Chris at Conditioning Research Interviews Keith Thomas
publication date: Mar 9, 2010
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author/source: Art
Keith Thomas is a remarkable man; learned and temperate and wise beyond years and books. You will learn much, as I did, from reading the interview he did with Chris at his great Conditioning Research site. The link to Keith's philosophical site is Evfit. I only became aware of Keith's interview when Robb Wolf posted it with some of his own observations of this growing Paleo/EF movement.
I knew I was pioneering something, though that was not my intent, when I first posted my thoughts on my university web site somewhere around 1998 or so and wrote the Evolutionary Fitness Essay. Even my good friends thought I was crazy. But, good science wins in the end, I think. I have enjoyed great health since I began around 1984 and my family (most importantly) has benefited.
As to the curious concern Chris asks Keith to comment on about the libertarian slant that sometimes perturbs some people or may be seen as egotism on my part, that attitude comes from three sources: 1. I had to take responsibility for my family's health in the face of the evidence that my our doctors were giving us bad advice regarding the treatment of their type 1 diabetes. 2. my research in economics and complex systems taught me that the order in human physiology---a truly decentalized, complex system operating far from equilibrium---is an emergent property, not one that is determined by top down control. This is true also of a life of freedom. There is no neglect of social interactions or the state of the world; indeed, these are part of the constraints and institutions that help to shape an emergent order. 3. Hunter gatherer societies are very flat and have almost no hierarchical structure (but for some male and age dominance that is primarily earned through knowledge and physical prowress), that is a legacy of agriculture and control of water resources---the hydrological state, not a natural order.
The Paleo/EF movement, if there is one, emerged out of the open and very disordered information space of the blogosphere and from many individuals communicating ideas and experience. So, relax and enjoy the individualism that has made this new science take form and let all share in its findings. I never tried to rush my book out to stake a claim on this knowledge and had I done so, I don't think the movement would have spread as it has. Sharing the information openly was the only way this was going to go anywhere.
The genetic research is coming out everywhere now and revising many notions of health. Yet, it is revealing the complex networks of gene expression and hormonal and signalling pathways that take us farther into the realm of complexity.
There is no gene for obesity or height or strength or health; there are complex and adaptive networks of agile genes as Matt Ridley calls them. I prefer to treat them as Bayesian genes that are capable of learning and forecasting our future energy and metabolic needs, the essential aspect of keeping us alive as their carriers into the future. Homeostasis is a dead model of physiology to be replaced by allostasis, a model of dynamic adaptation. The post-genomic era will, as Steven Hawking said of the 21st Century, will be the era of complexity. I abandoned equilibrium economics a long time ago and with it, equilibrium physiology---homeostasis. Our genes learn and adapt and are expressed by epigenetic elements that EF tries to get right. I have moved beyond mimicking Paleolithic models of human activity to this more complex model.
The right model, as I see it, is deep evolution. I see as much wisdom in the gene expression of worms, like c. elegans, as I do in the movements of hunter gatherers. Deep evolution looks at the evolutionarily conserved genes and gene networks that we share with all living things. It has been a fascinating 25 year journey and it becomes more fascinating with each day.
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