Sublime

Fast evolution is Exhibit D in the retrial of group selection. If genetic evolution can be fast, and if the human genome coevolves with cultural innovations, then it becomes quite possible that human nature was altered in just a few thousand years, somewhere in Africa, by group selection during particularly harsh periods.

Now I might be halfway up the Slope of Enlightenment on a good day, but one key change I have made is that I am no longer a dogmatic advocate of any particular way of eating, such as a ketogenic diet or any form of fasting. It took me a long time to figure this out, but the fundamental assumption underlying the diet wars, and most nutrition researc

Yet the NIH researchers found that their calorically restricted monkeys had not lived longer than the controls. There was no statistically significant difference in the lifespans of the two groups. From a headline writer’s point of view, caloric restriction had not “worked.”

In the case of mammals, if you compared the female, with her long gestation period, to the male, with his essentially limitless capacity to reproduce, it was clear that the pressures of selection would fall principally on the males. If some males enjoyed access to several females, others would necessarily have none. So this inequality between males

‘There is a serious snag in the specialist way of life’, Desmond Morris said in his bestseller, The Naked Ape, which compares human and animal behaviour. ‘Everything is fine as long as the special survival device works, but if the environment undergoes a major change the specialist is left stranded’. So, for example, the koala subsists almost entir

Lashley’s principles seemed like a coverup” and that Lashley must have simply “concocted his doctrines.”42 Pietsch sought to disprove Lashley’s and Pribram’s theories by damaging salamander brains and examining whether they still exhibited feeding behavior.43 To his surprise, no matter what he did to the salamanders’ brains, they not only lived but

Bracketing satisficing with Darwinian may appear contradictory, for evolutionists sometimes talk about survival of the fittest. But in fact, natural selection only predicts that survivors will be fit enough, that is, fitter than their losing competitors; it postulates satisficing, not optimizing.