The Becker-Posner Blog asks whether unemployment compensation should be extended:

However, the actual large extension poses a major risk of creating an unemployment culture where men and women remain “ unemployed” for years. Once the period of unemployment becomes long enough, people begin to get the habits from being unemployed for a long time: they sleep late, develop various leisure interests, and at the same time their work skills depreciate from not using them for an extended period.

Ummm, when I read that I couldn't help but substitute:

However, the actual large extension poses a major risk of creating an college culture where men and women remain “in college” for years. Once the period of college becomes long enough, people begin to get the habits from being in college for a long time: they sleep late, develop various leisure interests, and at the same time their work skills depreciate from not using them for an extended period.

My parents would be delighted if I went to grad school, which is tempting, but I have many older friends who did long stints in grad school and come out with jobs paying the same as mine, bad work habits (which I also suffered from thanks to college), and mounds of debt. The only thing drawing me in is the actual desire to learn more about subjects I'm interested in, but I've seen too many people get burned by that. They get to study something they like, but under professors who aren't any good. What would make me go to grad school? The chance to study under a specific expert perhaps. That's how it was in the days of people like Plato. You didn't go to school just to go there (or in the case of some friends, to attempt to ride out the recession), but to follow a great scholar or two.

I'm feeling much better, but this weekend I was at DrupalCamp NYC, which is a conference for the web platform I develop on. It powers this site, though I definitely have neglected other features besides the blog. I presented a couple of sessions- user interface, LAMP/MAMP stack, and Drupal for small business/education/non-profits. But the food was a big challenge. I managed to get gluten-free options this time, but the option was gluten-free pasta with tomato sauce— not exactly a source of calories or nutrition in general, though definitely more nutritious than the conventional offerings of cheese pizza and bagels, though there was some fruit provided. Next year I'm going to push for either not doing food at all or doing food that isn't made of refined flour. The problem is that people want to spend as little as possible...when are people going to learn that cheap food mostly = bad food? Paleo, the idea that humans should eat human food, is very popular in the tech community, but this reminds me that it's still a small movement. I ate the gluten free pasta, bananas, and coffee... and ended the weekend bloated and fatigued.

What would a better option consist of? I think a salad bar with loads of greens, good calorie-rich dressings, nuts, fruits, and meats would be an awesome option that would please everyone from vegans to celiacs.

P.S. Another instance of government crushing the small farm movement- this time not raw milk, but a home-slaughtered pig. The government is scared because they are realizing that the jigs up- people are realizing that government inspected and approved does not equal safe and that individuals can often do a better job.

The paleo diet is primarily about applying evolutionary principles to nutrition. But nutrition is certainly not the only subject evolutionary science can lend its wisdom to. Long before I had heard of the paleo diet, I had a keen interest in the controversial science of evolutionary psychology. In high school, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate fueled plenty of arguments with my family and in classes.

Here is another evolutionary psychology book that seems to be designed to start arguments, since it’s about something nearly everyone seems to have an opinion about. Sex at Dawn, written by psychologist Christopher Ryan and psychiatrist Cacilda Jethá, is snarky and perhaps intentionally provocative, but no matter your opinion, it will probably make you rethink some long-held assumptions about sex.

I come from a culture where growing up, I was preached that the ideal was that you would only have sex with one person and they would only have sex with you. As an adolescent I was assaulted with books extolling the evils of animal-like promiscuity. Surely it caused ye to be dishonored and blighted with syphilis and live destitute with 14 children in a trailer. Having one true love was ordained by God and temptations otherwise were certainly of the Devil. It’s kind of a miracle that I’ve been able to move on and have normal relationships, but intrinsic human desire tends to win out when confronted with freedom.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that humans have a tough time following such a doctrine. A pastor in my own church growing up was one of those who struggled and his divorce almost broke up the congregation.

It’s no wonder we have such a tough time— evolutionary speaking, we are a hypersexual species with marked physical adaptations for promiscuity. Sex at Dawn presents some interesting evidence for this, as well as a romp through human history. Paleo dieters will be familiar with the idea that hunter-gatherers were healthy and happy, which gets several chapters here. I did learn one new fact, which is that one of the techniques used to estimate age of bones, dental eruption, only says that the person was over 35, but some idiotic studies have underestimated lifespan because they took these studies and recorded 35 as the age of death.

But back to sex, since that’s probably what you were thinking about anyway. There has certainly been ample speculation about Paleolithic sex, with the general narrative being that women have always sought to procure a stable man to help with children and bring home wooly mammoth kabobs, while hooking up with the hot jerk on the side. Meanwhile men have always just tried to knock up as many women as possible while trying valiantly to only provide meat to their own offspring. Jethá and Ryan dismantle this frankly stupid just-so story well. It just doesn’t make sense in light of anatomy or how hunter-gatherers actually live. It requires that every culture be organized around marriage, fathers provide mainly for their own children, that sex is connected to paternity and that men are somehow able to discern paternity, and that hunters could refuse to share their meat with others. In reality, while sex habits seem to vary, hunter-gatherers almost always share meat (and raise children) communally and several cultures do not even recognize paternity in the modern sense of the word.

Unfortunately, numerous evolutionary scientists have operated under this errant view and it remains fairly mainstream.

So where is the evidence otherwise? The authors look at comparative anatomy with other apes. Our closest true-monogamous relatives are gibbons, which share very little in common with humans otherwise. Our closest living relatives are bonobos, who are hypersexual and promiscuous, but as I’ve pointed out in nutritional anthropology posts, they aren’t that close (though it’s interesting that even they hunt for and prize meat). One interesting thing we have in common with bonobos is a repetitive microsatellite important to the release of oxytocin, which is absent in chimps and important for pro-social feelings like love and eroticism. Bonobos also share the unusual habit of copulating throughout the menstrual cycle, lactation, and pregnancy. Like us, their vulva is oriented towards the front of the body, rather than the rear as in chimps.

Next the authors examine studied hunter-gatherers. There are certainly no tribes practicing the ideal of one lifetime sexual partner. In face, most seem to enjoy lots of sex with many people— “Anthropologist Thomas Gregor reported eighty-right ongoing affairs among the thirty-seven adults in the Mehinaku village he studied in Brazil.” They also take down the ideal of the “nuclear family”- which no hunter-gatherer culture practices either. In tribal cultures the extended family (which is often the entire village) is where children are raised.

But as post-agrarian hunter-gatherers are an imperfect reflection of the Stone Age, so the anatomy information is even more interesting. In terms of several important anatomical markers, humans show evidence that we engage primarily in sperm competition, which has huge implications. Some men I know seem to think men evolved to be promicious, but women didn’t, which would make us similar to gorillas. These giant herbivorous apes engage in battles over harems. However, our sex organs and our body size dimorphism (the sex difference between males and females) are nothing like gorillas and women’s bodies seem to have evolved as a sperm battleground. Instead of mostly competing via physical strength contests like gorilla males, our sperm is made for a race that involves competing against other sperm from other men and the human vagina is apparently a formidible racetrack able to store and sort sperm to some degree.

Unfortunately the legacy of the agricultural revolution has been STDs, pregnancies woman can’t support, lower sperm counts, and sexual repression. Condoms and birth control have solved some problems, but there is evidence that people who have sex without condoms are happier (I sometimes wonder if people promoting condoms as a solution to the world’s sexual ills have actually used them, but the authors also cite research that shows that women can aborb chemicals from sperm and get a mental boost from them) and that birth control affects woman’s ability to chose biologically compatible partners (and there is evidence that the children from these poor biological matches have reduced birth weight and impaired immune function). As far as abstinence education, data seems to show that expression of adolescent sexuality is associated with lower levels of violence. Paleos may also be familiar with the association between vegetarian grain-pushers like John Kellogg and sexual repression, but I was surprised to learn how he openly mutilated children to “protect” them from masturbating.

Gee? I wonder why high-fiber low-fat whole grain diets are so popular considering that many were developed to lower libido…unfortunately Ryan and Jethá don’t seem to get that part of the picture and repeatedly mention our ancestor’s healthy “low fat” diet. They also keep harping on a study that showed men eating massive amounts of beef have lower sperm counts, when that study was on the effect of eating feedlot beef pumped with hormones. To their credit, they also mention the ball-busting effects of soy, which are present no matter how it’s grown.

The book also point to some evidence that humans have adapted to deal with civilization’s demands on our sexuality. While it may seem laughable, apparently there is some truth to err… group differences in penis and testes size for example, which they hypothesize might be related to cultural practices, though they admit this hasn’t been studied very well.

As for women’s sexuality being lesser than men’s, an idea that has been popular among evolutionary scientists since Darwin, with his own frigid wife, wrote “the female…with the rarest exception, is less eager than the male…” As a woman, you don’t have to convince me that this is untrue, but there remains a legion of men welded (and perhaps even attracted to) the idea of the chaste woman and, unsurprisingly, unable to locate the part of a woman’s body that would persuade them otherwise. If women are so uninterested in sex, why did physicians of yore devote so much time trying to stamp out the evil of female masturbation, even in the US resorting to female genital mutilation up until the 20th century. Luckily, some doctors changed tactics and the vibrator was born, but not as a cure for female dissatisfaction, but as a medical device to cure “hysteria.”

So what do humans want out of sex? It seems like we do enjoy intense pair bonds with other individuals…that eventually wane. The bane of marriage seems to be that sexual novelty is immensely exciting for humans. Ryan and Jethá seem to imply that swinging clubs might be a good solution for having an emotionally satisfying pair bond AND fulfilling sexuality. I suppose, but it underlines the difficult fact that humans have Paleolithic sexual desires in a world where children are expensive, women expressing themselves sexually are called “sluts,” and gonorrhea and other worse STDs are a real risk. The picture of modern sexuality painted in the book is a bleak one- of sexless marriages between men popping sperm-deforming antidepressants and hooked on internet porn paired with women with frustratingly low libidos struggling to juggle their career and children. Such marriages are not only bad for people's health because of the psychological effects; apparently sex with a new woman is one of the few tried and true ways to boost middle aged men's flagging testosterone. Fun.

I personally wonder how much low libido is connected with the inadequate diet and physical activity levels of modern humans. Evolutionary health aims to ask how we can use such science to make life better. In terms of sex I think our sex lives would certainly better if we would eat well, exercise, and be realistic about human nature. The authors don't really offer a solution and on their FAQ they say:

6. So you’re recommending the everyone should have an open marriage or not get married at all?

Definitely not. We’re not recommending anything other than knowledge, introspection, and honesty. In fact, as we say in the book, we’re not really sure what to do with this information ourselves. We hope Sex at Dawn advances the conversation about human sexuality so people can focus more on the realities of what human beings are and a bit less on the religious and cultural mythologies concerning what we should be and should feel. What individuals or couples do with this information (if anything) is up to them.

This book, while an excellent tour of human lustful behavior, is lacking on the murkier matter of love. But I definitely recommend reading it. It’s certainly fascinating, if anything.

Interesting interview @ Salon.

So far I'm waiting for tests to come back. It's been crappy. So far some candidates include lyme disease and genetic hypotension. Some books I have been reading lately include:

Wild Health: Great read, a good exoneration of plants, which kind of get bashed a lot in the paleo world

Sex at Dawn: Kind of a naughty book. I'm not sure I agree with all of the author's points, but it's certainly thought provoking.

Dark Summit: Harrowing story of Mt Everest's deadly 2006 season.

Possum Living: A rather odd guide to living off of nothing. Regardless of the feasibility of the author's advice, it's certainly a book with character...

The End of Overeating: Honestly, a little boring, but interesting to see that many of the things counted as "fatty meat" in studies are injected with hydrolyzed soy protein and sugar, wrapped in refined carbs, and fried in rancid PUFAs....

Pandora's Seed: Kind of redundent if you've already read Jared Diamond or any other stone age anthropology, but a fairly decent introduction to the idea of using our ancestors as models for our modern life.

I'm planning to write full reviews of most of these as well! Got any more good book recs? Let me know in the comments?

Dance Break:

Ja jag, kan tänka mig ett liv som på stenåldern
Yes, I can imagine a life of the Stone Age
Utan pengar, neanderthal, vi glömmer bort och börjar om igen
Without money, neanderthal, we forget and start all over again

While I was gone, apparently The China Study received some belated smackdown. I've personally never paid much attention to that book. I took several advanced statistics classes for my degree and an epidemiology class. If I wanted to base my diet on that flawed methodology, I might be more interested. But you can hash and rehash data and it won't change the fact that epidemiology (like my own science, economics) has been responsible for crap conclusions that have not bared out in the real world. I don't think economics or epidemiology are bad and in fact I'm quite interested in them, but they are rough tools that I'm not going to use them to manage my life.

As Kurt Harris said:

This is all just epidemiology, and epidemiology is bogus. Now, I don't mean it has absolutely no value. It is good for hypothesis generation. It is almost worthless for finding the truth. It is especially worthless the way it is used by hacks like Campbell who are simply trying to sell people a book that tells them what they want to hear.

You can run all kind of analytics on that China data and maybe find some interesting hypotheses to test, but then you have to worry about the data itself. I'm not sure rural Chinese people from the 80s have much to tell us about what to eat in America now. As Denise pointed out, there are pathogens present in rural China that aren't exactly common in Brooklyn, NY.

While Denise's post is certainly very interesting, I'm alarmed that she is now working with a vegan epidemiologist, but who also is a fruit-based raw vegan. While there are several academics who have formulated scientific vegan nutrition, no conventional science supports the fruit-base raw vegan diet- it's pure quackery and lately its proponents have unfortunately been trolling paleo blogs.

Evolutionary fitness is not about epidemiology- it's applied evolutionary theory. I'll be reviewing some books in the next month about that science, but needless to say, I think it's a far better groundwork for living as a human.