1. The Evolutionary Fitness Essay that started it all.


2. Chapter One of Arthur De Vany's Evolutionary Fitness.


3. "Steroids, Home Runs and the Law of Genius".


4. A somewhat difficult paper that models the energy dynamics of modern elite athletes and our Paleolithic ancestors Why We Get Fat


5. My interview with John MacGregor in The New Scientist.


6. My interview at T-Nation forum.


7. My book on the movies Hollywood Economics


8. New Yorker article on my motion picture research. Talk of the Town.


9. Video archive of the PBS television show Closer to Truth. I appear on segment 108. Can You Really Extend Your Life?


10. Virginia Postrel's NYT article about my movie research The Formula


11. A very well done LA Times Magazine cover story quoting me about the way Hollywood chews up outsiders and, yet, they keep on coming. Patrick Kiger's Chew. Spit. Repeat.


12. Another LA Times Magazine cover story, this time by a Cal Tech physicist, on uncertainty in the movies and the role of luck in the business, Leonard Mlodnow's Meet Hollywood's Latest Genius . (There aren't any.)

I don't know that there is much study or evidence on this point, though I think there are reasons why a sharpening of the mind occurs during intermittent fasting.

1. Hunger does concentrate the mind. An ancestor who got lazy or fuzzy minded during caloric deprivation would have poor survival prospects. There are studies that show that subjects who undergo food deprivation become focused on food, even obsessed with it. The more gentle, intermittent fasting with eating to satisfaction following, is unlikely to promote the obsession. Still it may better focus the mind, though the focus can be too single minded to realize the benefits of the focus in your work.

2. Fasting releases HGH which, in turn, makes muscle more insulin resistant. This spares glucose for the brain. Thus, energy may be more favorably shunted to the brain by fasting. Moreover, the stomach competes with the brain on more or less equal terms for energy; they are rough metabolic equivalents in energy use. Fasting reduces the stomach's intake of digestive energy making it available to the brain. I think also that the brain is the last organ to become insulin resistant; thus fasting might relatively increase brain sensitivity.

3. At some point during the fast, the brain may switch to ketones as an energy source. I recall reading of the benefits of glucose to ketone cycling as energy substrate.

When there is a surplus of energy, the body's purposes are more diffuse, less purposive and reproductively oriented. When there is shortage there is a wonderful focusing on staying alive; repair and maintenance take precedence.

I find the easiest way to do intermittent fasting is not to keep much food on hand. When I don't eat, it's for the same reasons prehistoric humans didn't: no food. It helps ensure I have fresh produce too, since I have to shop every couple days, and half an hour at the grocery store after work is much better than half an hour watching TV.

But the idea with intermittent fasting isn't to skip meals and starve yourself so as to limit your total calorie intake, but rather to defer a meal or three to get the physical benefits of fasting without the calorie deficit. For example, after you fast one day, eat double the next day to make up for it, or half-again as much the next two days, or whatever it takes to sate your hunger. If you're ravenous after a workout, eat. If you're suddenly hungry between meals, snack.

In spite of how complex the mechanisms behind an evolutionary approach to fitness are, its real beauty is in how simple it is to implement. As long as you don't feed your body crap (like processed sugars, starches, grains. See: here (requires Real player)) in place of food, and stimulants in place of sleep (see: here ), your body is largely self-regulating. Sleep when you're tired, eat when you're hungry, keep moving, and you're probably 90% there.

The last 10%, maybe even just the last 1%, is a lot of what Dr. De Vany writes about: careful manipulation of genetic switches through diet and activity levels for specific results. He's been doing the evolutionary fitness thing for decades and is a very advanced practitioner, and so reading his blog is a lot like reading a professional pitcher's training logs. Dr. De Vany is often talking about things that are the equivalent of optimizing work/rest cycles for managing a failing rotator cuff mid-season, and most of us need to realize we still need to learn how to throw a fastball.

Get the diet sorted first. Get used to feeding your body plenty of good food when it's hungry. Get used to buying and cooking meat and nuts and fresh produce and herbs and spices and whatnot, and avoiding grains and starches and refined sugar. Spend a few months at it until it becomes habitual and effortless to eat well. Do this before you start mucking about with controlled fasts, because by then your insulin and blood sugar will be rock steady and because of this the hunger pangs you suffer on the fasts will be mild.

Here is the last installment of Super Mike's integration of body building with Evolutionary Fitness. It is about eating and might be useful to stave off the weight gain and surging insulin. It is too easy to come back from the holiday feasting and snacking with damaged insulin sensitivity and dynamics. The puffy look you acquire will take weeks or months to come off. I interperse a comment here and there in brackets [ ].

"For my eating, I like to visualize myself in a wild environment. What would I eat if I were trying to survive outdoors? [Pure evolutionary fitness, not body builder thinking.]

After waking up, I picture myself foraging for nuts, berries and eggs.
Sometimes having scraps from the day before. Sometimes there’s nothing. That makes you have to hunt. And not just for big game. I think it’s easy to picture our ancestors hunting mammoths and other big, dangerous game, but I bet day-to-day survival depended a lot on birds, rodents, fish, fruits and nuts, and probably bugs. [Bugs, yes. We retain an enzyme to desolve the chitin in insect exoskeleton.]

I practice brief, intermittent fasting, usually from 8:00pm the night before to 2:00pm the following afternoon. I do this at least twice a week.

Some mornings I have just nuts and fruit, other times eggs and fruit.
Sometimes I’ll have a piece of salmon or left over steak and vegetables.
(A dinner for breakfast can be a nice change.) [Mike has seen the pictures of my meals and WW's I think.]

At about 2:00 or even 3:00 I’ll have a salad with chicken, fish, pork tenderloin, tomatoes, walnuts, cashews, green peppers, red peppers, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots. Lots of color. All the good stuff.

On workout days I find myself grazing for an hour or two after I eat a lunch. Green beans. Snap peas. Grapes. Strawberries. (It helps to have a small refrigerator in my office.)

Dinner is usually around 8:00 and consists of chicken, fish, beef, pork tenderloin, with a dark green vegetable like broccoli, spinach or green beans. And yes, every once in a while, my wife will make spaghetti. (Remember the not an EF saint part?) Those nights are usually followed by a fast day. [I'm not an EF saint either, but pretty pure because it tastes better. Pasta makes me sluggish and feel too full. I think I can no longer digest it effectively. No loss.]

Some nights I do something I would have never thought of doing before, I actually go to sleep hungry. [A real departure from body building.]

I tell people that basically I’m a vegetarian that eats meat. I probably have 10 to 12 small servings of fruits and vegetables per day. I eat a lot less protein than I used to. (So much for the 1.5 grams per pound theory.)

I have no idea how many calories I consume or use. I don’t keep track.
I kept a food log for one week and found out that I drink a lot of wine.

The socially dominant opinion (promoted by sports writers and sports talk radio personnel) is under challenge. Have a look.

The results of the before and after study of hitters said by the Mitchell report to have used steroids? Here they are in brief:

"Hitters didn’t fare much better. For the 48 batters we studied, the average change in home runs per year “before” and “after” was a decrease of 0.246. The average batting average decreased by 0.004. The average slugging percentage increased by 0.019 — only a marginal difference. So while some batters increased their totals, an equal number had falloffs. Most showed no consistent improvement, several showed variable performance and some may have extended the years they played at a high level, although that is a difficult question to answer.

Some players improved and some declined. But the pattern for the individuals’ averages was consistent, and the variability of players (with the exception of home run counts) was low. There is no example of a mediocre player breaking away from the middle of the pack and achieving stardom with the aid of drugs.

Barry Bonds’s career has been the most scrutinized, and in fact his home run production in the years after he supposedly started taking drugs does show significant average gains. But individuals always vary, and choosing specific cases does not yield general conclusions."

Pitchers fare worse. As I said, it was the aging and injured and insecure who make up the bulk of the list of users. It is not surprising that they might over all show a decline in performance relative to the healthy non-users. Selection bias shows up again.

HGH promotes acromegly in adults (gigantism) which squeezes the organs into the stomach. HGH is a molecule thought to have evolved from insulin. It is released in fasting and exercise. HGH promotes insulin resistance, but in natural release patterns it is released in pulses, mostly in deep REM sleep where it does no harm to insulin dynamics. [This is why I recommend against ingesting high carbohydrate and protein mixes after a work out; it releases insulin and shuts off HGH. The insulin resistance causes the mix to float in the blood serum delivering the sugar to tissues and setting off free radical reactions. The protein in the mix is easily oxidized and turned into a molecule the body cannot use.]

The evolutionary rationale for insulin and HGH to be antagonistic in their action is simple and compelling; during times of negative caloric balance and starvation, it reduces muscle insulin sensitivity to preserve scarce nutrients, especially glucose, for the brain. Glucose was scarce in ancestral times and the brain lives on glucose. If the muscles soak up the little glucose available, the brain fades and the ancestor becomes an easy prey to a predator or fellow human and a victim to falls and disorientation.

It does nothing for performance as the New England Journal of Medicine article linked and abstracted on Sabernomics (a great site) makes clear.

I would add that the players alleged to be users in the Mitchell Report were trying to heal from injury. An MLB player earns so much that a missed season producing a bad year lowers his value. He must avoid the reputation for being injury-prone in order to prevent erosion of his human capital value. Add that up and you can see that in MLB a controlled experiment would show no gain, according to the results of the NEJM. And the field experiment, using performance of players who use HGH, would likely show a performance drop because the experiment selects injured players as the subjects and non-injured subjects as controls.

Even the media are taking up the proposition that steroids increase performance by tabulating pre- and post-steroid statistics for players said to be users in Mitchell's report to show that decreases in performance are as common as increases (one was an LA Times story whose link I forgot to save). I would say they are really just tracking the variability that is natural to this elite level of performance.

On push/pulls, I prefer to do them right after one another in the same work out to use reciprocal inhibition to counteract stiffness and maintain muscle balance. I also do no more than two hard days a week and then do one or two easy days to work on symmetry, balance, posture and grace (see the Essay). With all the chining and pulling, he probably does more bicep work than he needs to. A concentration curl would peak the bicep while the chins and pulling add mass and thickness. That is enough for me. I don't like big arms and my shirts become too tight (see my Essay again on polar moment). But, what the heck if he likes it.

Art,

Here are the details of my workouts and EF lifestyle that some of your readers requested. I apologize for the length.

I’m not an EF saint. I probably work out too much. I’ve been known to have a bowl of ice cream or a bag of popcorn on occasion. And I enjoy wine and beer. (One of the reasons I latched on to your site was when I saw a dinner you had prepared, and next to it was a Bud.)

But thanks to you, I have found out what works for me. And I’ve gotten results that I didn’t think were possible, at any age.

I try to apply Evolutionary Fitness principles of randomness, play, work and rest, to traditional body building routines.

I love to lift weights. Some people dread workouts. I can’t wait until the next one. I have to force myself to take days off. Lifting is my play. It’s not really bodybuilding, but more body re-design, build here, delete there. It’s fun.

I keep coming back to push/pull splits. Pull one day. Push a day or two later. I do legs and abs a day later or maybe in between the other days.

One reason I split is that I found out that when I work out heavy, and then wait a week or longer and work out heavy again, that that was when I injured myself. I found that to keep injury free and to help my joints stay flexible, strong and pain free, I need to have days with lighter weight and higher reps in between the heavy low rep days.

After 3-4 weeks of splits I may change to one muscle group a day or all groups in one day for a couple weeks.

I don’t go by workout days per week, so I can’t say back and bicep on Monday and then shoulders, chest and triceps on Wednesday. I might throw a leg day in between, or even take an extra rest day. Or do a day of just arms. I try to keep it random, but like I said earlier, I love to lift weights and probably do too much.

]]> I do try to change up exercises each time. If I do chins and rows on one pull day, the next one I will do v-grip chins, t-bar rows, dumbbell rows or partial dead lifts. On the first pull day I will do 12-15 reps. The next pull day, I will do 3-6 reps. But I always warm up with plenty of light sets first. And slowly progress to the heavier weights, which I will do for two to three sets. Some days to failure, but less and less to failure, I’ve found that a constant tension and good contraction is more important.

When I do three sets of the 10 to 12 rep range, I usually have a 1minute rest, 1.5 minute rest and then a 2 minute rest. It varies though.

When I do 3-4 reps I rest less than a minute.

My workouts are usually 40 to 50 minutes long. They include plenty of warm ups.

How much do I lift? I am much stronger in my pull movements than my push. (I wonder if there is an evolutionary reason for this? I could easily climb a tree with a child holding on to me. I once climbed a fire pole two stories high using only my hands and arms, on a bet.)

I do v-grip chins with 75 lbs around my waist but only use a pair of 60-70 pound dumbbells when I do seated presses. My rotator cuff has never been able to handle heavy bench presses and that’s actually been a blessing, symmetry wise.

I do some aerobics. Once or twice a week I use the elliptical machine.
Basically, I use it for a brisk 30 minute walk. After about 20 minutes I do a series of 30 second sprints that make the machine shake, followed by a 30 second walk. I will do 4 of these. If I do too much, it just makes me too hungry later.

The elliptical machine is at a gym I belong to, but I lift free weights in my garage where I have Olympic bars and dumbbells up to 100 pounds. I use a rack for safety because I lift alone. I’m out there when it’s 36 degrees or 106 degrees. (Texas weather.) My wife thinks I’m crazy.

I prefer to workout at noon and usually fast the morning before a workout.

Arnold used to say, “stay hungry” and I live by that. I like to leave when I know I could do a little more. The same philosophy works for eating.

Art,

Here are the details of my workouts and EF lifestyle that some of your readers requested.
At work, I’ve often been called, “The man that doesn’t age.”

I get a lot of questions from friends and co-workers about what I eat and what’s my secret, but their faces usually glaze over by the time I get to the part about avoiding pasta and baked potatoes.

I’m 5’11”, 175 lbs and by my cheap skin fold calipers, about 6% BF.

I’ve attached a disgusting “before” picture and an “after” picture that shows my front and back at once. No retouching, just the front and back merged into one.

I call the second picture a “Work of Art.” (Art De Vany, that is.)

Thanks again for all the useful information.

Keep writing,

Mike

Here is the "before" picture of SuperMike.

Here is the "after" picture.

We know from the posts I put up earlier that not all this progress can be attributed to Evolutionary Fitness. He had worked out in a body builder style before beginning EF. The after is after practicing EF for a year, having worked for an unspecified period before.

Nonetheless, the progress is astounding and does show that working out can make a huge difference in appearance and health. The final polish to his appearance came from the year of EF.

I will post more installments later. Too busy now to do it all at once and too much to read at a single sitting, not to mention the load on my server.

Soccer does seem to be a power law sport. And, I have seen the distribution of the length of tennis points and it is a power law. Most points are over rather quickly, but a few are extraordinarily long.

The sprint part of any form of play does recruit far more muscle mass and, particularly the inefficient FT fibers. Far more anabolic drive is created as well. No wonder the soccer players fared far better in the study Chris examines.

"I know I've seen a study on the subject, though I can't seem to find it at the moment. Because walking and running/sprinting are more efficient gaits than jogging, they can be sustained for longer periods before complete rest is required, so over long periods of time (days/weeks) a walk-run pace does indeed cover more distance than a continuous pace."

I have seen the studies too, and have posted on some of them in the past, though I can't take the time now to find them. But, the point is that this mixture, with some time in the continuous mode, is likely to be more energy efficient. Why didn't I put it this way?

Further evidence comes from studies of intermittent versus continuous exercise and there the verdict is that a human can do a lot more work if done intermittently than if done continuously. Or, put another way, you can do a lot more work in a given period of time if the work is done in an intermittent fashion. This gain in time versus energy expenditure efficiency, as you know by now, is one reason Evolutionary Fitness makes use of intermittency in eating and energy expenditure. I think it is the ancestral pattern too, as this evolving discussion seems to indicate.

Does that mean that continuous running is out of the picture? I don't think so, but it ought not to be done to the exclusion of the others, as seems to be the practice of many joggers and marathoners seeking to keep their heart rate in a zone. The power law spreads activities over all zones and intensity, but it is concentrated on something close to walking/trekking with bursts into the other zones. The energy spent in the zones is greater in the walking/trekking and in the sprinting zone, using the mobility example, but there is a portfolio which ought to include some continuous running, as another commenter noted.

My model is to use the gym for my "fight or flight" zone and to take long walks for my "easy" zone. My sprinting now is pretty much confined to tennis which is a nice mix of high and easy work; play in other words. An hour hitting tennis balls on the ball machine set up to launch from side to side and hitting baseline returns with occasional rushes to the net for volleys is a nice work out.

3. Lastly, thanks to EIC for this: "As I stated in my comment under the post that compared hormone levels of T supplemented vs. normal individuals, one can now maintain testicle size and function while using exogenous hormones by adding HCG to the mix. HCG stimulates the release of FSH and LH and keeps the testicle size intact. Any knowledgeable HRT doctor will supply this with testosterone. I am sure that the guys advising athletes would know to do the same."

As far as I can determine from the Mitchell Report, there is no indication that these hormones or hormone releasers were used by the MLB players. Mitchell may not have been aware of this problem. Has anyone seen evidence of HCG use among players? Of course, then there is the issue of users developing breasts or pain in the breast area. Body builders use estrogen blockers. Did MLB players? It is a pharmaceutical nightmare to use steroids.

I did not see a discussion in the Mitchell Report of the error rate of the tests either, something Mark Sisson has previously and expertly commented on here. And, I know I swore off this topic, would it really have been useful for the players to have had a day-before warning to avoid detection? Mitchell suggested that this deters detection. Seems unlikely. Maybe Mark can add something.

The best picture to determine steroid use is of the testicles because, as I have shown in previous posts, steroids diminish their volume by reducing follicle stimulating and leutinizing hormones. Hypogonadism would have been quite evident in the shower room of any MLB clubhouse. The "special parts" of a player are subject to much scrutiny and comment in the shower and locker room. A big time user would have been laughed out of the clubhouse. So far, I have heard nothing about this. I doubt that Barry's jock strap is any smaller and wouldn't want to ask him anyway.

I fail to see any purpose that is served by naming players who are alleged to have used a performance enhancing drug. It drags the reader through unseemly characters and events that have little real bearing on the issues. Nearly all the players named have NOT tested positive for any of the substances alleged to be performance drugs. It would have been more responsible to have given more objective data by tabulating the number of players on drugs and when they used them and then gone on to develop the evidence that their performances were affected.

The report contains no objective evidence that the so-called 'performance enhancing' drugs actually enhance performance. So, we have some sleazy stories about players and drug dealers, but no evidence that there were any consequences for performance or player health.

So, first, I think the Mitchell Report fails in its first task to demonstrate or quantify drug use in MLB in a objective, measurable way. No scientist can go through the report and gain any data of use.

Second, it does not support its claim that players suffer health problems as a result of drug use. I searched for a table that listed injuries or poor health as a result of drug use and found nothing.

Third, it does not establish or quantify any evidence of enhanced performance. Thus, it does make the case for the oft-repeated mantra that users are cheaters and gain an advantage over 'clean' players, his term for non-users. Where are the data that would be required to measure use in MLB so that one could do the empirical analysis? Where is the evidence for the claims of enhanced performance?

Fourth, it does not note the relative use of the various drugs in a quantifiable manner. How many used steroids and how many used HGH? From my reading, it appears that most of the HGH and possibly the steroid users were injured and trying to speed their recovery. Why shouldn't injured players have access to these drugs? Everyone else does.

If it were primarily injured or aging players that used them, then how could drugs have increased hitting? It would be more likely that steroid use would show a correlation with poor rather than superior performance. This is the selection problem; if the walking wounded are using them more than others, use would be correlated with poor performance.

Nearly all of the evidence of use comes from two persons, Kirk Radomski and Brian McNamee, both of whom are under plea bargains. There are cancelled checks which do support some allegations. So, some clearly are true.

I could find no evidence of a clear performance gain achieved by any athlete using or claimed to have used drugs. Not a shred. Here is some of Mitchell's so-called evidence on that primary issue.

Ken Caminiti made the All Star Team and credits his performance to steroids. This is merely an anecdote. Players make the All Star Team some years and not in others. How many other users accomplished this or a similar goal?

The old story about Mark McGwire, whose privacy was invaded when a reporter went through his locker, is mentioned. But, Mitchell fails to report that andro is completely ineffective in the promotion of muscle mass and has never been shown to enhance athletic performance.

Roger Clemens may or may not have used steroids. There is slight evidence to support that. Still, it is hard to believe he took them or took enough or that they worked. He is too fat to be such a hard trainer as he is known to be and be on steroids. He ought have had a better body composition if he used steroids. Moreover, he has never tested positive for them. So, I doubt he is a user. He denies the allegations strongly.

Mitchell described Chad Allen's characterization of Miadich's bad behavior, smashing items in the club house, as "roid rage". Is it really? I guess Mickey Mantle, whose attacks of the dugout water cooler were legendary, suffered roid rage too.

The conversations and personal opinions or characterizations drawn by the people Mitchell interviewed do not make for convincing or trustworthy evidence.

Dan, who is pictured in the photo, has been following EF (Evolutionary Fitness) for quite some time. He plays football at the elite college level and tells this story about finally adding IF (intermittent fasting) to EF. In addition he uses a system I am not yet familiar developed by Jay Schroeder called EvoSport. It seems everyone is getting into the evolutionary way of thinking. Of note is the drop in body fat with no loss of lean body weight when Dan added IF to his program; most of the weight loss was in a drop of waist size of 4 inches. But, he had to drop the 4 or 5 meals a day mentality often held by body builders and athletes.

Dan's characterization of his set up in the picture is excellent: "Notice the athletic position in one picture. Hamstrings pulling into the ground, torse erect, chest separating at the pectorals. These are hallmarks of the efficient athlete." Young athletes should pay close attention and also understand that he has excellent technology at his disposal in EF, IF, and EvoSport.

Here is Dan's description of his methods:

"First off, I've been reading your blog since it's inception (and am now re-reading from the archives because of some free time), but just this past summer began applying IF principles to my lifestyle approach. Despite being a long time reader, I somehow had been reluctant to apply episodic caloric deprivation. I create a demand for calories unlike many others, I had reasoned. This is true, but my physiology still evolved like everyone else. I soon found I would benefit greatly from IF. I dropped approx. 4 inches 4-5 weeks, while maintaining the same weight. I went from 34 to 30 w/ little effort. In pictures that will follow, people always remark about how skinny my waist is. For the past several years I had eaten meats, vegetables, fruits, and nuts as the bulk of my diet but had difficulty shaking popular fitnesses' 4-5 meals a day. In retrospect, how silly. Because of the stressful demands of the football season, I gained a few inches back and my lean mass dropped a bit. Not good. However, I did not diligently apply IF because of concerns about caloric deprivation and the demands of the season. Probably, not well reasoned. "

On EvoSport, he has a brief insight into the theory; it is fight or flight made systematic in my estimation. Pretty sound on those grounds at least.

"Consider this, Jay has found ways to eliminate the normal symptoms of overtraining by working the body at high load, high velocity, and high volume. More specifically, this is done by training the body's reflexive systems. Think fight or flight! He accomplishes this w/ iso-extremes, rebounds, and altitude drops amongst other methodics. These inhibit the GTO, inhibiting the bodys protective mechanisms, thus allowing elite performance. I could write about it hours, but it is a little food for thought. The body's reflexive system can be trained to elicit the same performance over and over and over. It's quite remarkable. Much of it in line to what you already know to be true..."

I include a couple more pictures below. Did you ever see a leaner, more balanced and graceful looking athlete? His physical goals are impressive: "My goal at the Northwestern combine... weigh in at shredded 210 (only to impress scouts, weight is really irrelevant) and a 4.3 40 yard dash and 35 plus vert. jump. Only accomplished w/ the help of the two best technologies avaialble, EF, IF, and Evo-Sport. I am taking a cue from you here and perhaps creating some incentives (everything is economics) for myself to adhere the best I can to these goals and the demands of living the proper lifestyle. "

The subject is the link between education, poverty and terrorism among Palestinians, a topic much discussed these days. Most commenters in the media claim poverty is the root of terrorism. Perhaps it is the other way around; societies where terrorism breeds are made poor by the corruption of public trust and misplacing blame on others. In the one presidential debate I have seen the moderator made this now standard assertion as the preface to her question to the Republican candidates.

As we know from the Saudis on those flights on 9/11, they were from middle class to slightly affluent families. And, they were educated as well. This study finds a similar pattern among Palestinian terrorists.

Evidence about the Link Between Education, Poverty and Terrorism among Palestinians. (If you go to the link below the abstract, you can obtain the full paper.)

Claude Berrebi, RAND Corporation

Abstract

This paper investigates the ways in which terrorism is linked to education and poverty using data newly culled from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) documentary sources. The paper presents a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in terrorist activities by members of the Hamas and PIJ between the late 1980s and May 2002. The resulting evidence suggests that both higher education and standard of living are positively associated with participation in Hamas or PIJ and with becoming a suicide bomber, while being married significantly reduces the probability of participation in terrorist activities.

Berrebi, Claude (2007) "Evidence about the Link Between Education, Poverty and Terrorism among Palestinians," Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy: Vol. 13 : Iss. 1, Article 2.
Available at: http://www.bepress.com/peps/vol13/iss1/2