism … extends to the foundation of knowledge itself. Either the great branches of learning — natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities — can be connected by a web of verifiable causal explanation, or they cannot.
Because the sort of constructivists found in English departments are suspicious of most normative social structures, science included, the consilience extolled by Wilson is often viewed as myopically and detrimentally western, white, and patriarchal in practice. The extremity of this virulent form, however, often suffers from caricature. In more moderate forms constructivists are concerned with claims about the naturalness of human behavior and human institutions, particularly when they concern such “hot button” topics as gender, politics, race and violence. 4 If “naturalness” is their nemesis, the alternative that constructivists posit is an often seemingly unconstrained behavioral plasticity that allows them to freely reimagine rather than scientifically defend their conception of our social, political and personal worlds.
The untested and oftentimes loopy logic of present day literary and cultural criticism has led many outsiders to question the very place and purpose of English departments within the academy. 5 Even within English departments a growing number of politically-minded literary critics are coming to see that strong forms of social constructivism are seriously flawed models for fomenting progressive political change. 6 It is out of this strong constructivist collapse that emerges the most recent, forward-looking and promising raise to Carroll’s bid for the future of literary studies, the 12-essay volume, The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, edited by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson.

The sense that The Literary Animal is part of an exploratory expedition, blazing a new path across infamously hostile territory, is captured in the title to the introduction: “Literature: A Last Frontier in Human Evolutionary Studies.” Wilson and Gottschall rightly admit that although “[n]umerous evolutionists and literary scholars have become interested in exploring this territory … it [evolution] has not become part of the normal discourse for the field of literary studies as a whole.” The editors ask us to remember that virtually every other academic discipline was initially uninviting toward evolutionary inroads, despite their eventual acceptance. In order to quell any rising alarms or fears of hostile takeovers from humanists (the evolutionists are coming! the evolutionists are coming!) Gottschall and Wilson remind English professors that historically, when evolution comes into contact with another discipline, “non evolutionary perspectives have not become obsolete; the task of integration is much more interesting and symbiotic than simple replacement.” Emollient comments like this are present throughout The Literary Animal and are one of its many admirable strengths. Unlike some early evolutionary treatises on literature and constructivism, The Literary Animal largely maintains a congenial and positive tone that is inviting to anyone interested in genuine interdisciplinary dialogue.
The Literary Animal tackles a huge topic: the nature and representation of narrative and its role in the evolutionary scheme of human affairs, past and present. Despite other essay collections on evolution, literature and the arts, 7 The Literary Animal is the first volume of evolutionarily focused essays on the multifaceted nature of narrative, which is defined here as oral and written literature. This definition encompasses theater, film, television, novels, poetry, erotica, folktales, the narrative activities of journal writing and the hypothesized narrative processes underlying our conscious thought.
The editors believe their collection speaks to three major themes, each addressing a specific question:
What is literature about?
What is literature for?
What does it mean for a seemingly nonscientific subject such as literature to be approached from the perspective of a scientific discipline such as evolution?
The essays are divided into four sections: Evolution and Literary Theory, Darwinian Literary Criticism, The Evolutionary Riddle of Art, and Darwinian Theory and Scientific Methods.
To address such a wide range of topics the editors have culled a stellar cast of diverse contributors, including prefaces by such luminaries as E.O. Wilson and Frederick Crews, and an afterward by Dennis Dutton. Individual chapters are penned by two-time Booker Prize winning novelist Ian McEwan, well known anthropologists Daniel Nettle and Robin Fox, and those familiar with evolutionary literary studies will recognize Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, Brian Boyd, and Ian Jobling.
In the introduction Gottschall and Wilson relate their respective stories about how they became interested in literature from an evolutionary perspective. Notable is Gottschall’s experience as a graduate student, one which will likely resonate for many young scholars who are frustrated by the virtual absence of evolutionism in contemporary literature departments. Gottschall retells the story of how his evolutionary-themed dissertation was effectively deemed off-limits by his otherwise interdisciplinary English department faculty. Serendipitously, it was through this most irrational limitation that Gottschall met Wilson, with whose assistance he completed his dissertation.
Three essays from The Literary Animal to which I will pay particular attention, address some of the most pressing issues and problems facing those who already or may soon wish to integrate evolutionary with literary studies. The opening essay by novelist Ian McEwan is a gem (prepare to laugh out-loud at an anecdote about Virginia Woolf and a certain stain). McEwan reclaims the privilege often denied to authors by many constructivists to speak on behalf of the psychical continuities between author, reader, and historical time when he asserts that
Literature flourishes along the channels of this unspoken agreement between writers and readers, offering a mental map whose north and south are the specific and the general. At its best, literature is universal, illuminating human nature at precisely the point at which it is most parochial and specific.
While McEwan admits that cultural specificities are interpretive luxuries, he asserts that such historical details are often unnecessary for understanding the human condition at the center of all stories from Gilgamesh to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
McEwan’s observation is noteworthy because it directly contradicts the hallowed constructivist position that “human nature is a specific historical product…that there is no human nature at all beyond that which develops at a particular time and in a particular culture.” McEwan rightly diagnoses this misguided endeavor as “the central project of intellectual history — to ask at which moment, in which set of circumstances, we became recognizable to ourselves.” It is neither exclusively the historical lurch nor the abrupt rupture with the past, McEwan argues, but the continual, common crawl of human nature that is chronicled in stories across cultures. The vast body of world literature is intelligible and translatable precisely because it speaks to the most recognizable aspects of our shared human nature. While making the indispensable point that literary critics should understand history and human nature in evolutionary as well as culturally specific contexts, McEwan’s essay wields the term “human nature” rather uncritically. 8 This is no real fault of the essay as its purpose in this volume is not to adjudicate between competing paradigms of human nature. The specificity and nuance found lacking here is properly addressed in the subsequent essay.
Following on McEwan’s heels, David Sloan Wilson’s chapter assesses the merits of competing paradigms of human nature and social constructivism. The admirable synthesis Wilson hopes to produce is evident in his title, “Evolutionary Social Constructivism.” A subsidiary aim of his essay is to propose a theory for how narrative is currently adaptive in our non-Pleistocene world. Although other essays in the volume consider why narrative may have been adaptive in a Pleistocene environment (Sugiyama reverse engineers narrative; Brian Boyd surveys adaptationist theories of narrative), Wilson considers how such a ubiquitous activity as narrative functions in modern environments.
To appreciate Wilson’s argument it is necessary to think outside the common conception of narrative as simply novels and poems. Wilson suggests that because humans are constantly adjusting to novel and unprecedented modern environments in which genetic if-then rules fail as viable plans for individual and collective action, stories act as “new and untested guides to action, the retention of proven guides to action, and the all important transmission of guides to action from one person to another. In short, stories often play the role of genes in non-genetic evolutionary processes.” Wilson’s theory is consistent (with some historical qualifications that McEwan’s essay addresses) with Benedict Anderson’s constructivist ideas in Imaginary Communities 9, a text popular amongst scholars who study the relationship between narratives and the nation state. Anderson argues that western nationalisms — a nations’ collective assimilation to a pervasive societal narrative — was made possible, in part, by the rise of print culture, of which the novel was a significant contribution. If stories are indeed like genes, the success of specific nations in fostering nationalistic allegiance should correlate with the emotional potency of the content in their respective “grand narratives.” The emerging nationalistic stories of recently decolonized countries could be examined in light of this theory and specific hypotheses could be formulated and tested about which narratives specific populations find agreeable or disagreeable at specific historical moments. However, before postcolonial theorists jump at this chance, Wilson understands that more fundamental misconceptions need to be dissolved.
Wilson’s chapter is by far the most diplomatic of all the essays in The Literary Animal. Demonstrating the possibility for honest mutual understanding and friendly dialogue is effectively the hinge that will open or close doors to the evolutionary paradigm in English departments. If politically-minded constructivists cannot accept the fact that evolution is not all genetic determinism and naturalized excuses for oppression, they will continue to regard it as an elite construction for maintaining an undesirable and inimical status quo. While others have stressed points similar to Wilson’s elsewhere, his is the most honest and concerned attempt to date, one which realizes that literature is the “battle ground” on which the larger epistemological war between Darwinian naturalism and relativism is being waged. To his credit, Wilson also calls for sociobiologists to engage more seriously with certain aspects of social constructivism, principally its contribution to understanding culture as a viable non-genetic process that influences human behavior.
To begin chipping away at the genetic determinism fallacy, Wilson succinctly and lucidly introduces constructivists to the concept of behavioral plasticity. He demonstrates that our evolved domain-general intelligence allows us to problem solve at the very point where genetic if-then rules break down. Fascinatingly, Wilson shows how some aspects of if-then genetic determinism are actually compatible with constructivist positions. His summary of Margo Wilson’s and Martin Daly’s study of male risk taking and female early pregnancy rates in inner-city Chicago is a compelling and instructive example that any constructivist would appreciate. However, Wilson is quick to point out that just because if-then rules break down, it does not imply that anything goes in terms of human behavior. He wishes to drive home the point that “there is a difference between potential for individual and societal change and equi-potential. If by blank slate we mean “anything can be written with equal ease,” then that part of the metaphor is false.” To learn just what is feasible in terms of progressive social projects, “the way forward for social constructivists,” Wilson contends, “is to become sophisticated about evolution, not to deny its relevance to human affairs.” While Wilson’s essay succeeds in what it sets out to accomplish, one is left wondering just what are and wherefrom originate these “constraints” on our behavior.
In terms of literary criticism, Joseph Carroll has done more than any other evolutionary literary theorist to suggest just what scholars in this nascent field should do and which models of human behavior they should utilize. In his essay he delineates a model for determining literary meaning as it relates to a rather novel but appropriately complex understanding of human behavior. Carroll makes the point so often missed by students of literature that
to treat characters as if they were actual people is to ignore the whole concept of ‘meaning’ in literature, and to ignore meaning in literature is something like ignoring the concept of ‘energy’ in physics or the concept of ‘life’ in biology.
Carroll erects his model upon the foundation of “cognitive behavioral systems,” a theory borrowed from Darwinian psychiatrists. Behavioral systems focus on the function and causal relations between “central categories of life-history,” which are “birth, growth, death and reproduction.” These categories are further dissolved into two fundamental forms of human effort — somatic and reproductive — that Carroll then elucidates through a reading of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
This model of human behavior stresses the importance of domain general intelligence, or what David Wilson called behavioral plasticity. Significantly, Carroll’s model is meant to be a careful and thoughtful departure from the rather narrowly conceived positions of sociobiologists and “narrow” evolutionary psychologists who see humans as “fitness maximizers” and “adaptation executors” respectively. While Carroll’s earlier work endorsed some of the foundational theories of “narrow” 10 evolutionary psychology (that he here rebukes), his reconfigured model of literary meaning and human nature exemplifies the extent to which evolutionary literary critics must be willing to rethink their ideas in light of new evidence from the behavioral sciences. At this point, Carroll actually seems to be ahead of many evolutionary psychologists in addressing their most vocal critics. The importance of Carroll’s essay is that it demonstrates to evolutionarily minded literary critics that they must fully understand not only the nuances appropriate for literary study, but the continuing debates in fields like evolutionary psychology as well. Ultimately, the model of human behavior that literary critics employ will determine the legitimacy and longevity of their interpretive claims. To Carroll’s credit, he has fashioned and adapted his model for literary meaning in a manner that meets the challenges posed by critics of “narrow” evolutionary psychology, the school of thought from which literary Darwinists frequently draw their knowledge of human behavior.
As enthusiastically as the contributors to this volume look forward to elucidating literature with evolutionary insights, it is repeatedly suggested that evolutionists in the hard sciences ought to rethink literature “as a source of data that can be analyzed quantitatively.” To this point, the last three essays in this volume are among some of the first ambitiously quantitative and statistical studies of human behavior using literature as a database. Daniel Kruger, Maryanne Fisher, and Ian Jobling use “Proper” and “Dark” hero archetypes from British Romantic fiction to test female mate preferences in respect to the evolutionary literature on cads and dads; Catherine Salmon demonstrates how the sub-genre of “Slash” erotica fiction is surprisingly consistent with theories on female mate investment; and Jonathan Gottschall tests feminist claims about western folktales by conducting a content analysis of 1,440 world folktales from six continents. Projects of similar and greater breadth, spanning entire centuries of literary history and genre, are in the works and will likely be published in the coming year.
Quantitative studies will take some getting used to for many humanists trained in subjective measures for empirical validity. Many readers who enjoy literary criticism might agree with Frederick Crews’ observation in the introduction to The Literary Animal, that “such discourse looks nearer to anthropology and psychology than to criticism per se.” By no means though do any of these essays suffer from the detached and impersonal objectivity that often characterizes scientific journal writing. Indeed, a warmth of spirit and a tenderness for the human subject is here present if not occasionally rescued from decades of postmodern fragmentation and depreciation.
Evolutionists and constructivists who are willing to read this volume will be pleasantly surprised by the lucidity of writing, compelling arguments, spirit of cooperation, and generosity of endnotes, all of which make The Literary Animal preeminently approachable, readable, and valuable for any student or professor wishing to cross that rather illusory bridge in their mind between the Darwinian behavioral sciences and the humanities. One might say that The Literary Animal has effectively completed the long and difficult construction of that bridge with twelve new sturdy planks. When — not whether — seems to be the most appropriate forecast this time around for predicting the end to the climatic shift that is currently underway in literary studies.
References & Notes
Skeptic, Vol. 4, No. 4: 94–96.
For a review of contributions to the field of evolutionary literary studies see Joseph Carroll. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. Routledge: New York, 2004. xv-xvii.
To appreciate the nuance of these terms in simple language, see Christopher Butler. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002. Jonathan Culler. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997.
Steven Pinker. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking, 2002.
Christopher Hitchens. Book review of The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. The New York Times Book Review. May 22, 2005. 18–19. New Literary History. Vol. 36. Winter 2005. Essays on the Humanities. This latter volume is devoted entirely to debating the “crisis” in the humanities.
Satya Mohanty. Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multiculturalism. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997. Paula Moya and Michael Hames-Garcia, Eds. Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling, Eds. After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory. Evanston. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1993. Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner, Eds. Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts. Lexington, KY: ICUS, 1999. Joseph Carroll. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. Routledge: New York, 2004.
David Buller. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. 419–81.
Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso: London, 1991.
The definition of “narrow” comes from Steven J. Scher and Frederick Rauscher, Eds. Evolutionary Psychology: Alternative Approaches. Boston: Kluwer, 2003. 9 19. Other critiques include, Kim Sterelny andJulie Fitness, Eds. From Mating to Mentality: Evaluating Evolutionary Psychology. New York: Psychology Press, 2003. David Buller. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.

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Three Plates

August 4, 2005 01:25 PM

Some of the comments on my T-Nation interview were brought to my attention. Most are positive, some are not. That's life and I wouldn't try to convince those who hold less than favorable opinions.

Interviews are always a risk because you have little space and I have little time for them. I intend to do very few in the future as I find them to be of limited value and a bit time consuming. You may know that I receive many such requests and turn most down. I have had more than my share of media exposure - Time, Fortune, GQ, Newsweek, New Scientist, The New Yorker, PBS, BBC, German, French and American TV and many many newspapers. It really doesn't amount to much in terms of the progress of my work. I feel that I have had more than my 15 minutes and that is more than enough.

But, this caught my eye. Apparently it is believed that when one works out the way I do that you can't do a three plate squat. Three plates comes to 315 without the collars or 325 with (I usually do them without the collars because I move fast on the squats and can't load the plates as quickly with the collars).

So here is how I do my squats: 20 to 30 reps, deep, with one plate (135). Quickly load two more plates (225) and with no rest do 8 or so more. Then quickly add another plate for 315 and with no rest do whatever feels right, usually about 4. Then, rack the bar and hold it with both hands and do leaps as high as you can and as many as you can.

This is a hierarchical set that drops out the ST fibers and moves right up the FT firing sequence from FTb to FTx. The leaps then really hit the FTx when everything else is pretty much wasted.

My warm up for this is just to do some pretty hard standing leg curls to get the knees smoking.

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Taleb on Lance

Nassim Taleb is a brilliant and original thinker. He is the author of the much-acclaimed book Fooled by Randomness , a book I used in my Economics of Extreme Events course at UCI. (We are writing a paper together with Mark Spitznagel if I lay off the blogging, motorcycling, golf, softball and other play.) Like Lance, he is a cancer survivor and I think his comment on my Lance post deserves a wide audience. Here it is

"Climbing the Himalayas or running a marathon or winning a bicycle race may give their owner a sense of accomplishment, but they do not benefit humanity-especially when it comes at the detriment of one's health. These competitive games stretch what makes us humans.

Furthermore as a cancer survivor, I feel entitled to say that recovering from cancer is NOT an accomplishment. So worthier many persons than myself and Armstrong failed in that battle, for reasons outside their control."

Best,
Nassim

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, PhD
Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty
Isenberg School of Management
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
& Chairman, Empirica LLC

His Empirica fund is a kurtosis fund, meaning they know that extreme events occur and many people do not take that into account. The kind of trading they do brings a rationality to trading that improves the efficiency of asset prices.

Why don't people correctly anticipate the occurance of extreme events? Hard question, but most people tend to think of probability as a Normal distribution. This is completely wrong. The tendancy to think this way is drummed into us when everything we see is focused on the average, a pretty meaningless statistic for reasons I won't go into here.

Nassim has looked at these problems and you can find out more at his web site Nassim Taleb.

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Intermittent Eating and Exercise

Both fasting and exercise produce a negative energy balance. These, in turn, bring stress and the body responds. When these activit