Newsweek's Begley illustrates Sailer's Law of Female Journalism

Sharon Begley wrote a column for Newsweek that represents her attempt to debunk evolutionary psychology: Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?
The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves. Here's a passage in which she discusses the work of anthropologist Kim Hill in arguing against the contention of Randy Thornhill that an urge to rape is an evolutionary adaptation in men:

Or so it seemed. But Hill had something almost as good as a time machine. He had the Ache, who live much as humans did 100,000 years ago. He and two colleagues therefore calculated how rape would affect the evolutionary prospects of a 25-year-old Ache. (They didn't observe any rapes, but did a what-if calculation based on measurements of, for instance, the odds that a woman is able to conceive on any given day.) The scientists were generous to the rape-as-adaptation claim, assuming that rapists target only women of reproductive age, for instance, even though in reality girls younger than 10 and women over 60 are often victims. Then they calculated rape's fitness costs and benefits. Rape costs a man fitness points if the victim's husband or other relatives kill him, for instance. He loses fitness points, too, if the mother refuses to raise a child of rape, and if being a known rapist (in a small hunter-gatherer tribe, rape and rapists are public knowledge) makes others less likely to help him find food. Rape increases a man's evolutionary fitness based on the chance that a rape victim is fertile (15 percent), that she will conceive (a 7 percent chance), that she will not miscarry (90 percent) and that she will not let the baby die even though it is the child of rape (90 percent). Hill then ran the numbers on the reproductive costs and benefits of rape. It wasn't even close: the cost exceeds the benefit by a factor of 10. "That makes the likelihood that rape is an evolved adaptation extremely low," says Hill. "It just wouldn't have made sense for men in the Pleistocene to use rape as a reproductive strategy, so the argument that it's preprogrammed into us doesn't hold up."

According to Begley's description of Hill's study, Hill basically just made up some numbers and assumptions and then declared that rape couldn't possibly be adaptive.

But if we made a few different assumptions, the result might look quite different. How many primitive men, were they inclined to rape a woman, would have carried out their deed on an infertile woman - "women over 60"? Few of these women would have even existed in a paleolithic environment, so the answer must be "very few".

Would a primitive man lose "fitness points, too, if the mother refuses to raise a child of rape, and if being a known rapist (in a small hunter-gatherer tribe, rape and rapists are public knowledge) makes others less likely to help him find food"? This ignores the fact that most rapes of the sort under discussion would probably occur as a result of war, the victors being the rapists. A conqueror who rapes a woman from another tribe wouldn't be under any pressure from his own people; on the contrary, he'd be among the heroes, the alphas. Also overlooked is a fundamental concept in evolutionary psychology: a man's performance of the sex act is extraordinarily cheap, compared to a woman's. If an act that takes a few minutes marginally increases fitness more than the cost of the act, then it ought to be adaptive. Hill engages in the sort of ungrounded theorizing which Begley accuses evolutionary psychologists of doing.

Back to Begley. She doesn't like the idea that men are attracted to youth and beauty, women to status:

One evo-psych claim that captured the public's imagination—and a 1996 cover story in NEWSWEEK—is that men have a mental module that causes them to prefer women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 (a 36-25-36 figure, for instance).[...]

Later studies, which got almost no attention, indeed found that in isolated populations in Peru and Tanzania, men consider hourglass women sickly looking. They prefer 0.9s—heavier women. And last December, anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan of the University of Utah reported in the journal Current Anthropology that men now prefer this non-hourglass shape in countries where women tend to be economically independent (Britain and Denmark) and in some non-Western societies where women bear the responsibility for finding food. Only in countries where women are economically dependent on men (such as Japan, Greece and Portugal) do men have a strong preference for Barbie. (The United States is in the middle.) Cashdan puts it this way: which body type men prefer "should depend on [italics added] the degree to which they want their mates to be strong, tough, economically successful and politically competitive."

Are there any studies which show that men prefer women with BMIs over 35 or under 17? Women over age 55? Any studies in which women prefer men of lower status than themselves?

Sailer's Law of Female Journalism: "The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking."

Do antioxidants increase death rates, and if so, why?

A recent systematic review published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Mortality in Randomized Trials of Antioxidant Supplements for Primary and Secondary Prevention, concluded: "Treatment with beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E may increase mortality. The potential roles of vitamin C and selenium on mortality need further study." The study aroused a few howls of indignation, for example from Alan Gaby, M.D., who claimed that the "exclusion of certain trials skewed results"; that may be, but the study's methodology was specifically designed to exclude biased studies.

Antioxidants enjoy a sterling reputation among the better-educated, mainly those wanting to take charge of their own health. We've been bombarded with the message over the past few decades about free radicals being responsible for aging and assorted illnesses, and that antioxidant supplements will help avoid common health problems by quenching free radicals. Given that bombardment, the average intelligent person, including the aforementioned Dr. Gaby, probably scratched his head in wonder that antioxidants could possibly increase death rates.

However, at least two recent studies have found that antioxidants prevent increases in insulin sensitivity, whether by exercise or diet. It's now becoming increasingly clear that insulin levels correlate with cancer. For example, in Metabolic syndrome, hyperinsulinemia, and colon cancer: a review, we read:

An impressive body of epidemiologic data collected over the past decade indicates that the risk of colon cancer is elevated in those with metabolic syndrome. This evidence includes studies that examined the risk of colon cancer or adenoma in relation to determinants of the metabolic syndrome (obesity, abdominal distribution of adiposity, and physical inactivity), clinical consequences of this syndrome (type 2 diabetes and hypertension), plasma or serum components of the definition of metabolic syndrome (hypertriglyceridemia, hyperglycemia, and low HDL cholesterol), and markers of hyperinsulinemia or insulin resistance (insulin and C-peptide), which is the underlying metabolic defect of the metabolic syndrome. The mechanism underlying these associations is unknown but may involve the influence of hyperinsulinemia in enhancing free or bioavailable concentrations of insulin-like growth factor-1. Future studies should also be based on better measurements of insulin resistance, beta-cell depletion, and insulin responses to better assess which aspects of insulin resistance are most closely related to the risk of colon neoplasia.

Or there's a review by Gerald Reaven of Stanford, the man responsible for identifying the metabolic syndrome, Insulin resistance, the insulin resistance syndrome, and cardiovascular disease. Very likely increased insulin levels and insulin resistance are responsible for heart disease as well as cancer, or at least in a great many cases.

Antioxidants prevent dietary or exercise-induced lowering of insulin levels, so they may very well promote cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and all the other diseases of civilization. That is why the result of the review, that antioxidants increase the death rate, is both plausible and biologically credible.

Classical Music and IQ

Plugging the variables WORDSUM (number equals how many of ten vocabulary questions were correctly answered, and a proxy for IQ) and CLASSICL (like or dislike classical music) into the General Social Survey gives the following table. The results show clearly that as the U.S. becomes more moronic, classical music will decline even more in popularity than it already has. (See also this for a ranking of musical genres according to the IQs of their fans.) Thanks to reader Zanzibar for the tip.

In trying to discover the correspondence between Wordsum and IQ, I googled it and was amused to discover that the first page of results was almost entirely to sites like Audacious E, Half Sigma, and The Inductivist. For an area of such fundamental consequence to society as the IQ of its members, it's not only amusing but sad that only a few hardcore HBD bloggers discuss it. But then, as a commenter at Steve's said the other day, pattern recognition is racist.

Frequency Distribution Cells contain: -Column percent -Weighted N CLASSICL 1 LIKE VERY MUCH 2 LIKE IT 3 MIXED FEELINGS 4 DISLIKE IT 5 DISLIKE VERY MUCH ROW TOTAL WORDSUM 0 .0 0 .5 2 .2 1 .0 0 .6 1 .3 3 1 1.6 3 1.9 6 3.1 8 2.9 5 2.5 2 2.4 23 2 2.9 5 2.6 8 2.4 6 4.2 7 6.9 6 3.2 32 3 4.1 7 4.0 12 3.9 10 7.7 13 10.1 8 5.1 50 4 5.1 8 8.5 26 8.8 23 17.7 29 19.5 16 10.5 103 5 7.9 13 10.2 31 17.3 45 20.3 33 17.6 15 14.0 137 6 18.7 31 25.3 77 21.2 55 23.8 39 22.0 18 22.6 221 7 17.8 30 16.4 50 21.4 55 12.2 20 10.1 8 16.7 164 8 13.7 23 13.7 42 11.4 30 8.4 14 3.1 3 11.3 110 9 17.1 29 11.8 36 6.9 18 2.9 5 3.8 3 9.2 90 10 11.1 18 5.2 16 3.3 8 .0 0 3.8 3 4.7 46 COL TOTAL 100.0 166 100.0 305 100.0 259 100.0 164 100.0 84 100.0 979

Color coding: <-2.0 <-1.0 <0.0 >0.0 >1.0 >2.0 Z N in each cell: Smaller than expected Larger than expected

McDougall and Taubes

About a year and a half ago I asked John McDougall, M.D. about the brewing controversy raised by Gary Taubes's book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. McDougall is one of the better-known advocates of low fat, vegetarian eating as a way of preventing heart disease and a host of other degenerative "diseases of civilization". Taubes's book, as is well known now, rejected the lipid hypotheses of heart disease and instead posited that refined carbohydrates are responsible for most of the diseases of civilization. At the time I had not yet read Taubes and, based on what I knew of the research and on what I had read about his thesis elsewhere, assumed that he was mistaken. You can read Dr. McDougall's response to Taubes here.

In his response, among many other things, McDougall wrote: "I will likely be put in the position soon of having to thoroughly analyze Taubes's selective read of scientific studies. This will not be an overnight task, nor one that I look forward to spending my time on."

It has now been quite some time since he wrote that, and meanwhile Taubes's book has become probably the most talked-about book on health and nutrition in decades. McDougall, who writes a monthly newsletter that normally contains two or three original articles, has still not managed to write anything about Taubes's thesis, as well as his demolition of the lipid hypothesis. (Though I see that the contents of a $50, 8-hour DVD that he made include a discussion of "The Low Carb Craze". Forgive me if I save my money on that one.)

Looking again at what McDougall wrote, it now seems full of sophistry, arguments to authority, assertions that are not backed up, evasions, and attacks on Taubes's character.

As I noted in my brief review of Taubes's book, it is a tour de force, a game changer, that completely changed my mind. Subsequent reading in the literature as well as re-reading the book has done nothing but reinforce that. I believe that the reason that McDougall hasn't yet managed to find the time to read and review Taubes's book is that he would find it nearly impossible to refute, and refutation is probably the only thing he would be interested in doing. Since he has based his career on the lipid hypothesis, he would probably find it extraordinarily difficult to change his mind on it, as I believe that the science indicates he should. Careers have a way of doing that to people.

So Dr. McDougall, I'm still waiting.

Are women becoming more beautiful?

The Times of London reports on a recent study that appears to confirm Satoshi Kanazawa's assertion that women are becoming more beautiful. However, a couple of things about this story puzzle me. First, the story:

FOR the female half of the population, it may bring a satisfied smile. Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.

The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern.

Over generations, the scientists argue, this has led to women becoming steadily more aesthetically pleasing, a “beauty race” that is still on. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans.

In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their attractiveness was assessed from photographs taken during the study, which also collected data on the number of children they had.

This builds on previous work by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who found that good-looking parents were far more likely to conceive daughters. He suggested this was an evolutionary strategy subtly programmed into human DNA.

He cited two findings from the Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a US government-backed study that is monitoring more than 15,000 Americans. The measurements include objective assessments of physical attractiveness.

One finding was that women were generally regarded by both sexes as more aesthetically appealing than men. The other was that the most attractive parents were 26% less likely to have sons.

Kanazawa said: “Physical attractiveness is a highly heritable trait, which disproportionately increases the reproductive success of daughters much more than that of sons.

“If more attractive parents have more daughters and if physical attractiveness is heritable, it logically follows that women over many generations gradually become more physically attractive on average than men.”

In men, by contrast, good looks appear to count for little, with handsome men being no more successful than others in terms of numbers of children. This means there has been little pressure for men’s appearance to evolve.

Maybe I'm missing something or not thinking about this correctly, but here's what I don't understand. If women are becoming more attractive, and attractive women have more daughters, wouldn't the sex ratio be changing? Why aren't there many more girls than boys being born, now that women are allegedly more attractive? Or is it the case that it's relative attractiveness that counts - in which case, the sex ratio remains the same, because even though women might be more attractive on an absolute basis, it's only women who are relatively more attractive who have more children?

Another puzzle: the main quality that makes women more attractive ought to do the same for men, and that quality is symmetry. Yet men allegedly are becoming no more attractive.

Then there's assortative mating. Ceteris paribus, beautiful women marry handsome men and vice versa. Doesn't this throw a monkey wrench into the idea that it is women who are driving the cycle of attractiveness?

From the article, another consideration also throws doubt upon this enterprise: "One finding was that women were generally regarded by both sexes as more aesthetically appealing than men." Yes, women didn't used to be known as the fairer sex for nothing - so in light of this, the notion that men are not becoming more attractive appears to be highly subjective.

Teachable Moment

That has got to be one of the worst expressions ever thought up. It's nothing more than propaganda; those who assert that something is a "teachable moment" are always the ones that want to do the teaching. The rest of us can just shut up and "learn".

The Adherer Effect

Michael Eades, M.D., in a discussion of the adherer effect, notes a paper, Statin Adherence and Risk of Accidents that was designed specifically to look at the adherer or "healthy user" effect. The result?

The results from our multivariable-adjusted models showed that more adherent patients were less likely to have accidents than less adherent patients. This effect was greatest for motor vehicle accidents (hazard ratio, 0.75; 95% confidence interval, 0.72 to 0.79) and workplace accidents (hazard ratio, 0.77; 95% confidence interval, 0.74 to 0.81). More adherent patients had a greater likelihood of using screening services (hazard ratio, 1.17; 95% confidence interval, 1.15 to 1.20) and a lower likelihood of developing other diseases likely to be unrelated to a biological affect of a statin (hazard ratio, 0.87; 95% confidence interval, 0.86 to 0.89).

Amazing: taking more statins caused a 25% decrease in motor vehicle accidents compared to those who took fewer. Those are some powerful drugs.

Here is Gottfredson and Deary on IQ and motor vehicle accidents:

O’Toole and Stankov (1992) used IQ at induction into the military, along with 56 other psychological, behavioral, health, and demographic variables, to predict noncombat deaths by age 40 among 2,309 Australian veterans. When all other variables were statistically controlled, each additional IQ point predicted a 1% decrease in risk of death. Also, IQ was the best predictor of the major cause of death, motor vehicle accidents. Vehicular death rates doubled and then tripled at successively lower IQ ranges (100–115, 85–100, 80–85; O’Toole, 1990).

Adhering to medical advice is more generally known as "compliance". This is the subject at issue in the paper above that found that more compliant patients had fewer accidents.

Researchers have concluded that high rates of noncompliance reflect many patients’ inability, not unwillingness, to understand and implement the treatments their physicians recommend, especially as regimens become more complex. Many people are unable to perform some fundamental tasks in the ‘‘job’’ of patient, and some researchers have studied this issue using health literacy tests. Although these tests focus specifically on health content, they mimic IQ tests in assessing the same general ability to learn, reason, and solve problems. For instance, one study (Williams et al., 1995) found that, overall, 26% of the outpatients at two urban hospitals were unable to determine from an appointment slip when their next appointment was scheduled, and 42% did not understand directions for taking medicine on an empty stomach. The percentages specifically among outpatients with ‘‘inadequate’’ literacy were worse: 40% and 65%, respectively. In comparison, the percentages were 5% and 24% among outpatients with ‘‘adequate’’ literacy.

One might conclude that a substantial portion of a person's health is inherited.

Rapamycin, Insulin, and Longevity

It was recently reported that the antibiotic rapamycin substantially extended the lifespan of experimental mice. For anyone familiar with the work on insulin and aging, this would not have come as a surprise.

One of the key signaling elements in the insulin pathway is a protein known as mTOR: mammalian target of rapamycin. Among other things, mTOR helps regulate cell growth and proliferation, and cell aging. Rapamycin apparently extended longevity in mice by knocking out mTOR, thereby disrupting the insulin signaling pathway.

Cynthia Kenyon discovered that knocking out genes that encoded for proteins in the insulin signaling pathway increased the lifespan of worms up to 6-fold.

Calorie restriction, along with its subsets protein restriction and methionine restriction, extend lifespan at least in part by increasing insulin sensitivity and lowering insulin levels.

The healthful effects of exercise are also perhaps mainly due to an increase in insulin sensitivity.

Type 2 diabetics, who by definition suffer from increased insulin resistance, have greatly increased rates of everything from heart disease and blindness to cancer. The obese also suffer from insulin resistance and also suffer from much higher rates of heart disease and cancer.

Dysregulation of insulin signaling appears to be behind the increasing oxidative stress seen in old age. N-acetylcysteine partially or completely suppresses this oxidative stress. (I wouldn't be surprised if someone discovers that n-acetylcysteine increases longevity.)

I think I see a pattern here. Any substance or process that downregulates insulin signaling seems to promote health and longevity by signaling a relative scarcity of resources, and simultaneously increasing cellular defences. Upregulation of the insulin pathway occurs in the presence of abundant food and primes the organism's cellular machinery for growth and reproduction.

Low carbohydrate diets result in much lower insulin levels. This probably explains their efficacy in improving health, including blood lipid markers.

So, if you want to be healthy and live long, it looks like keeping those insulin levels in a low and healthy range is among the top priorities. A low carbohydrate diet, moderate exercise, a normal BMI, and probably abstention from antioxidant supplementation will help to do this.

Update: I neglected to mention resveratrol, a substance which promotes longevity and which appears to function by affecting signaling proteins known as sirtuins. According to this:

As such, enhanced SIRT1 activity decreases glucose levels, improves insulin sensitivity, increases mitochondrial number and function, decreases adiposity, improves exercise tolerance and potentially lowers body weight.

So resveratrol is yet another longevity-enhancing substance that works through an effect on the insulin-signaling pathway. Again, no surprise.

Update 2: A couple of commenters asked about my statement on refraining from antioxidant supplements. The link is above, but for clarity here it is again: Antioxidants prevent health-promoting effects of physical exercise in humans.

Miss England 2009

She's pretty attractive and all, but to my eyes she doesn't look very English. According to the website, the public was allowed to vote (votes cost a one pound donation to charity), and they put this woman in a distant third place. The judges, however, had different ideas and they prevailed. Hard to believe, I know.

Who Killed the Men of England?

Who Killed the Men of England?
The written record of history meets genomics, evolution, demography, and molecular archaeology. (Via n/a.)

There are no signs of a massacre--no mass graves, no piles of bones. Yet more than a million men vanished without a trace. They left no descendants. Historians know that something dramatic happened in England just as the Roman empire was collapsing. When the Anglo-Saxons first arrived in that northern outpost in the fourth century a.d.--whether as immigrants or invaders is debated--they encountered an existing Romano-Celtic population estimated at between 2 million and 3.7 million people. Latin and Celtic were the dominant languages. Yet the ensuing cultural transformation was so complete, says Goelet professor of medieval history Michael McCormick, that by the eighth century, English civilization considered itself completely Anglo-Saxon, spoke only Anglo-Saxon, and thought that everyone had “come over on the Mayflower, as it were.” This extraordinary change has had ramifications down to the present, and is why so many people speak English rather than Latin or Celtic today. But how English culture was completely remade, the historical record does not say.

The article describes various efforts in historiography in the mold of Clark and Cochran and Harpending, which have the capacity to blow the study of history wide open.

Of note in this article, the Romano-Celtic population diminished to the point of disappearance because of the men's failure to reproduce, legal restrictions apparently having been written into law. But that may not have even been necessary because, then as now, women don't like losers.

Allergies and cancer: inversely related

This paper presents the results of a retrospective study that examines the association of cancer with a history of asthma, hay fever, hives, and other allergy-related diseases. This study is based on interview data collected from 13,665 cancer cases and 4,079 nonneoplastic controls who were admitted to Roswell Park Memorial Institute from 1957 to 1965. Although there is a general tendency for the age- and cigarette smoking-adjusted odds ratios associated with a history of asthma and hay fever to be less than 1, for both males and females, there is stronger evidence for a decreased risk of cancer associated with a history of hives and other allergy-related diseases. Decreased risks associated with a history of hives and other allergies are seen in males for oral cancer, cancers of the lung, larynx, digestive system, urinary system, and cancers of all sites combined and in females for cancers of the digestive system, reproductive system, in particular, cancer of the cervix, and cancers of all sites combined. None of the few odds ratios over 1 associated with a history of any allergy-related condition are statistically significant (alpha = 0.05). These findings suggest that individuals with allergy-related disorders may be at decreased risk of cancer, although reasons for cautious interpretation of the findings are emphasized. Prospective studies of carefully defined allergic disease cohorts are needed.

Abstract from Allergy-related diseases and cancer: an inverse association. Found via the New York Academy of Science colloquium, Evolution, Health, and Disease: Darwinian Approaches to Medicine.

Also found in the same place: evolution in a bottle: Adaptive Molecular Evolution for 13,000 Phage Generations: A Possible Arms Race; the authors followed 13,000 generations of bacteriophages - viruses that infect bacteria. It only took 180 days, and they discovered that the phages were in an arms race - against each other.

The IQ Resistance

Bruce Charlton's latest monthly Medical Hypotheses editorial is entitled Replacing education with psychometrics. Much of it will be familiar territory to HBD bloggers - indeed, the author acknowledges Steve Sailer at the end of the article, which may be a first for a science journal - but the idea most interesting to me was this:

If psychometric measures of IQ and personality were available, then it would be easy to construct a modern educational system that was both more efficient and more effective than the current one. However, such change would result in a massive down-sizing of the educational system – with substantial and permanent loss of jobs and status for educational professionals of all types including teachers, professors, administrators and managers.[...]

The vulnerability of the elite institutions to IQ knowledge is because most of the assumed advantages of an expensive elite education can be ascribed to their historic ability to select the top stratum of IQ (and also the most desirable personality types): given the stability and predictive power of these traits the elite students are therefore pre-determined to be (on average) highly successful.

Consequently the most elite institutions and their graduates have in the past few decades, both via academic publications and in the mass media, thoroughly obscured the basic and validated facts about IQ. We now have a situation where the high predictive powers of IQ and personality and the stable and hereditary nature of these traits are routinely concealed, confused or (in extremis) explicitly denied by some of the most prestigious and best-educated members of modern society [17].

Elite educational institutions seem to be practicing a version of "Who? Whom?", i.e. if the science of IQ becomes better known and accepted, these institutions will be screwed, and if it remains obscure and contested, the status quo of elite institutions' money, power, and prestige remains, at huge cost to society.

Still, that some of the most intelligent people around deny the reality of IQ is not without humor.

The Upside of Health Care Rationing

In the NYT, Peter Singer advocates the rationing of health care. Singer's op-ed is full of sophistry - what did you expect? - like this:

Health care is a scarce resource, and all scarce resources are rationed in one way or another.

Looks like the man has never read an economics textbook; otherwise, if it's a "scarce resource", why do we have so much more of it now than we did 30 years ago? It's called supply and demand. Health care isn't pumped out of the sands of Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, though Singer's totalitarian dream of the government controlling all of medicine may come to pass, there is an upside.

If health care is rationed, those in worse health will suffer the most. The healthy don't need health care.

Who are the unhealthy? The smokers, the obese, the couch potatoes, the alcoholics, those who practice unsafe sex with multiple male partners, the drug addicts. In short, and overgeneralizing, the unhealthy are the stupid and those with low future time orientation.

The healthy are those who take care of themselves. They're the smart and those with high future time orientation.

I think you can see where I'm going with this. Rationing health care will have consequences that its advocates don't intend.

First your teeth and gums rot, then your body falls apart

A great paper, Dietary Carbohydrates and Dental-Systemic Diseases by P. Hujoel, is a sort of dental "Good Calories, Bad Calories. The author discusses whether tooth and gum diseases are something on the whole superficial, or whether they are signs of something else, namely chronic non-communicable diseases (CNCDs), and comes down on the side of the latter.

Incredible as it may seem, no one ever stopped and thought that teeth and gums rotting away isn't something normal and to be expected. It's long been known, of course, that diet had a lot to do with it, but it was thought, without a lot of evidence, that "fermentable carbohydrates" - the paper's nomenclature, meaning refined carbs - were part of man's normal diet. Even more, since the rise of Ancel Keys' now all but discredited lipid hypothesis, refined carbs were considered healthy, and that poor dental health was just inevitable.

But dental disease and systemic disease correlate. For instance, tooth loss in young adulthood correlates to heart disease later. Primitive peoples with no exposure to Western diets not only have vanishingly low rates of heart disease and cancer, but have near perfect teeth and gums. The Iceman had no cavities.

Interestingly, the paper pokes a few holes in the argument that CNCDs could be caused by microbes. Treatment of dental disease with antibiotics seems to cause no decrease in CNCDs.

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

A Cause of the Secular Decline in Violence

Steven Pinker writes on the well-known (in the Steveosphere) decline in violence from the Middle Ages to today, and suggests four possible reasons for the decline: wider governmental control, a sense that life is no longer cheap (from better sanitary and medical conditions etc.), greater incentives to cooperate, and an escalation in empathy, (Singer's "expanding moral circle").

He doesn't mention another and nearly proven possibility: evolution. Clark showed convincingly that England's population evolved over several hundred years up to 1800, with middle class personality traits increasing in incidence among the population. Cochran and Harpending have shown convincingly that evolution currently proceeds at a rate up to 100 times faster than before civilization; furthermore, they asserted that the breeding of docility is a process that civilization could be expected to encourage, so it would also be likely from living under expanded and more powerful governments.

Pinker writes:

Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time.

Not necessarily, Dr. Pinker. Or if they did work to end it, some of their methods included the massive application of capital punishment and letting the poor starve, along with other measures that few would advocate today.

How the Irish in America increased by an order of magnitude

Another nice piece of information from race/history/evolution notes, on "how 4.5 million Irish immigrants became 40 million Irish Americans". Basically, by identifying as victims, with a helping hand from the adversary culture:

The growth of ethnic populations, including the Irish, has three components: natural increase, intermarriage, and preference.[...]

For some ethnic groups, intermarriage thins out the ethnic heritage because few offspring of mixed marriages remember ancestors from that group. For other groups, intermarriage is a recruitment opportunity because the offspring of mixed marriages often think of themselves as part of that group, simplifying their mixed heritage with a single mention or expressing the sense that they "feel closer" to one group than to the other.

n/a asserts that being Irish by identification allows one "to be a colorful victim, diametrically opposed to the evil, dull WASP television and public schools have taught you to hate." The Irish-Americans themselves probably have a lot to do with this (speaking as someone with some Irish ancestry myself). The Irish - some Irish I should say - promote their victimhood at the hands of the English, and this notion is passed down for generations.

(With that, I'll be away from the blog for a few days.)

Calorie restriction effect on longevity driven by protein restriction

These are some notes I've collected which I place here while collecting my thoughts to write something longer.

Most will be familiar with the phenomenon of calorie restriction (CR) and the fact that it dramatically increases both mean and maximum lifespan in many different species of animals, from yeast to mammals.

It turns out that CR usually also amounts to protein restriction, and that is the true driver of the CR effect on longevity. Furthermore, recent research has determined that the restriction of only one amino acid is responsible for the increasing longevity seen in CR, and that is methionine. See this abstract for an explanation. (Interesting to note that a great deal of this work has been done in Spain, ranked 9th in the world in scientific output.)

Methionine restriction works through several pathways, such as increasing insulin sensitivity, decreasing visceral fat, and lowering IGF-1 levels, as well as decreasing the production of oxygen radicals by mitochondria. Methionine restriction also increases blood glutathione levels - that's a good thing.

A number of humans are attempting calorie restriction; however, it appears that until now they've been blowing it, at least partially, because they increased their protein intake, or didn't change it, and while they have received benefits in the form of lower blood pressure and better cardiovascular disease markers, their serum IGF-1 levels did not decrease, thus denying them full benefits. But (same paper), when protein levels were restricted, IGF-1 levels plummeted within weeks.

All this is interesting because calorie restriction, though it might bring huge health benefits for humans, is something that only highly disciplined people can carry out. But restricting protein ought to be pretty easy - no need to go hungry.

Which diet is lowest in protein? Score one for the vegans. (That's from my favorite journal.)

On the other hand, it's pretty clear that restricting carbohydrates in the diet is also a good strategy for health, and vegans usually have a high carb intake. (CR research has shown that neither carbohydrate restriction nor fat restriction is responsible for CR longevity effects.) It seems that a good strategy for those desiring to pursue both protein and carbohydrate restriction might be the Kwasniewski or "Optimal" diet.

From an evolutionary point of view, it's thought that CR works because in conditions of food scarcity, it allows an animal to "survive and fight another day". Methionine, the protein constituent which appears to be the driver of CR, is an essential amino acid in humans, found most abundantly in meat. Methionine scarcity - and I'm speculating here - appears to be an indication of scarcity in general; it would be the first dietary element to disappear when conditions of scarcity begin; so it makes sense that its restriction causes CR longevity effects.

(I also posted this to my new blog, an experiment for me, Biomedical Intelligence.)

The Scientific Impact of Nations

Following up on yesterday's post, Chris pointed us to this (pdf) from Nature, 2004, called "The scientific impact of nations"; this study uses several different measures to determine a nation's scientific output. One measure is of citations per paper, adjusted for the particular field and year of publication, in an attempt to normalize results. This should give a good measure of the quality rather than quantity of a nation's scientific output, and avoid the problem of massive output of "papers on racism". For the years 1997-2001 (which would exclude the recent years in which Chinese science has allegedly accelerated), the list based on "rank order of nations based on share of top 1% of highly-cited publications" shows the U.S. at number one, and of the next 17, only Japan and Israel are not European.

Another ranking, the "citation rate per paper" shows Switzerland in first place, followed by the U.S., and of the top 20, again Japan and Israel are the only non-European countries.

In a measure of the ratio of all citations to per capita GDP, Switzerland came out way out in front, with the U.S apparently doing a little worse than the average. In other words, given our GDP, the U.S. ought to be producing even more highly-cited papers than it does.

But when compared to a group including the EU and the G8 nations, the U.S. produced more than 65% of the top 1% highly-cited publications.

The Top Ten Countries in Science

Rank	Country	Papers 1998-2008
1	United States	2,798,448
2	Japan	757,586
3	Germany	723,804
4	England	641,768
5	France	517,096
6	People's Republic of China	511,216
7	Canada	388,471
8	Italy	370,053
9	Spain	271,753
10	Russia	262,982

The table (link) lends some credence to Kanazawa's dictum that Asians can't do science. The population of Europe and North America combined are somewhat over one billion, with Asia at some 5.3 billion. Japan and China together produced some 1.3 million papers, while Europe and North America combined produced about 6 million papers. Papers/population for Asia: 0.00025. For Europe and North America: 0.006, or 24 times as many.

However, take a country like South Korea, which had 2.26% of the world's papers, with only 0.8% of the world's population. This would seem to be above average for the world; the U.S. by contrast has 34% of the world's papers (link) with 5% of the world's population. Must be all those Asian scientists engineers immigrating, without whom we wouldn't be competitive.

Sadly, the continents of South America and Africa are not represented on this list.

White people: we've still got what it takes.

Antioxidants prevent health-promoting effects of physical exercise in humans

Awhile back I noted a paper which showed that vitamin C abolished endurance training effects. It turns out that vitamin C isn't the only substance that will do this: Antioxidants prevent health-promoting effects of physical exercise in humans. This from the PNAS, a high-impact journal; this study isn't shoddy work, in other words.

The experimenters took two groups of young men, previously trained with endurance exercise, and previously untrained. Each group in turn was randomized to receive antioxidant supplements in the form of 400 IU vitamin E and 1000 mg vitamin C daily, or placebos. Then the men underwent 4 weeks of training, 5 days a week, including biking, running, and circuit training.

The result: those who had taken antioxidants saw no, repeat, no health benefits from exercise. The measurements done were of insulin sensitivity, TBARS (a measure of oxidative stress), and several others. In each of them, those who exercised, and did not take antioxidants, regardless of whether they had trained previously or not, saw an increase in insulin sensitivity, a decrease in TBARS, and so on, while these effects were abolished in those who took the antioxidants. Further, the promotion of muscle antioxidant defenses which is normally promoted by exercise was prevented by supplementation.

From the paper:

Most importantly, these changes in gene expression and the increase in insulin sensitivity following physical exercise are almost completely abrogated by daily ingestion of the commonly used antioxidants vitamin C and vitamin E. Thus, antioxidant supplementation blocks many of the beneficial effects of exercise on metabolism.

What are the larger implications here? What about that high fruit and vegetable intake that we are constantly told is so good for us? this is where it gets very interesting:

If transient increases in oxidative stress are capable of counteracting insulin resistance in humans, it is possible that preventing the formation of ROS by, for example, antioxidants might actually increase, rather than decrease, the risk of type 2 diabetes. While this remains to be determined, one metaanalysis of previously published studies (27) suggests that high dietary intake of fruits and vegetables, a source of antioxidants but also of numerous other bio-active compounds, may actually decrease the risk for type 2 diabetes. Nevertheless, and as stated by Hamer and Chida (27), all larger intervention trials evaluating the diabetes-preventive potential of defined antioxidant supplements have been unable to find any positive effects of supplementation (28–30). Moreover, antioxidant use in type 2 diabetics has been linked to increased prevalence of hypertension (31) and use of antioxidant supplements has recently been proposed to increase overall mortality in the general population (32). Taken together, these previously published findings tentatively suggest that fruits and vegetables may exert health-promoting effects despite their antioxidant content and possibly due to other bio-active compounds. [...]

Free radicals causing oxidative stress are an inevitable by-product of mitochondrial metabolism and have been proposed to exert repetitive damage to individual cells of the body promoting increased disease prevalence and aging (33). However, and in specific regard to exercise, antioxidants were incapable of further extending exercise-induced lifespan extension in rats (26). Repeated exposure to sublethal stress has been proposed to cumulate in enhanced stress resistance and ultimately increased survival rates due to a process named hormesis. By analogy, for sublethal ROS-dependent processes emanating from the mitochondria, the term “mitohormesis” was recently proposed on a hypothetical basis (34). Evidence for this novel concept has been provided in model organisms such as nematodes (15) and rats (17), and the current study would extend the concept of mitohormesis to the amelioration of insulin resistance in humans, suggesting that potential harmful ROS may exert health promoting effects via defined molecular intermediates (Fig. 3). [...]

Taken together, we find that antioxidant supplements prevent the induction of molecular regulators of insulin sensitivity and endogenous antioxidant defense by physical exercise. Consistent with the concept of mitohormesis, we propose that transiently increased levels of oxidative stress reflect a potentially health-promoting process at least in regards to prevention of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes mellitus. [My emphases.]

Reference was made above to nematodes, in this case the famous Caenorhabditis elegans, the subject of Cynthia Kenyon's longevity experiments. In the study referenced above:

Reduced glucose availability promotes formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), induces catalase activity, and increases oxidative stress resistance and survival rates, altogether providing direct evidence for a hitherto hypothetical concept named mitochondrial hormesis or "mitohormesis." Accordingly, treatment of nematodes with different antioxidants and vitamins prevents extension of life span. In summary, these data indicate that glucose restriction promotes mitochondrial metabolism, causing increased ROS formation and cumulating in hormetic extension of life span, questioning current treatments of type 2 diabetes as well as the widespread use of antioxidant supplements. [Link.]

My takeaway on all this: low carb diets promote health and longevity by, among other things but perhaps mainly, increasing insulin sensitivity, and along with it, decreasing inflammation. This is the lesson from Kenyon's worm experiments, in which insulin signaling is disrupted, causing the worms to have up to a 6-fold increase in longevity. But antioxidants appear to completely abolish this activity related to insulin signaling.

There have been many arguments on both sides of the antioxidant debate, but this one I find very convincing, enough so that it appears that antioxidants are bad for your health.

"Old Americans" more successful WWII pilots

From race/history/evolution notes (it pained me to write that all in lower case):

The principal extraction in all flyers was Old American, with the rest overwhelmingly Northwest European - British, Irish, Germanic, and Scandinavian, in that order. Four per cent were of Slavic and 1% of Mediterranean descent. Successful combat pilots were significantly more Old American in ancestry than cadets, an Old American being a person whose 4 grandparents were born in the United States. Twenty-two per cent of cadets and 60% of the successful combat pilots were Old American on both sides; on one parental side only, an additional 24% and 15%, respectively. This highly significant difference (p < .01) is hardly attributable to geographic provenience, since 10% more of the combat pilots than of the cadets were from the East coast, where recent immigrants are most numerous.

The quote is from a paper: Damon. Physique and success in military flying. Am J Phys Anthropol. 1955 Jun;13(2):217-52.

My father was one of those, with that Northwest European ancestry. The paper's result is one of those unexpected things that make you wonder. It also reminds me of an anecdote I once heard, on public radio I think, that might partially explain the results. The anecdote concerned a Jewish man who'd been drafted into the Army Air Corps during WW2. When his officer found out he was a Jew, he was sent to navigation school instead of pilot training, because, as the officer explained, "A navigator is nothing but a flying accountant."

The Evolutionary Enigma of Vitamin C

Vitamin C can be synthesized by "the vast majority of animals and plants" (Wikipedia), but not by many primate species including humans, guinea pigs, and bats. (Note: this is one reason that guinea pigs are desirable experimental animals - they're like humans in their inability to synthesize C.) It has been suggested that these animals lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C because it was present abundantly in their diets, although that is perhaps too simplistic an answer. This paper discusses some of the possibilities as to why primates lost the ability to make vitamin C.

On the other hand, vitamin C has been successfully used to treat many different illnesses, the pioneer in this area being Frederick Klenner, M.D., a general practitioner who lived in North Carolina. Klenner's feats using C were remarkable - no, almost incredible:

“Dr. Klenner remembers using (ascorbate) for a man, who was lying near death from severe virus pneumonia, but refused to be hospital­ized. ‘I went to his house and gave him one big shot with five grams or 5,000 milligrams of vitamin C,’ he recalled. ‘When I went back later in the day, his temperature was down three degrees and he was sitting on the edge of the bed eating. I gave him another shot of C, 5,000 milligrams and kept up that dosage for three days, four times a day. And he was well. I said then, well, my gosh! This is doing something.’" (17)

Klenner devised an early office test for vitamin C. (18) He would go on to administer massive amounts of ascorbate against any and all viral diseases. And, in the course of some forty years of general practice, Klenner used vitamin C, often accompanied with high doses of other nutrients, to fight a striking variety of other illnesses. Smith (6) itemizes a list that includes Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, bladder infections, alcoholism, arthritis, leukemia, atherosclerosis, ruptured intervertebral discs, high cholesterol, corneal ulcer, diabetes, glaucoma, burns and secondary infections, heat stroke, radiation burns, heavy metal poisoning, chronic fatigue, and complications resulting from surgery. Additionally, Klenner also reported mega nutrient cures of tetanus (19, 20), trichinosis (21), venomous bites from spiders or snakes (22, 23), and, perhaps most controversially, multiple sclerosis.

The "Clinical Guide to the Use of Vitamin C", based on Klenner's work, is here.

Further, most animals can radically increase their synthesis of vitamin C when under stress, as from illness or poisoning. Goats, e.g., produce up to 100 g of vitamin C daily when ill.

Why don't humans? It seems like such a huge advantage to be able to do so that it's a mystery as to why humans do not.