Cavemen who walk among us

By Katie Engelhart - Friday, February 26, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 74 Comments

We’re used to seeing the potato as a focal point of conflict and discord, the clichéd casualty of the carbohydrate wars. But hoopla over green beans, that healthiest of vegetables? There are lots of reasons why Loren Cordain wouldn’t touch a green bean. If you ask him, he might talk about how legumes can render a healthy gut “leaky.” Or he might rant about their “anti-nutrient” properties. But it would come down to this: green beans weren’t around tens of thousands of years ago, when our prehistoric ancestors ushered in the Paleolithic era with the first tools made of stone. And so we shouldn’t eat them today.

“It’s not rocket science,” Cordain insists. His book, The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat, now a bible to a small but growing subculture, is built around a simple premise: humans evolved over millions of years. Modern agriculture has been around for just 10,000, a blip on the evolutionary timeline. Because of this, humans are healthiest when eating as they did before agriculture came along—in other words, like cavemen.

The diet boils down to meat (lots of it), seafood, eggs, vegetables and fruits: anything you could hunt or forage for in the wild bush, and wouldn’t need to cook. All of which sounds generally inoffensive. “Nobody’s going to argue with fruits and veggies,” says Cordain. But the repertoire excludes so-called super-foods: green beans (and other legumes, like lentils), tomatoes (and other nightshades), dairy products and whole grains. Most oils are also out; today’s cavemen opt for lard.

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The truth is out there. Somewhere.

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 11:05 AM - 495 Comments

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t . . .
We will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is! . . .
If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I’ll delete the file rather than send it to anyone . . .

And so on. Since their release last November, the famous hacked emails from scientists in the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia have provided a rich source of such incriminating phrases. Participants, including some of the leading figures in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), discuss how to prevent skeptics from publishing in peer-reviewed journals, plot to destroy or suppress the raw data underlying their studies, suggest ways to massage the figures for better effect, and generally carry on in a tone more evocative of the “war room” than the common room.

To many, the emails offer disturbing evidence that a number of prominent climatologists have crossed the line, from science into activism. It is clear they view dissenters, not as critics to be engaged, but enemies to be beaten. But in fact there is a more fundamental problem at work: a breakdown of trust between scientists and large sections of the lay public.

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Bigging Up Darwin

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, March 7, 2009 at 12:44 PM - 8 Comments

Following up the spectacular success of The Rebel Cell the estimable Baba Brinkman has hit new heights with The Rap Guide to Evolution, with the hit single “Natural Selection” featuring Richard Dawkins.  Here’s an excerpt from Baba’s dispatch from Fresno, where he’s touring the production:

The feedback was mostly very positive, but at one point I was accosted by two women who said they were very offended by the show, which they found deeply misogynist; they suggested I focus on the “long view” of evolutionary history instead of trying to apply evolution to “short term” subjects like understanding human mating strategies.  They said they thought my take on evolutionary psychology was “the equivalent of social darwinism”, and used the example of breast augmentation, which evolutionary psychologists might designate an attention-getting strategy rather than a sad example of female objectification.  

To this I responded that un-augmented breasts themselves were already an attention-getting strategy, since all other primates have flat breasts that only swell during lactation, whereas human female breasts (and buttocks) have evolved through sexual selection to store fat deposits, making them a prominent mechanism for appraising the fitness (ie youth & fertility) of mates, which was not a popular answer (although technically it was an answer from comparative anatomy rather than evolutionary psych).  I found out later that I was speaking to a professor of Women’s Studies from the local university.

And here’s a video from the show:

Growing up Darwin

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, March 7, 2009 at 10:30 AM - 35 Comments

This weekend the Citizen joins into the celebration of Darwin’s 200th birthday, with a fine essay by Tom Spears announcing the End of the Debate.

And here’s the money graf from my contribution:

To be committed to science is to be committed to the idea that there is no original design or purpose in the universe. What pushed God from the picture once and for all is the realization that science is a progressive endeavour that can in principle never come to an end: Something came from nothing, the more complex came from the less complex, and the appearance of design or intent is just that — appearance.