Katie Roiphe's baby is like opium

Katie Roiphe is addicted:

In the six weeks since my baby was born, I seem to have lost all worldly ambition. I can think about September, when I am supposed to go back to work, only with dread. I have a class to teach. I have to start writing again. But the idea of talking about ideas in front of students or typing a coherent sentence (i.e., my normal life) seems totally implausible. Even now, the prospect of writing a few paragraphs about this problem seems almost out of reach. Taking care of the baby—physical, draining, exhilarating—is more like farming: following the rhythms of the earth, getting up at dawn, watching the corn flush in the sunrise. It is not at all like writing. [...]

I imagine a better metaphor would be addiction. There is an opium-den quality to maternity leave. The high of a love that obliterates everything. A need so consuming that it is threatening to everything you are and care about. Where did your day go? Did you stare blankly at the baby for hours? And was that staring blankly more fiercely pleasurable, more compelling than nearly anything you have ever done?

Must be society's expectations that did this to her. Or maybe her sense that God wants her to take care of her baby. Or because she loves her husband so much that she wants to devote full time to his child?

By the way, in this day of easy divorce, Roiphe's article illustrates one danger to modern marriages: the wife and mother will always love her children more than she does her husband, and if push comes to shove, will always choose them over him.

HBD "Reductionism"

Over at View from the Right, where there's never a dull moment, Lawrence Auster and his correspondent The Undiscovered Jew (TUJ) discuss the implications of human biodiversity (HBD) for politics and society. (I know I link to VFR a lot, but since my name is being mentioned, here we go again.) TUJ's comment first appeared in different form as as a comment here; in it he asserts that HBD is the only serious intellectual competitor with traditionalist conservatism. That's a discussion unto itself, but what I want to delve into here is Auster's use of the word "reductionism" to describe the collection of ideas known as HBD.

Insofar as HBD is materialist reductionist it is a disaster for mankind, for our civilization, and for conservatism. I recommend that you acquaint yourself with my writings on why the right-Darwinist and Sailerist views, while they contain some truths, are, when seen as a whole, false, inadequate to the problems we face, and deeply harmful.

Do any advocates of HBD maintain that genes, evolution, and biology comprise everything we need to know in order to understand human behavior and society? If so, I've never come across one.

Science works through reducing the complexity of a system to simpler parts in the hope of gaining an understanding of the system as a whole. In fact, science couldn't work in any other way, for neither the world nor any system or entity can be studied as a whole; if we completely understood something, reduction would have no place. It's precisely because we do not understand that we look at parts of the whole. One cannot, for example, study an ecosystem without trying to understand how its parts interact, or how ecosystems interact with each other.

If HBD were a political ideology and nothing more, Auster's criticism might have more validity. Whether the ideology is communism, fascism, or liberalism, each one takes some aspect of human society as supreme in importance, whether it's the inevitable progress of history, the state as metaphysical embodiment of the people, or equality. HBD, in my estimation, is no such thing. HBD advocates have many different and mutually exclusive political stances, from communism to white nationalism to a return to the old America. (Whether these views are compatible with HBD is an interesting question, outside the scope of this discussion.)

HBD, broadly speaking, is a point of view that says that the facts of human biology have been massively overlooked or suppressed as explanations in politics, education, sociology, criminology, sex relations, war, sports, and just about any other field of human endeavor. As such, it possesses great explanatory power for the problems that plague the world, and even manages to suggest a few solutions. But that it is reductionist is no more true of HBD than it is for, say, economics. When someone like Peter Schiff asserts that what ails us could be cured by a return to the gold standard, it's no criticism at all to say that this is reductionist, merely because it does not encompass everything we need to do to make the country healthy; it's not his job to explain everything that needs to be done. When an HBD advocate says, for example, that the recent decline in SAT scores can be explained through psychometrics and genetics, it's as mistaken to call this reductionist as it would be to call cell biology reductionist.

HBD does indeed suggest many solutions to political problems, just as conservatism does. However, HBD doesn't claim to have the answers to everything, and neither does conservatism. Take the recent discussions about Game and modern sex relations: conservatives and HBD advocates both are on all sides of this issue.

Auster has set up a straw man in asserting that HBD is a totalist ideology, which he then says is reductionist and as such doesn't adequately describe human society or prescribe solutions.

One last point: Auster and his commentators like to say that, were the Darwinian theory of natural selection overturned, HBD would no longer be valid:

For all we know, Darwinism is about to come crashing down into a heap, and take the credibility of all science, including the HBDers--whose confidence is Science--down with it.

Nonsense. Scientific theories have come crashing down many times in the past, and science hasn't lost credibility. That's because these theories have been crashed by scientists. Darwinian evolution will never be shown to be invalid, in my opinion; it's just too well confirmed by the evidence. What could happen is that another theory will be shown to be even more explanatory. The theory of relativity did not negate Newtonian classical physics, it merely demonstrated that its applicability is confined to a narrower slice of the world than had been thought. The theory that aging is programmed doesn't negate the free radical theory of aging for the same reason. But even were Darwin's theory shown to be completely mistaken, HBD would still be able to point to the evidence of human difference, and that evidence isn't going to disappear.

PS: A commentator at VFR, Kidist Paulos Asrat, wrote:

I find that most atheists are highly intelligent people, so in that capacity, they are valuable members of a civilization-saving movement. But, they have also successfully (through this intelligence) argued out the existence of God to themselves.

But, at the end of the day, people like Dennis Mangan, and now the Undiscovered Jew, don't quite come to the task in defense of this civilization. Look, for example, at how Mangan works out the Game phenomenon. And the Undiscovered Jew resorts to his HBD (and I assume Darwinism) to explain the world to himself.

All I can say is that, if I don't "come to the task in defense of this civilization", that leaves mighty few who do.

Surviving and thriving in the coming crisis

Whether the U.S. and much of the rest of the world will proceed into a full-blown economic crisis, and what shape that crisis might take, are hotly debated. Without going into great detail, since many more capable than I have made the arguments, I've come to believe that a depression and/or hyperinflation is in the cards. For instance, John Williams, who runs the Shadow Government Statistics site, argues that the U.S. faces hyperinflation, at least some time within the next ten years and probably sooner.

The government’s finances not only are out of control, but the actual deficit is not containable. Put into perspective, if the government were to raise taxes so as to seize 100% of all wages, salaries and corporate profits, it still would be showing an annual deficit using GAAP accounting on a consistent basis. In like manner, given current revenues, if it stopped spending every penny (including defense and homeland security) other than for Social Security and Medicare obligations, the government still would be showing an annual deficit.

The government currently estimates a ten year deficit of $9 trillion; don't expect that estimate to decrease either. Unfunded liabilities - Social Security and Medicare - add another $40 trillion.

Loss of U.S. Dollar Purchasing Power through March 2008

	—-Since January of —-
Versus:	1914	1933	1970
Swiss franc	-80.4%	-80.4%	-76.5%
CPI-U	-95.1%	-94.0%	-82.3%
Gold	-97.9%	-97.9%	-93.4%
SGS-Alternate CPI	-98.2%	-97.8%	-93.6%

Inflation may take a while to kick in, and it looks like deflation is the current order of the day.

Here's Williams again:

While equities do provide something of an inflation hedge — revenues and profits get expressed in current dollars — they also reflect underlying economic and political fundamentals. I still look for U.S. stocks to take an ultimate 90% hit, peak-to-trough, net of inflation, during this period.

Someone in my position, age mid 50s, simply can't afford to wait around for equities to recover - I may not live to see it. I've worked and saved and invested too hard to see everything evaporate, and I can't work and save all that much longer.

So how do you protect yourself and your assets? The short answer is precious metals. After an investing lifetime of dismissing the gold bugs as irrelevant hysterics, I am now ready to listen. Silver looks to be even better, as the gold/silver ratio is currently around 70, versus an historical ratio much lower, at times as low as 10. Commodities in general ought to perform well in a period of inflation.

I believe that there's a good chance that we have not yet seen the bottom in the stock market. As always, investing is about uncertainty, and diversification is in order; but U.S. equities and U.S. Treasury bonds don't look like a great place to put your money.

One might also consider living abroad as well, though you still don't want to hold dollars.

I've only touched on a tiny part of this vast subject. Those who want to survive and thrive in the coming crisis will have to keep their ears to the ground. But you can be sure that the government is not on your side, and if you want to keep your wealth, remain cognizant of that.

Game debate over? Not so fast

Lawrence Auster cites a post by One STDV, The Beta Revolution Will Fail as evidence that "the debate on Game has moved dramatically toward closure. ... One more world-saving materialist ideology ends up in the junkyard of history."

Not so fast. The argument presented by One STDV says that teaching betas game and thus showing them how to be alphas does not promote the civilizing qualities that its supporters think it does. Teach men to be alphas, and they will merely want to become promiscuous layabouts, and no longer will they desire to be the beta providers that the West needs.

Admittedly, game could never provide the material for saving the West. But the idea that once a man learns how to be attractive to women, that he will forsake home and hearth and cubicle to sake his lust in the arms of prodigal women beggars the imagination. It assumes that game is utterly transformational, changing a man's character so profoundly and changing him from nerd to Casanova so completely, that forming a harem will be nearly the only thing on his mind, and that he will abandon his former goals of forming a family, saving for retirement, and in general enjoying a quiet life.

I rather doubt that. Making a man more attractive to women will be a marginal, not all or nothing, business, and would have little or no effect on other aspects of his life. Furthermore, if every beta studied game and was successful at implementing it, that doesn't get around the fact that sexual attraction is relative, i.e. if every man in the country became 10% more sexually attractive, the relative standings remain the same, and we're left with the original problem, namely the sexual proclivities of women.

So game, despite the exaggerated claims of its supporters, won't save the world, but it will help men cope with that world, which looks like it's going to be a long time in changing to something better. But the diagnosis of the social/sexual state of the West, to which game is a response, remains.

Why prevent aging?

Regular reader Dave in Hackensack finds it odd that I am interested in and write about the prevention of aging, or promotion of longevity (however you look at it).

How long do you want to extend your life -- and why? Is there something positive you are anticipating that you want to be around to see in forty years?

Yes, the positive thing I anticipate in 40 years is my alive and healthy self. Do you need any other reason? Only among the terminally ill or the mentally ill do you find those who have no regard for their continued existence.

Dave writes about investing - something I'm keen on myself - but I guarantee that 95% of the population wants to hear nothing about that. You can find blogs and websites on any topic under the sun, so in that sense there's nothing odd at all about my writing on aging and its prevention. I write about lots of other things too.

But asking why is really missing the forest for the trees. Most people won't cross a street in front of a bus, or get into a car with a drunk driver, or visit the streets of Oakland after dark. Why? Because they want to live, that's why. Dave replies that looking both ways before crossing the street doesn't require the same effort that I put into my studies and writing. But look at the quantities of time and money some people spend sweating in a gym; looking decent is one motivation, but being healthy is another. In any case, I wouldn't have a blog if all I were interested in was saving my time.

The greatest reason for questions such as Dave's - and his is far from the only comment I've had that questions this - is that the average person thinks that aging is something inevitable. While in the long run that may be true, there's much that can be done about it. Humans don't die from aging - they die from disease, whether cancer, heart disease, or any of a number of unpleasant conditions. Refraining from cigarette smoking is an age-prevention strategy, as are maintaining a healthy body weight, exercising, and eating right. Those strategies don't get a lot of questions, however - but if you're interested in other anti-aging strategies, all of a sudden you're a kook.

Dave says, "In your case in particular, I find your zeal for life extension an interesting complement to your displeasure at most of what you observe, and what you expect coming down the pike." I don't understand - because I see and foresee unpleasant things, I'm not supposed to desire a longer life?

Dave also wrote, "Most people aren't in any hurry to die, but don't seem to find it worth going out of their [way] (e.g., via caloric restriction or seeking out putatively life-extending supplements, etc.) to dramatically expand their lifespan."

My reply: most people are morons who have little in the way of future time orientation.

Can women's behavior be changed?

Apropos of our recent thread on game and social collapse, Roissy writes:

Here’s a clue, chipmunk-cheeked conservatives: If you wish to change the behavior of men, you first must change the behavior of women. [Sentence omitted in the interest of propriety.] Your chivalry and paeans to honor and duty do nothing but fuel the decline. Guys like me laugh at your sacrifice.

Just as its foolhardy to continue battle while your officers are running for the hills, so it may be foolish to continue thinking of chivalry and duty toward women when they show no signs of reciprocating. (Honor I would except, as honor means being able to hold your head up in society - though definitions of honor can and do change over time.)

So if Roissy is correct that "you must first change the behavior of women", a tenet which most of those in the thread seemed to agree upon, how is it going to be done? There's the rub, which I tried to get at in my original post. Women's behavior is a function of society. Otherwise, why has their behavior gone from monogamous and modest to polygamous and shameless in such a short time span? A short list of the causative factors: capitalism, liberalism, birth control, feminism, Hollywood, immigration.

And of these, the first, capitalism takes the major share of the blame. Since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has become increasingly wealthier with time, until wealth reached a tipping point, with the result that women became much less dependent on men for their sustenance. With wealth comes liberalism, the belief that society can function without the maintenance of its foundations, indeed without even understanding what its foundations are.

So long as we as a society remain wealthy, so long as crisis doesn't arrive, women won't change. Marriage and family are dying. But that itself may bring on the crisis that will change everything.

Tests begin on anti-aging drugs

In the NYT, Nicholas Wade has written an excellent article that nicely sums up the current state of anti-aging research. (Thanks to Fred.) Rather than summing up or presenting excerpts - you should read the whole thing if this topic interests you - I'll highlight a few points of disagreement or contention.

This optimism, however, is not fully shared. Evolutionary biologists, the experts on the theory of aging, have strong reasons to suppose that human life span cannot be altered in any quick and easy way. But they have been confounded by experiments with small laboratory animals, like roundworms, fruit flies and mice. In all these species, the change of single genes has brought noticeable increases in life span. [...]

“My rule of thumb is to ignore the evolutionary biologists — they’re constantly telling you what you can’t think,” Gary Ruvkun of the Massachusetts General Hospital remarked this June after making an unusual discovery about longevity.

Evolutionary biologists may very well be wrong here, for the simple reason that animals in the wild do not generally die from aging, while we know from the evidence of calorie restriction that aging is not random. Aging, in the words of Mikhail Blagosklonny, is a "quasi-program". Link.(pdf)

Blagosklonny's article makes the case - convincingly in my view - that the free radical theory of aging, which states that aging results from the accumulation of random damage, is incorrect. Aging is in reality the flip side of growth, and therefore is programmed by the organism and its environmental influences. Learn how the program works, and it can be hacked.

Mice on caloric restriction seem protected from degenerative disease, which may be why they live longer.

Key point: people (and other animals) do not die from aging, they die from age-related diseases. Prevent the diseases and you have prevented the manifestations of age. People do not die from random molecular damage, they die from organ or tissue failure.

To the extent caloric restriction works at all, it may have a bigger impact in short-lived organisms that do not have to worry about cancer than in humans. Thus the hope of mimicking caloric restriction with drugs “may be an illusion,” they write.

This is puzzling to me: the main cause of the death of old lab mice is cancer. If anything, humans would seem to have a much lower death rate from cancer than lab mice.

People may live so long already that no drug could make much of a difference. Probably because of reductions in infant mortality and other types of disease, human life expectancy in developed countries has been on a remarkable, unbroken upward trend for the last 160 years. Female life expectancy at birth rose from 45 years in 1840 to 85 years in 2000.

Again, people die from disease, especially heart disease and cancer, both diseases of age. I doubt that we are anywhere near a natural limit.

According to this theory, if mice had wings and could escape their usual predators, natural selection ought to favor longer life. And indeed the maximum life span of bats is 3.5 times greater than flightless mammals of the same size, according to research by Gerald S. Wilkinson of the University of Maryland.

In this view, cells are so robust that they do not limit life span. Instead the problem, especially for longer-lived species, is to keep them under control lest they cause cancer.

This appears to be the case. Cancer results from uncontrolled cell growth, which illustrates the growth/age program. If this is correct, if the cells can continue to grow, reproduce, and function without cancer, then aging will have been greatly slowed or stopped.

Game and Social Collapse

In our recent thread on the beta manifesto, Lawrence Auster commented:

The kind of thinking on display in this thread, in which people look at the human race in terms of "alpha male" and "beta male" and talk about organizing society along those lines, is symptomatic of a social catastrophe. The catastrophe results from the twin developments of biological reductionism and sexual liberation, and it consists of the reduction of human beings to competitors/commodities in the sexual marketplace. It's a vision of man and society in which there is no sense of social and cultural order, no shared vision of an inherited or higher good, but just the competing desires and needs of people conceived of as biological/sexual units.

Is this really the way you see, and want to see, other human beings? Is this really the way you see, and want to see, yourself?

Can you imagine any decent society coming out of such a vision? Do you think any civilization could ever have been created or preserved on such terms?

When you look at the world through this reductionist, Steve Saileresque lens, you've already given up on humanity, you've given up on civilization.

And even more desolating is the impact of someone like Roissy.

I see two elements at work here. One is the recognition there has indeed been a "social catastrophe", that a sexual marketplace exists, that alpha and beta describe, at least partly, two kinds of archetypal men who, while they presumably have always existed, are much more discernible now.

The second element I see is what to do about it. The man who, for whatever reason, finds himself single, could be condemning himself to a lifetime or at least long stretches of celibacy and/or a miserable marriage, that is, if he refuses to acknowledge reality. The man who uses "game" to enter the sexual marketplace is saying, in effect, I know that there's been a social catastrophe, but I can't wait around my whole life for society to get its act together, so I'll try to enjoy myself while I can.

Obviously conservatives and/or religious men may have a difficult time with this, the putative choice between violating one's principles or remaining celibate. (The third choice, a traditional marriage, is still available but in diminishing numbers due to the social catastrophe.) Much of the recent discussion on this topic here and elsewhere was elicited by the case of George Sodini, the Pittsburgh man murdered 4 women and killed himself in a gym. He was 48, decent looking, made good money, and hadn't had sex or a girlfriend in 19 years. (Link.)

These days even people who consider themselves devout Christians get divorced, and the various churches have tacitly endorsed the practice. So there's a sexual marketplace even among the religious: if one spouse considers that the other doesn't meet his/her needs, divorce may be in the offing. A married man or woman is still, perhaps indirectly, in competition with unmarried men or woman.

The so-called betas, as the bloggers whom I mentioned have noted, are those who in a previous social incarnation would have been providers, family men, and who now find themselves unable to marry. It's a sad state of affairs, and one that will be all but impossible to set right, in my view.

(Also Mr. Auster linked to his post, Biocentric yuppiedom versus the West, which explains in more detail his objections to what he avers is "biological reductionism".)

Benefits of exercise are due to hormesis

Hormesis defined:

Hormesis is a term used by toxicologists to refer to a biphasic dose response to an environmental agent characterized by a low dose stimulation or beneficial effect and a high dose inhibitory or toxic effect. In the fields of biology and medicine hormesis is defined as an adaptive response of cells and organisms to a moderate (usually intermittent) stress. Examples include ischemic preconditioning, exercise, dietary energy restriction and exposures to low doses of certain phytochemicals.

As the paragraph above indicates, the benefits of exercise are due to hormesis, the placing of a stress on the organism that strengthens its defenses. Exercise is one of the few certain methods for increasing longevity, calorie restriction being another. Exercise and hormesis: oxidative stress-related adaptation for successful aging:

The hormesis theory purports that biological systems respond with a bell-shaped curve to exposure to chemicals, toxins, and radiation. Here we extend the hormesis theory to include reactive oxygen species (ROS). We further suggest that the beneficial effects of regular exercise are partly based on the ROS generating capability of exercise, which is in the stimulation range of ROS production. Therefore, we suggest that exercise-induced ROS production plays a role in the induction of antioxidants, DNA repair and protein degrading enzymes, resulting in decreases in the incidence of oxidative stress-related diseases and retardation of the aging process.

Antioxidants abolish the benefits of exercise because they prevent the stress that is required for those benefits.

Some have suggested that the health benefits (if any) of alcohol are due to hormesis; that is, it's a toxin, but in low doses upregulates the stress defense mechanisms.

The best-known practitioner of hormesis was probably Mithridates the Great:

Mithradates is most famously said to have sought to harden himself against poison, both by taking increasing sub-lethal doses of the poisons to build tolerance, and by fashioning a 'universal antidote' to protect him from all earthly poisons.

And he died old.

Betas of the world, unite

The Roissysphere and its moral and intellectual objectives: a proposed manifesto: The blogger at In Mala Fide has produced this, a "manifesto", which is summarized at the end as:

Restoring the role of the provider beta in society is the only way to prevent this disaster, and anyone who opposes liberation for beta males is an enemy of Western civilization.

In principle, not a bad idea, but how many men would want to identify as a "beta"? Doing so ensures that you identify as a loser - not that a beta is a loser, but that's the impression: he's not getting any. I wonder how this differs from the men's rights movement; the latter is concerned about issues like divorce law and child custody, and changing divorce laws would go a long way toward improving the lot of the beta. (By the way, why hasn't Obama announced a multi-trillon dollar initiative to close the shameful death gap, men dying far younger than women. Our misandrist society is killing off the men.)

"Liberation" signifies being released from oppression, and as such has the same baggage as "beta". Beside the fact that it's a leftist cliché. I don't want to be overly critical. The essay is well worth reading. However, that so many single men are betas and that a small number of alphas apparently or supposedly dominate the sexual marketplace has come about through a vast number of social changes, and won't easily be put right. (Another by the way: are there any actual statistics on whether, for example, the alpha-beta divide follows the Pareto Principle, with 20% of the men getting 80% of the action?)

Beta Revolution is another blog that has taken up the cause of the beta.

In the past, the AFC (average frustrated chump, the beta) would have married and that would be the end of that particular story. But since the world has changed so much, it would be much easier now for the AFC to do his best and learn some game. A poor person can complain about the rich and how unfair it is, or he can spit on his hands and get down to business and try to become rich himself. Just so for the beta.

The Future of the American Underclass

In the Washington Post, Gregory Clark sees a set of grim choices ahead: tax and spend to support a growing underclass of the unskilled and superannuated, or watch poverty grow, with attendant unrest.

Reading between the lines, one sees Clark managing to slip a little HBD into the Post's august pages:

Others see education as a way out of this dystopia. The root problem is, after all, the widening of the income gap between the skilled and the unskilled. Can expanded education give the poorest the tools to resist the march of the machines? I'm skeptical. Already, much of the supposed improvement in high school and college graduation rates has come by asking less of graduates. We can certainly arrange to have everyone "graduate" from high school, but whether they will have the skills needed to make it is doubtful.

However, Clark never manages to mention the i-word: immigration. He blames technology and a skills gap for the growing division between haves and have-nots, but where are all those unskilled people coming from?

Then there are rising health care costs.

Adult-onset diabetes, for example, estimated to afflict more than 21 million Americans, is a chronic condition associated with a lifestyle occurring at high rates among lower-income people. Modern medicine allows the average person diagnosed with diabetes to live more than 15 additional years, but at a cost typically exceeding $100,000. (Twenty-one million times $100,000 is $2.1 trillion, and that's just one disease.)

Discussion on evolution and purpose with Lawrence Auster

Lawrence Auster objects to my ascription of purpose or desire to a living creature as being inconsistent with the theory of evolution, and I respond.

Curcumin inhibits cancer via insulin signaling

Some doubt has been expressed in various quarters about the efficacy of antioxidants. In our recent post on antioxidants and their prevention of health benefits from exercise, Michael Ristow was quoted to the effect that fruits and vegetables might have beneficial health effects despite their antioxidant content, not because of them. David Sinclair is another antioxidant skeptic; he recently wrote:

Scan the scientific literature and you will likely read that plant polyphenols, including flavonoids, provide health benefits because of their antioxidant activity. Yet many view the data as unpersuasive: Halliwell and colleagues, for example, have described the evidence as “confusing and equivocal” (Halliwell et al., 2005). Most damaging for the antioxidant theory is that the antioxidant capacity of polyphenols does not correlate with their efficacy (Halliwell et al., 2005). Moreover, anti-oxidants as a class of molecules do not provide the life-span extending effects across diverse species that polyphenols do. [etc.]

Curcumin, the principal active ingredient of turmeric, is known to have anti-tumor and anti-inflammatory activity. Clinical trials have been conducted with good results.

If it's not an anti-oxidant, how would it work? By inhibition of mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin), part of the insulin signaling pathway. So curcumin works just as resveratrol and rapamycin do. Will curcumin promote longevity too? I'd bet that it would.

Update: This may be of interest: A Low Dose of Dietary Resveratrol Partially Mimics Caloric Restriction and Retards Aging Parameters in Mice:

Resveratrol in high doses has been shown to extend lifespan in some studies in invertebrates and to prevent early mortality in mice fed a high-fat diet. We fed mice from middle age (14-months) to old age (30-months) either a control diet, a low dose of resveratrol (4.9 mg kg−1 day−1), or a calorie restricted (CR) diet and examined genome-wide transcriptional profiles. We report a striking transcriptional overlap of CR and resveratrol in heart, skeletal muscle and brain. Both dietary interventions inhibit gene expression profiles associated with cardiac and skeletal muscle aging, and prevent age-related cardiac dysfunction. Dietary resveratrol also mimics the effects of CR in insulin mediated glucose uptake in muscle. Gene expression profiling suggests that both CR and resveratrol may retard some aspects of aging through alterations in chromatin structure and transcription. Resveratrol, at doses that can be readily achieved in humans, fulfills the definition of a dietary compound that mimics some aspects of CR.

About 5 mg/kg/d, so a 70 kg man would get that much with about 3 standard 100 mg capsules of resveratrol, at a cost of maybe 30 cents a day.

game : personality :: education : g

Brandon Berg's formulation:

"The obvious analogy:

game : personality :: education : g

Neither can work the miracles its most fervent supporters claim, because some people simply don't have the potential to become top performers. But both are necessary to reach the limits of your natural potential."

Strikes me as correct. How about:

game : personality :: training : athleticism

Training won't make a genetically inferior man an Olympian, but it can turn him into a reasonably healthy human specimen who will be in better shape than 95% of men who do no training. Game can't turn the average schlub into Porfirio Rubirosa, - probably the original most interesting man in the world - but it could put him well ahead of schlubs without any game.

Anti-Aging Drugs Are Here

Mikhail Blagosklonny, a prolific author of scientific papers has, in one of his papers, Validation of anti-aging drugs by treating age-related diseases, thrown out a few ideas as to the effects anti-aging drugs might have. Of greater interest to the general reader will be his assertion that a couple of currently available pharmacological agents, one a prescription drug, the other an OTC supplement, show great promise as genuine anti-aging drugs. These two, rapamycin and resveratrol, have few side effects and even seem to cure diseases associated with age.

Unexpectedly, it turned out that rapamycin prevented cancer, and even cured pre-existing cancer and Kaposi's sarcoma in renal transplant patients [34-44]. Furthermore, temsirolimus, an analog of rapamycin, has recently been approved for cancer therapy [45]. Also, everolimus, a TOR inhibitor, markedly delayed tumor development in transgenic mice that spontaneously develop ovarian carcinomas [46]. Would TOR inhibitors extend life span in transgenic mice? Since rapamycin delays cancer, it must prolong the life span of cancer-prone mice, who would otherwise die from cancer. Of course, humans die from a variety of age-related diseases, not from just one disease. To prolong life span dramatically, rapamycin must delay most of them. [...]

In principle, life-extending effect of anti-aging drug might be limited by side effects. Although chronic administration of rapamycin is associated with some undesirable effects in transplant patients (see for references [88]), they might be avoided by administrating rapamycin in pulses (for example, once a week). [...]

Resveratrol, an activator of SIRT1 in mammals, extends life span in diverse species [89,90]. Resveratrol was shown to prevent cancer, atherosclerosis, neuro-degeneration and insulin-resistance (diabetes type II) [10,91-100].

A third drug on the market, commonly prescribed for diabetics, is metformin. When metformin was given to mice in standard dosages, it increased their average lifespan by nearly 40%.

All of these agents work via the insulin receptor pathway, the same target on which calorie restriction acts. David Sinclair, the well known aging researcher at Harvard, has already said that he personally supplements with resveratrol. My guess is that many scientists and doctors have also begun to supplement with rapamycin and metformin as well. Blagosklonny stated (see above) that giving rapamycin "in pulses", such as once a week, might give most of the benefits and few of the side effects. Since as much as 20% of top scientists take ritalin and other performance enhancers, it wouldn't be surprising if many of them started in on some of these too.

Here's one doctor that prescribes metformin for weight loss; here's a 73-year-old doctor who has self-prescribed metformin and has had some very positive anti-aging results. The most effective and under-appreciated life extension drug.

Is game hardwired?

J. P. Rushton has recently published a number of papers, e.g. this one (pdf) which postulate a "general factor of personality", the idea being that all of the Big Five personality factors correlate to some degree and can be explained by a general factor, much like ability and talent in many areas can be explained by a general factor of intelligence, g. And, just as variation in g is 50 to 80% heritable, so the general personality factor is at least 50% heritable, according to the studies of Rushton et al. Rushton states that the heritability of this general factor shows that it has been under strong and recent evolutionary selection.

Game, the art and craft of the pick-up artist, involves the PUA as presenting certain facets of his personality - those facets that he believes will improve his status in the eyes of women. But if our personalities are fixed, at least after childhood, this will be difficult to pull off; deception is most easily practiced when self-deception is part of the mix.

A perceptive comment at Roissy's follows this line of thought:

Sodini definitely counts as a data point against the hypothesis that “every man can save himself, if only he knows GAME.” He was obviously aware of the seduction community, but the tools available to him weren’t enough.

This blog’s readership is generally accepting of HBD, right? We admit that intelligence, not to mention almost every psychological trait worth measuring, are all primarily genetically determined. Physical traits and athletic ability follow the same pattern. Why do we assume that game is uniquely malleable? It’s like as soon as we start talking about success with women, everyone’s a Gladwell-reading Blank Slatist.

I thus submit the following to the list pretty lies: Game is to a large extent genetically determined. In a polygamous society, some men will be left out of the sexual marketplace regardless of how many negs they memorize.

A PUA might reply that one can still fool some of the women some of the time, but maybe teaching game to a shy nerd will be about as successful as teaching him to become a successful salesman.

Update: Roissy weighs in on the question of genetic predisposition and game.

But does it follow from such a truth that game is a Blank Slatist wolf in womanizer’s clothing? Should we tell the left side of the desireability bell curve to hang up their cleats and go home to rot until the end of their days? No. Tell them the truth: Game will help you find sex and love. It won’t help you as much as, or as effortlessly as, better looking men, or richer men, or smarter men, or more charming men, or more adaptable men, but it will help. And that is the choice before you: To learn the art of seduction and at least give yourself a fighting chance to score more often and with women better looking and more personable than what you are accustomed to scoring, or to give up all hope and masturbate your life away to the gloomy flicker of an LCD while your fat cow American wife thrashes you to within an inch of your pride.

Spent

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Human Behavior by Geoffrey Miller, is a classic example of a book that is an extended magazine article in disguise. (Steve Sailer called it an "airport book", which is on the mark too.) That people spend money on consumer goods in order to display their status has been well known since Thorstein Veblen. Miller's twist on this asserts that people buy consumer goods to display facets of their personality, such as their conscientiousness or openness, and that there's no good way around spending a lot due to the strictures of signaling theory, which says that a signal must be costly to be real.

That's probably about all you need to know, and anyone who's read much in the HBD blogosphere, or even EconLog will be plenty familiar with the material in this book.

What I found both off-putting and telling about the book is what it says about the author, Geoffrey Miller. In several places in the book he's quite concerned about ensuring that his readers understand that his being an evolutionary psychologist does not mean that he is conservative in any way. For example, in the following, Miller reveals himself to be a shallow trend-follower whose taste could have come from reading Stuff White People Like while lacking a sense of irony:

The things I find most exciting about consumerist capitalism include: almond croissants, Tori Amos concerts, skiing at Telluride, houses designed by Bart Prince, the BMW 550i, Provigil, iPods full of Outkast and Radiohead songs, and the Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard on which I'm typing.

After reading that, one feels that one could follow Kingsley Amis's example and throw the book across the room.

In a passage of several pages, Miller is quite concerned that evolutionary psychologists have mistakenly been characterized as conservatives:

For example, of the 31 evolutionary psychology Ph.D. students, 30 supported gay marriage, 29 supported environmentalism, 26 supported abortion rights, 25 supported universal health care, 21 opposed cutting the federal income tax, 19 supported marijuana legalization, 17 supported raising the minimum wage, and 17 opposed preemptive military actions against foreign countries. [...]

Thus, we have a signaling failure. Holding an evolutionary psychology worldview is still perceived by many educated people as an indicator of conservatism, disagreeableness, and selfishness, through a process of guilt by historical association with 1860s social Darwinism.

Undoubtedly, 30 of 31 students thought that their discipline had no relevance to the real world, that importing masses of Third Worlders incapable of assimilating to Western norms was "not a problem", and that it was important that everyone know that they hold leftist political views so that they could get a job after they got their University of New Mexico doctorates in psychology.

If you've already had your fill of liberal self-congratulation, don't bother with this book. It would have been better had Miller omitted all the details about what a fine person he and his colleagues are, but it's still just a long magazine article.

Xenohormesis

Why would chemical compounds from plants, for example things like green tea extract, polyphenols from wine like resveratrol, or the flavonoids from chocolate, be healthy for humans to ingest? On the face of it, it doesn't make much sense. Since both animals and plants are living beings whose most important purpose is to keep themselves alive and reproducing, and since being eaten by a predator causes the death of the organism, both plants and animals have developed defenses against predators. In the case of animals, defenses include fight or flight, but plants cannot flee, so they've developed elaborate systems of chemical warfare to prevent predators from feeding on them. Therefore one would prima facie expect that chemicals from plants would at best be neutral with regard to human health, and at worst lethal, with many in between these extremes and causing damage to health. But since we find that many plant-derived chemicals benefit health, something else must be occurring.

One school of thought says that the benefit of plant chemicals for health results from chance. Since the "chemical space" occupied by phytometabolites is vast, it might be expected that, by chance, a few of them will be beneficial. Against this view is that plants elaborate compounds such as flavonoids when under stress, and these compounds up-regulate stress-protection systems in animals. This doesn't seem like a coincidence.

Cell biologist David Sinclair of Harvard, best known for his work on calorie restriction and the CR mimetic resveratrol, coined the term xenohormesis to describe the phenomenon of plant metabolites benefiting the health of animals. He describes xenohormesis as "sensing the chemical cues of other species". The idea is this: when plants are under stress, whether from a drought, disease, weather, it manufactures chemicals that help it to endure stress. Since animals depend upon plants for their food - and in many cases an animal species depends upon one species or very few of them to stay alive - they have evolved the ability to sense the stress chemicals of plants. This sense tells them that the plants are under stress, and that they themselves had better prepare for adversity. These phytochemicals interact with the animals' biochemistry, up-regulating stress defense systems - in many cases and crucially, the insulin receptor and its downstream pathway, including mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR).

Calorie restriction works in the same fashion: the organism senses a relative deprivation in its environment, signaled by a lack of food, which causes an increase in the organism's biochemical defenses, which in turn increases lifespan.

Cell biologist Mikhail Blagosklonny, in Inhibition of S6K by resveratrol: In search of the purpose, has proposed "an alternative (but not mutually exclusive) model, suggesting that anti-aging effects of resveratrol are ‘side effects' of its cytostatic effect." Since the insulin and mTOR pathways are crucial for growth and reproduction, a chemical produced by a plant that interferes with these pathways is indeed a form of chemical warfare. Both resveratrol and rapamycin, for instance, can be seen as anti-fungal drugs, produced respectively by plants and bacteria to fight off fungal invaders. But animals have evolved mechanisms to sense these agents of chemical warfare and to use them for their own purposes.

Did the government's war against dietary fat cause the autism epidemic?

That sounds pretty far-fetched, I'll admit, but there are some reasons to think that maybe it did, or at least gave it a push.

It appears that most of those with autism have serious gut/digestive problems. For example, the Autism Network for Dietary Intervention, Nourishing Hope for Autism, and the Specific Carbohydrate Diet are groups/sites that promote not only dietary intervention for autistic children, but also the notion that diet and ensuing gut problems are largely responsible for autism in the first place.

This research shows that fungi and bacteria in the GI tract cause gastrointestinal problems and neurological problems such as autism. Studies also indicate that starches and certain sugars feed these fungi and bacteria. SCD eliminates the foods that feed these microorganisms, starving the pathogens so that they leave the body. The child is no longer a hostage to billions of pathogenic invaders that poison the gut and brain.

As near as I can tell, that quote sums up the pathogenesis of autism: dysbiosis, leaky gut, and the spread of bacterial and fungal toxins into the bloodstream and thence into the brain. If the dysbiosis occurs during certain stages of brain development, trouble ensues. Also, we already know that leaky gut, with or without dybiosis, is associated with depression, so there's a precedent for this problem to be associated with brain or mental disorders.

So what causes dysbiosis? Prolonged use of antibiotics is one cause. But it also seems that refined carbohydrates can be another. The bacterial or fungal overgrowth in the intestines thrives on simple carbohydrates like sugar and starches, and the avoidance of these is crucial to repairing the gut. Most humans have something referred to as normal intestinal flora; the yeast and bacterial overgrowth that is characteristic of dysbiosis must be caused - it doesn't come from nowhere.

It looks like the autism epidemic really got going in the early 90s - and in complete fairness, it must be noted that doubts exist as to the reality of an epidemic of autism. The government campaign against dietary fat and its promotion of carbohydrates started in the late 70s, but probably most people started getting the news that fat was allegedly harmful in the 80s. Of course, those who promoted dietary carbs didn't say that we should be eating sugar and white bread, but the average person, who doesn't pay a lot of attention to dietary advice, may have only got the message that fat was bad, and everything else is OK. (Even now, probably the most pernicious food around is consumed happily by billions every day: soft drinks. You don't hear much about their health hazards either, except that they cause obesity.)

It has been suggested that autism is associated with higher socioeconomic status, though that is much disputed. If it were true, what SES rank would be more likely to follow the dietary advice promoted by various authorities? That's right, those of higher SES - they would be more likely to cut dietary fat from their own and their children's diets. (This is the adherer effect - smart and conscientious people are more likely to adhere to medical advice.) Should it be shown that those of higher SES are not more likely to have children with autism, the obesity epidemic affected everyone, and especially those of lower SES. And obesity is caused by refined carbohydrates, in my humble opinion. So the obesity and autism epidemics could be causally connected.

That's it. This may be crazy, I've never seen anyone promote this idea, it's my own little contribution to crank science. Only it could be not so cranky.

The Government's War Against Dietary Fat Caused the Obesity Epidemic

So say a couple of recent papers. A paper in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, The Pediatric Obesity Epidemic: Causes and Controversies places the blame squarely on dietary carbohydrate:

Obesity in children and adolescents has reached alarming proportions in the United States. Nutritional surveys do not indicate a significant increase in caloric intake in children and adolescents over the last 3 decades, although caloric intake has increased recently in adolescent females. Dietary fat has also been falling. There is no conclusive evidence linking physical inactivity to the obesity epidemic, and longitudinal studies indicate that physical inactivity may be the result of obesity rather than its cause. Hence, attention should be focused on dietary carbohydrate. Carbohydrate intake has increased as a result of the decrease in dietary fat. Indirect evidence also indicates that the quality of carbohydrate has been changing, so that American children are eating more carbohydrates with a higher glycemic index. It is proposed that high-glycemic-index diets lead to excessive weight gain as a consequence of postprandial hyperinsulinemia. Lowglycemic-index diets lower postprandial insulin levels and insulin resistance. It seems likely that diets restricted in sweetened sodas and noncitrus juices and containing ample whole grains, vegetables, and fruit could have a major impact on the prevalence of pediatric obesity.

A paper (pdf) in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine states that recommendations to cut dietary fat were not well thought out and have had unintended consequences, mainly the obesity epidemic:

Dietary guidelines, especially those designed to prevent the diseases of dietary excess, are a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. National dietary guidelines have been promulgated based on scientific reasoning and indirect evidence. In general, weak evidentiary support has been accepted as adequate justification for these guidelines. This low standard of evidence is based on several misconceptions, most importantly the belief that such guidelines could not cause harm. Using guidelines against dietary fat as a case in point, an analysis is provided that suggests that harm indeed may have been caused by the widespread dissemination of and adherence to these guidelines, through their contribution to the current epidemic of obesity and overweight in the U.S. An explanation is provided of what may have gone wrong in the development of dietary guidelines, and an alternative and more rigorous standard is proposed for evidentiary support, including the recommendation that when adequate evidence is not available, the best option may be to issue no guideline.

Much of the blame for all this falls on George McGovern and the rest of the U.S. government, as John Tierney explained:

After the fat-is-bad theory became popular wisdom, the cascade accelerated in the 1970s when a committee led by Senator George McGovern issued a report advising Americans to lower their risk of heart disease by eating less fat. “McGovern’s staff were virtually unaware of the existence of any scientific controversy,” Mr. Taubes writes, and the committee’s report was written by a nonscientist “relying almost exclusively on a single Harvard nutritionist, Mark Hegsted.”

That report impressed another nonscientist, Carol Tucker Foreman, an assistant agriculture secretary, who hired Dr. Hegsted to draw up a set of national dietary guidelines. The Department of Agriculture’s advice against eating too much fat was issued in 1980 and would later be incorporated in its “food pyramid.”

The 1970s, the time of McGovern's commission, was when the obesity epidemic got going.