House Keeping…

Here are the articles published this month on my blog, Evolved to Exceed:

The Cultural Immune System - By Greg Schmalzel

Work-Life Balance - By Greg Schmalzel

Music, Rhythm, And The Human Experience - By Greg Schmalzel

The Ice Age’s Vanishing Giants: Overhunting, Climate Change, or Both? - By Matt Kraemer

Of Speech And Society - By Greg Schmalzel

Ancient Exercise - By Greg Schmalzel

Book.

Title: A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide To The 21st Century: Evolution And The Challenges Of Modern Life.

Author: Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein.

Published: 2021.

Summary/Analysis

Written in almost a series of essays, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide To The 21st Century covers a wide array of modern-day issues from an evolutionary perspective. Heying and Weinstein tackle topics ranging from diet and nutrition, to mating and raising children, to addiction and gender. Each chapter is nuanced with advice on how to approach these ideas with an evolutionary lens in day to day life. Each could be read in isolation from the rest, granting you useful insights on the particular subject at hand. That being said, there are some through-lines that tie the book’s chapters together. The one I’d like to focus on for this newsletter is the dichotomy of culture and consciousness.

Dichotomy is probably the wrong word. It implies that the two terms are at odds with one another and according to the authors, they are not. But before we dive into the weeds, how do they define “culture” and “consciousness”, and what do they have to do with hunter-gatherer’s living in the modern world?

First of all, we are the hunter-gatherers they are referring to. Second, culture and consciousness are our tools for navigating this modern world. Culture is defined as “beliefs and practices that are shared and passed between members of a population.” As a tool, culture is for processing and understanding the known - what we as a species already know. Consciousness, on the other hand, is defined as “that portion of cognition that is newly packaged for exchange…. It is emergent cognition.” This definition is a little more abstract and a tad trickier to understand. In essence, consciousness is the tool used to process the unknown, whereby people come together and collectively share ideas and discover novel insights. At the core of this book is their framework for effectively navigating our future - which will be dependent upon us effectively mediating between these to tools.

So how do cultural traditions help us navigate the world? The authors present a biological analogy here to help us grasp the idea. Biological traits that are expensive for an organism to develop and maintain, and which persist through long periods of time, can be seen as adaptive. The human brain is a prime example of this. It is energetically expensive and has been growing for at least 4 million years. They claim that culture is similar. We should presume that expensive and long-lasting cultural traits are also adaptive. For example, religion is costly (most cultures spend large amounts of resources on religious structures and ceremonies) and we have been practicing it in some form or another for thousands of years. Its adaptiveness is evident by its ability to solidify social bonds. They even cite studies showing how religion can benefit personal health and well-being.

We should not impulsively reject the traditions of our past. They may be more important than we think. But when the wisdom of those traditions reaches its limits, and can no longer provide guidance, we must explore the unknown - we must make an appeal to our consciousness.

The authors paint a picture of ancient humans gathering around the campfire sharing ideas and innovating. It is this communal innovation, they argue, that allowed our consciousness to guide us into the future. Like the earliest inhabitants migrating into North America, who had to communally explore which plants were safe to eat and which were poisonous, we too have to venture into the unknowns of our future as a communal entity.

In contrast to the campfires of our past, today’s consciousness takes form over digital campfires. In the Age of Information, the internet is a “collective (metaphorical) campfire”, whereby people can share ideas across increasingly distant geographic locations, cultures, and time spans. It is promising in its efficiency, but lacks authenticity when compared to traditional campfires. For example, the authors note how the in-person nature of ancestral campfires put an individual’s reputation on the line. The lack of anonymity kept everyone in check and held people accountable. By contrast, the anonymity of the internet can encourage bad faith without reputational reprimanding.

If consciousness is the mechanism by which we navigate novelty, there has never been a time when it would be more important than today. In an acceleratingly novel world, we are in a constant struggle with the unknown. We need a way to explore our consciousness through real and metaphorical campfires, and ideally integrate the most beneficial features of both.

After reading this book, it seems that the optimal path forward is to engineer our societies in such a way that oscillating between culture and consciousness is optimized. We should not throw away what has led to our species’ success in the past. Additionally, we should not become so overly reliant on culture that we collapse in the face of change. Personally, I feel that places which actually encourage free speech are leading the way in this regard. I truly believe that speech, whether it’s done over a literal or metaphorical campfire, is the primary mechanism which allows us to explore both culture and consciousness. To loose that, would be to loose our societies ability to adapt.

Quotes

Academic Paper.

Mattson, Mark P. 2012. “Evolutionary Aspects of Human Exercise – Born to Run Purposefully.” Ageing Research Reviews 11:347-352.

Summary/Analysis

Mark Mattson is a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is recognized as being not only a proponent of intermittent fasting, but someone who has made great strides in educating the public on fasting with science backed data. In this article, he steps away from diet and enters the realm of exercise. Core to this paper is his thesis that humans are optimally healthy under the conditions of physical activity that we engaged in for most of our evolution. The condition which he sees most relevant is endurance running.

Accordingly, endurance running is what separates humans from the rest of the primates and even most mammals. Sure we share tons of physiological traits with our primate relatives, but it is running that makes us unique. Endurance running was our strategy for chasing down our less fit prey to exhaustion before killing and eating them. Therefore, it should be the focus of our attention when considering the evolution of human-specific fitness. He justifies the importance of running to our early evolution by providing examples of adaptations that we acquired as a response to selective pressures for increased endurance. These include: arched feet, small feet with short toes, long legs, a greater proportion of slow twitch muscle cells, sweat glands, and even reduced body hair. All of these are evidence of us having become efficient long-distance runners.

He goes on to show that when we engage in exercise like running, as did most of our Paleolithic ancestors, we reap a plethora of health benefits. Some of which are related to strength and endurance performance, while others are related to brain health and cognition.

As for strength and endurance, exercise places needed stress on the body to which it can adapt and grow stronger as a result - a process known as hormesis. For example, muscles atrophy over time if they are not used. They will continue to degenerate as you age, making you more and more susceptible to injury. Exercise can be used to combat this, as its been shown to reduce this rate of degeneration when implemented into lives of both middle-aged and elderly people.

As for the brain, it too can degenerate over time. We are all familiar with horror stories of elderly people losing their license, or even forgetting their child’s name because they no longer have the cognitive faculties they used to. Luckily for us, evidence suggests that exercise can prevent or at least delay these declines in cognition. For example, neurotrophins are a family of proteins that are essential for controlling the growth and survival of brain cells (neurons). Studies have shown that exercise increases the expression of these proteins. Importantly, recent studies showed that aerobic exercise specifically (i.e., running) can reverse age-related decrements in cognition by increasing levels of a specific neurotrophin called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).

As we move into a world of increasing sedentism, research like this is going to be essential. Showing how exercise is core to the evolved human experience, and how it quite literally sculpted our anatomy will be the framework. Continuing this tradition will provide a vision for a healthy future we ought to strive towards. Failing to uphold this tradition will provide the anti-vision we ought to fear.

Quotes

Podcast.

Summary/Analysis

The obesity epidemic in the west can largely be attributed to the evolution of the human brain. It’s a brain wired for maximizing energy intake and storing fat in relatively food scarce environments, but our environments are now overwhelmingly abundant with processed and calorically dense foods. That is the surface-level “Cliff Notes” version of this podcast. But let’s look deeper into what Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Stephan Guyenet have to say about this evolutionary mismatch and its neurobiological underpinnings.

The premise is quite simple. The brain wants to increase energy consumption to then convert that energy into body fat. But why? According to Guyenet, there are four main reasons why this is evolutionarily adaptive. First, throughout evolution food was not always guaranteed and it was not easily predictable. As a result, having extra energy in the form of body fat would have been good to have between eating opportunities. Second, having that extra fat storage is beneficial when burning energy to fight off disease. Third, evolution selected fat for this function because it’s the most energy dense macronutrient. It contains 9 calories per gram compared to 4 calories per gram of protein or carbs. Fourth, fat is hydrophobic, meaning it does not need water to be stored in the body (whereas carbohydrates do). Therefore, we are evolutionarily incentivized to eat and store fat.

How do the brain and body communicate and negotiate how much fat is stored in the body and how much energy should be consumed? The region of the brain that regulates body fat mass is called the hypothalamus. Lesions to this part of the brain lead to hyperphagia (feelings of insatiable hunger). A normally functioning hypothalamus, though, measures how much of the hormone leptin is circulating in the body. Leptin is made in fat tissue and secreted into the bloodstream in proportion to the amount of body fat you have (more fat = more leptin). High levels of leptin tell your brain that you have a sufficient amount of fat, and so you will be less hungry. But just as drug users build a tolerance to their drug of choice, you too can build a tolerance to leptin. According to Guyanet, people with obesity have leptin resistance, meaning that their hypothalamus requires more leptin to signal that their fat storage is nearing full. It takes more food to convince the brain that it’s not ”starving”.

A key point made throughout the podcast is that these neurobiological mechanisms are not new. They are ancient. It is our environments that are new. Accordingly, studies have shown that obesity is a highly heritable trait. About 75% of the variation between people’s body mass is due to genetics. Humans have always had these heritable genes that code for conserving energy as fat, for the very evolutionary reasons described above. The obesogenic environments we now live in are what these genes are capitalizing on, making us more susceptible to obesity.

Recognizing this modern issue and its increasing severity, Attia and Guyanet offer some tips for preventing and/or managing obesity. Given the lack of control we have over our fat hungry genes and neural mechanisms, these are largely behavioral adjustments. First, foods that are high in both sugar and fat (e.g., ice cream) tend to be the most addictive. Avoiding these highly palatable foods is essential. Second, because we can’t change our biology, we have to change our environment. Using “effort barriers” to make consuming food more difficult is one way of doing this. For example, you can make food less accessible by putting it far from where you spend most of your time. Third, well balanced meals are going to be more satiating than large meals with only one macronutrient. A plate of chicken, bread, and mixed greens will be more filling than a relatively larger bowl of just pasta.

Lastly, for further research, Guyanet plugs his website Red Pen Reviews, where he and his colleagues perform in-depth reviews on relevant diet and nutrition books. This is a great resource to make sure that the information (and food) your are consuming is coming from well-researched, scientifically-backed data.

Quotes

Fitness Challenge.

This month’s challenge is simple… 24-hour fast. Good luck.

• Tip: Drink plenty of water, add a little salt to it.

Fit Fuel Song Suggestion.

Title: Au nom de la Science

Band: Outre-Tomb

Album: R​é​purgation

PR Moment - 3:40