During my recent [failed] fatbiking trek from the U.S. to the Yukon/NWT border area of B.C. (don’t ask… yet), I had a lot of time to think. I also had a lot of opportunity to engage the environment and interact with land and animals in a way not available to enclosed vehicle travelers. The combination of situational inputs repeatedly pulled my mind toward the nexus of hunter-gatherer lifestyles, fauna, food, farms, forests, and fences. As my mind wandered, a truism became more and more real — hunter-gatherers are not nomads.

At times I was seriously short of food, and shared that through the expedition twitter account. A frequent response was that I should simply hunt and gather along the way. While this advice was sometimes well-meaning, and sometimes in jest, it started to frustrate me over time. Despite having a measure of technology that would have allowed me to hunt and fish, I was traveling based on efficient routes, and not according to an abundance of edible wildlife. In the modern world, wildlife tends to be displaced by roads. Collecting data for a roadkill research project drove that point home — at times in a very visceral way.

It wasn’t just the roads. Farms and fences stretched for hundreds of miles. Some held cows or alpacas or horses in, but they also held the other animals out. Ecosystems had been chopped and burned and plowed into oblivion. What was once an area I could have hunted and gathered had been transformed into a garden for growing, as one sign cheerfully displayed, “snack foods”. The energy transmitted by the sun, converted by the earth, and solidified by the plants and animals was off limits to me and the furry creatures of the world.

I was traveling by road. Because of the ability to transport building materials before there were roads, many roads are built near railroads. Because of the ability to transport building materials before there were railroads, many railroads are build near rivers. River valleys are some of the most ecologically diverse regions on our home planet — that is, before they are obliterated by roads and railroads and dams and farms. Nearly every plant you buy in a grocery store has displaced a diverse ecosystem throughout its entire life. This tends to be true of the animals you eat as well.

My brain was in overdrive, and I kept coming back to the idea of an “intentional community” that wipes the slate clean of agricultural constructs such as feudalism, monotheism, patriarchy, sedentism, overspecialization, technophilia, and farming.

But Andrew, we don’t have feudalism anymore? That’s true in terms of the particular “legal and military customs”, but the goals of feudalism remain firmly entrenched:

Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs… which, broadly defined, was a system for structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour. – Wikipedia

Yes, it is true that the relationship derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour is now mediated by capital. However, the functional mechanism is largely intact.

Moving on.

What follows is an early sketch of what I have in mind. Normally, I’d develop and present support for something like this. However, I want to open it up to your input before diving too deep. Nothing here is set in stone, and should only be viewed as a point at which to start discussion.

Vision

To rethink the communities we voluntarily participate in starting with what we’ve only recently learned about our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This is not a shunning of neolithic ideas per se, but a step back from the assumptions of agricultural civilization and rebuild on a clean slate.

To build a community deeply integrated with our current understanding of hunter-gatherer anthropology and evolved human psychology (with a small group of adventurous individuals).

To develop an evolving template for others who wish to do something similar.

Premises

• Civilization is a fairytale. The narrative of the civilized domesticated relies on the lie that humanity’s history began the same day as agriculture.
• Agriculture is overrated. Given the choice, hunter-gatherers have historically resisted assimilation by agricultural civilization.
• Agriculture breeds evil: Patriarchy, slavery, authoritarian gods, rape, and murder for hire.
• Agriculture hates life. The fertile crescent is a desert. Monocrops are a green veneer temporarily separating former ecosystems from future scorpion habitat.
• Ownership is for the lazy. Property (land) rights arose from agriculture as a response to sedentism and delayed return on investment, and are enforced through contractual evil (see previous).
• Security is an illusion. Agriculture’s exports are disease and famine.
• Comfort is a facade. Average dwelling size has increased from 100 sq. ft. to 2,300 sq. ft (U.S.) while happiness has decreased and depression has increased.
• Wealth is fake. Consumerism is an evolutionary mismatch that hijacks the human bias to collect resources for immediate consumption.
• Money is the root of all boredom. Now get back to work.

Comments on Common Missteps

Principles

1. Egalitarian

• Near zero difference in political power

2. Nomadic

• Think more opportunistic migration than perpetual motion or living in a van down by the river.
• De-emphasize notion of permanent residence with perpetual ownership
• Achieved via multiple locations in varied ecological contexts
• Apply timeshare concept as analogy to HG semi-nomadism.
• Sedentism is the path to land ownership with is the path to the state.

3. Play

• Play serves survival benefit in terms of simulating, and providing practice for, potentially dangerous situations
• Play serves reproductive benefit in terms of sexual selection
• The stifling of play in children and adults is a neolithic construct in service of the increased workload required to meet caloric needs under farming.

4. Self-sufficient

• Hunt
• Gather
• Quasi-gathering via minimal horticulture

5. Property rights distinguished from land rights

• No individual has a right to control natural resources
• No individual has the right to control objects fashioned from natural resources by another

6. Non-State

• Our country is the world
• The state is a function of agriculture
• The state incites, perpetuates, and hijacks human group bias to its own benefit.

7. Self-reliant

• Emphasize generalists over specialists
• Do not impose generalization in all domains
• Intentional division of labor foments sub-optimal well-being through fear of resource scarcity

8. Individualist

• Humans are individuals, and individuality should be allowed/encouraged to flourish
• Strict communalism tends to limit individual expression
• Sexual selection (in the technical, Darwinian sense) should not be impinged upon

Additional Inspirations

Foundational References

• Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence, Peter Gray
• The Hadza, Frank Marlowe
• The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott
• Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, Richard Manning
• Progress and Poverty, Henry George
• Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, Christopher Boehm
• Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Paul Shepard
• The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, Lierre Keith

UPDATE Spring 2015

We have laid the theoretical foundation for this concept, and purchased our first property! The ideas have change a bit since this was originally written, and in a good way.

People sometimes lob anemic criticisms at me for mentioning Zerzan, and that’s probably rooted in some kind of fair notion that he’s perceived as too readily jumping the is-ought gap. It seems pretty common for primitivist theorists to provide a few positive historical and anthropological examples, set them against some negative relatively modern examples, and argue that the primitive way was the better way. That’s somewhat of a problem logically, but it’s easily bridged by adding one clause between the examples (the is) and the conclusion (the ought). I’m not arguing for Zerzan’s primitivism, but I am arguing that his and similar ideas should be on the table for consideration, and that we dismiss them at our own risk.

The clause I suggest bridges the gap between the is of our hunter-gatherer evolution, and the ought of increasing our connection with nature, is the concept of Nature relatedness (NR). I’m only providing two references here, and both with the same lead author, but the references they contain build a robust picture and framework of the psychology itself, and the associated evolutionary context. Alternatively, I can also recommend the review in the first couple chapters of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution.

(all emphasis that follows is mine)

Article One

One of my favorite things about this article is that it’s an article about nature and references a paper by C. H. Feral. Three studies are discussed examining the subjective well-being of individuals and how nature has the potential to change these feelings. Positive correlations were found in positive affect, vitality, autonomy, personal growth and purpose (meaning) in life, and overall life satisfaction.

Abstract
Nature relatedness (NR) describes the affective, cognitive, and experiential aspects of human–nature relationships. Evidence from three studies suggests that individual differences in NR are associated with differences in well-being. In study 1, we explore associations between NR and a variety of well-being indicators, and use multiple regression analyses to demonstrate the unique relationship of NR with well-being, while controlling for other environmental measures. We replicate well-being correlates with a sample of business people in Study 2. In study 3, we explore the influence of environmental education on NR and well-being, and find that changes in NR mediate the relationship between environmental education and changes in vitality. We discuss the potential for interventions to improve psychological health and promote environmental behaviour. Nisbet, et al (2011)

Conclusion
“We suggest that the benefits of a strong connection with nature permeate into broad areas of life, and provide evidence consistent with this idea… NR also predicted well-being better than other environmental measures, and with environmental education people maintained their sense of connection with nature and experienced greater vitality over time. The results… support the notion that NR—the affective, cognitive, and experiential connection with the natural world—may contribute to psychological health…” Nisbet, et al (2011)

Article Two

I’ve read this paper a zillion times, and written about it elsewhere, but I still can’t put it any better than the authors introductory paragraph(s):

People habitually neglect the natural environment, yet contact with nature has considerable benefits. Research has shown that contact with nature can restore  attentional resources , improve  concentration in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, speed recovery from illness, and reduce stress; it may even reduce mortality risk (Mitchell & Popham, 2008). Psychologists often explain these findings by drawing on sociobiologist E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, which suggests that because humans evolved in natural environments and have lived separate from nature only relatively recently in their evolutionary history, people possess an innate need to affiliate with other living things. Although researchers cannot directly test the evolutionary origins of an affinity for natural environments, people’s fondness for natural scenery and the popularity of outdoor activities, zoos, gardening, and pets are evidence of biophilia. Nature can also be a source of happiness. Humans evolved in natural environments and still seem to thrive in them.

Modern lifestyles, however, may erode people’s connection with nature, leaving them unaware of nature’s potential benefits. By limiting their contact with nature, people fail to maximize the advantages it offers for cognition and well-being.

That pretty much sums up my general thinking on the matter. It’s all there… psychology… evolution… nature… scientific equivocations… everything.

Abstract
Modern lifestyles disconnect people from nature, and this may have adverse consequences for the well-being of both humans and the environment. In two experiments, we found that although outdoor walks in nearby nature made participants much happier than indoor walks did, participants made affective forecasting errors, such that they systematically underestimated nature’s hedonic benefit. The pleasant moods experienced on outdoor nature walks facilitated a subjective sense of connection with nature, a construct strongly linked with concern for the environment and environmentally sustainable behavior. To the extent that affective forecasts determine choices, our findings suggest that people fail to maximize their time in nearby nature and thus miss opportunities to increase their happiness and relatedness to nature. Our findings suggest a happy path to sustainability, whereby contact with nature fosters individual happiness and environmentally responsible behavior. Nisbet & Zelenski (2011)

Conclusion
Contact with nature has clear benefits for humans….this effect is a window to a larger process in which human disconnection from nature is linked to environmental destruction and suboptimal well-being… At the individual level, we strongly recommend more contact with nearby nature: It will likely make you (and the planet) happier than you think. Nisbet & Zelenski (2011)

The research mentioned here measures individual exposure and relationship to nature on very limited levels, and is only the tip of the iceberg. Humans are wild animals, and living in boxes is not optimal for health… whether physical or mental.

Is a push-up in your living room the same as a push-up in the forest? Is a sprint down the street in front of your gym the same as a sprint in that perfect sand just above the waterline as the tide is going out?

If you found this article at all interesting, please consider backing my expedition documentary project — at the end of Day (2 of 22) we were already at 34% funding. The entire goal is to show people how to reconnect with nature in a major way, and some of the rewards (Hyperlithic in particular), are also directly related to this topic. Even if you can’t back the project financially, please share this post — even if you think it’s marginally interesting.

Thank you! I welcome your thoughts below.

I get that people have jobs and families and schedules and live in cities and all that, and within those confines (though ultimately voluntary) it’s necessary to make some compromises. I get it; I really do. But that ain’t me (babe). If what I was looking for (babe) is out there, I couldn’t find it. I quit searching for the perfect thing a while ago.

I have a problem: if I can’t find what I’m looking for, I assume that I’m not the only one. Sometimes, if it’s something I care about, that drives me to build something. I don’t wake up trying to think of new projects to spend a ton of time on. I wake up trying to stop myself from doing all of the project ideas I have. It’s not a lifestyle choice, it’s a compulsion. Anyway, when it comes to fitness/training, I couldn’t bury the compulsion any longer, and I started building stuff.

What follows may be a little jargony, overly stream-of-consciousness, and completely unreferenced. It probably won’t make complete sense, but it would take a book to make the full case.

Actual content starts here: I started getting into paleo and the training systems it comes into contact with shortly after moving aboard a sailboat. The only gym I had within a 2 hour radius was your standard fare of treadmills, ellipticals, machines, and some free weights. Moving the free weights was largely frowned upon as the noise detracted from Fox News and {insert name of show really old people watch while giving a treadmill what for on the lowest speed}. “They were the best of times, they…”

For a while, I made do with Crossfit Endurance. One of those 24-hour card-entry gyms had opened up and despite the backlash against actually using weights, I could go after 4pm when the place cleared out for blue plate special hour. The only approximation to a squat rack was a Smith machine shoved in with so many other benches that there was no room to put a bar on the floor. If nobody was looking, I’d shove aside the equipment that wasn’t bolted down and do claustrophobic deadlifts with my face nearly leaving streaks on the ubiquitous wall mirror to avoid my ass smacking into steel plates. But whatever, I swapped in pistol squats and dumbbell versions of CFE S&C WODs, then headed outdoors for the run/cycle/swim sessions. Then CFE got all main-site and weird and I bailed for an even more DIY approach.

Impetus Ingredient 1: Frustration

Long story longer, “training” is somewhat paradoxically (and mostly by socialized expectations of training) more difficult in an environment with more access to nature. I’d already been on a path to changing my relationship with the industrialized spectacle, and had already immersed myself in the application of evolutionary theory to human psychology. My increasing exposure to “paleo” made me think about applying the same evolutionary principles to physical activity. For some reason, it seemed (and still does seem) that diet had been placed into the “massively aided by evolutionary theory” box, but physical activity was mostly placed into the “modern methods are better” box, and mostly disassociated from the evolutionary framework. And generally speaking, that’s likely to be useful in some cases, but I think the center of that debate is way too far to the modern end of the spectrum. I couldn’t get this simple thought out of my head:

Hunter-gatherers don’t train.

That’s almost self-evidently true without having to invoke debates about the thrifty gene hypothesis. As wild animals, human hunter-gatherers do work necessary to acquire the food necessary to sustain themselves. The time leftover varies widely by resources in any given environment, but when the work is done, they aren’t shy about two things: 1) playing 2) NOT working. The concept of laziness exists, and humans are highly attuned to it, but it is in reference to the need for immediate work, and not a socioeconomic tool used to motivate the sheep to enrich the shepherds masters. The protestant work ethic, and its non-euro-centric cousins are agrarian developments.

This is the same across the animal kingdoms. According to the protestant work ethic, Jesus would totally hate lions and tigers and bears. Animals go to great lengths to avoid work. This is so important that communication has evolved between predator and prey to increase efficiency and reduce waste.

So at this point, I had two ideas lodged in my brain:

1. Evolution is just as important for training and movement as it is for psychology and diet.
2. Hunter-gatherers don’t train.

In contemplating the topic as a whole, “Think like a geek. Eat like a hunter. Train like a fighter. Look like a model.” seemed to be something approximating a distillation of what I was thinking. I posted it on facebook, and it was immediately well received. It definitely taps into something — whether it’s a zeitgeist thing or something more fundamental I’m not sure.

Think Like a Geek.

Intelligence is sexy. It confers both survival and reproductive advantage, and was certainly selected for in our paleolithic ancestors. It’s woven throughout so many levels of our evolutionary past that it’s hard to reduce it to one thing. In this context, it carries the implication of the very word paleolithic itself — the reference to tools. Thinking like a geek helps us choose tools and develop tools.

Eat Like a Hunter.

The fuel we provide to our biological systems has effects that ripple through every aspect of our individual life. From mental acuity to mood to structure to disease, our choice of fuels is crucial. Thinking about food from the angle of a paleolithic hunter quickly provides answers to questions science is unable to efficiently adjudicate. This is not about pure carnivory, but a nod to optimal foraging theory. Once we understand something about the strategies of a paleolithic hunter we can begin to merge our ancient food system with our modern food system. If we lose either perspective, we will quickly go astray.

Train Like a Fighter.

This gets into a mess of words and concepts. Ignoring the “hunter-gatherers don’t train” bit for a moment… This is about training as a fighter fights, and not training to be a fighter per se. It is also about adopting modern tools with the intent of unlocking parts of our DNA that lay dormant within sedentary humans anesthetized by economically abstracted violence. Humans fought their own battles prior to the rise of agriculture. Being able to pay for violence to be conducted on our behalf appears to be a moral and physical benefit, but the signals and interaction between our genes and our environment are not easily faked and not easily replaced. Our physical and mental potential as individuals is not always aligned with those of industrial agricultural civilization.

Look Like a Model.

Because “look” embodies multiple tenses in the English language, this one is open to much ambiguity. My meaning is primarily in a passive sense. If you think like a geek, eat like a hunter, and train like a fighter, then you will [more or less] automatically “look like a model” in terms of phenotypic expression. It is also important to note that “model” means many things. There are many inputs for advertisers deciding on models, but I’m specifically not talking about three types of models. 1) Men as advertised in men’s magazines. 2) Women as advertised in women’s magazines. 3) Fashion models of either sex. Without going into too much detail today, it has been shown that men pictured in men’s magazines tend to be more muscular than the ideal women find attractive, and women in women’s magazines tend to be thinner than men find attractive. Advertisers manipulate us according to evolved heuristic biases.

I use “model” to imply something closer to an ideal attractiveness influenced by Darwinian sexual selection (inter-sexual). The intent is to get at things that are relatively generally attractive to the opposite sex. This is contrasted to the use by advertisers of intra-sexual selection… or… competition with others of the same sex. Our brains do not analyze these questions in a rational way, but in a way that tracks markers of health in the context of evolutionary time. “Look good naked” is a great goal. Unfortunately, our intuitive self-assessments of looking good are likely biased to the point of being counterproductive.

Common Threads

All of the above are related to the ecological context of us as individuals. The interaction between our genes and our environment is implied in each level. The association with gyms and training with the active physical components of health is similar to synthetic and isolated components being packaged and sold to us as “food”. Real food is not enough. We need real life as well.

The impact on our psychology is entwined in each of these concepts as well. We know that points of attractiveness shift depending on the ecological context of the beholder. Some use this as a refutation of attractiveness as an evolved psychological component. However, this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of human ethology. I am not interested in mimicking the optimal attractiveness ratings of people influenced by sub-optimal (resource depleted, etc.) environments. A better question is this: What is optimal for humans in an optimal environment? We need to answer other questions to say what environments are optimal, and they are not easy questions. They are also not so difficult that we should be flummoxed by those who descend into relativist or quasi-relativist arguments representative of myopia.

Hyperlithic

I’ve been working on these concepts specifically for months, generally, for my entire life. I’ll soon be launching hyperlithic.com, a website that seeks to relentlessly answer all of the questions raised above. It will be too awesome and fun to be free.

If “paleolithic” roughly means old-stone age, “hyperlithic” roughly means beyond stone age. There’s a nod to the old, and a hint at a modern update.

This is just the tip of the conceptual iceberg. More to come on all of this!

“A scheduled wolf hunt in northeastern Oregon will remain on hold. At least for awhile. In September, the Imnaha wolfpack found itself under the close watch of local ranchers and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW).” [source]

Okay, that seems pretty straightforward, and I’m not trying to get all tree hugger or PETA on you. I can kinda see where there’s room for discussion about the pros and cons of wolfpacks <sarcasm>roaming the streets at night trying to devour your children</sarcasm>. But… this is where it gets weird:

“the court wants a $5,000 security deposit [from the group representing the public interest] to cover potential livestock losses caused by the two wolves that would have been dead if the state’s plan had gone forward. [source]

Say what? This has a few implications that I find disagreeable:

• The default mode of existence in the minds of our bureaucracy is the complete subjugation of wildness.
• It is The State’s obligation to facilitate the eradication wildness.
• Land ‘owners’ have a reasonable expectation of zero external risk whenever externalities can be exterminated.
• The public’s interest in wildness in our agrarian state system is subject to individuals’ economic interest.
• Theodore Roosevelt was cooler than a lot of other Republicans

In response to the comments on my post about libertarianism, I’ve turned a significant amount of attention to analyzing the evolution of property rights — with an eye to ascertaining any fundamental differences between land and products. Some of the comments in that post brought my attention to the native (I’m increasingly disenchanted by the categorization of natives and non-natives — once any individual is stripped of “native” status, the state makes stronger claims on ownership of their lives) people of the Pacific Northwest. It was suggested that these hunter-gatherers were ferociously defensive of strict rights to land, and this was meant as a refutation of my claim that land rights are anathema to HGs. It turns out that the groups in question were not hunter-gatherers anyway, so it doesn’t at all refute my line of argumentation, but that’s beside the point for today. The point is that these PNW cultures persisted in ecological stability for 2,000 years with a conception of land rights that didn’t require the eradication of wildness, and especially didn’t require the public to subsidize the destruction of wildness at the behest of insular landowners.

The burden of responsibility among land ‘owners’ in PNW tribes was on the owners themselves. The people did not exist to support them; the landowners were responsible for providing for the people. The ‘owners’ acted as stewards of the land. If the land was not productive, they were stripped of the privilege to act in an ownership capacity. In other words, the PNW natives’ system, and what we’ve inherited from the British/French, are not direct comparisons. Forgive the apparent U.S.-centricity. It just happens to be the case that many of the world’s governments are adapted from U.S. law, and thus share a similar provenance. Had a chief of a PNW tribe requested a $5,000 security deposit from the general public, he would have been deposed and/or killed for violation of the public trust.

“Further, it appears that livestock producers may have other sources of compensation, such as county grant programs.” – Oregon Court Document

The obvious counter-argument as it pertains to the wolves is that current ranchers would be acting as effective stewards by exterminating the wolves. However, contrary to the myth of the myth of the ecological “savage”, PNW tribes followed elaborate rules and norms that ensured the functioning of the ecological system. There was no barbed wire management required. Rather than the extermination of wildness, the focus was on fostering and perpetuating the productivity of the wildness.

I’m not going to build my entire land rights case today. I had no intention of writing this post until the visceral reaction I got from the notion that people interested in the ecology we all live in somehow owe real cash money to those poor maligned landlords who enjoy the privilege of excluding the rest of us from ‘their’ land. For now, I feel pretty confident putting the 2,000 years of PNW tribe resilience up against the fuedalistic remnants of our relatively brief experiment with the agrarian-corporation state — in terms of ethics and optimal human experience. Obviously, the U.S./European systems had a leg up in the violence and authoritarian domination department. And that, ultimately, is where this issue leads. My analysis will continue to observe the spectrum from egalitarian hunter-gatherers with high levels of autonomy, humor, and play to centralized authoritarian agrarian states with huge disparity between the impoverished and the wealthy, low levels of individual autonomy, and a bunch of boring, subdued people wading through rationalizations and coping by drug use. This notion of play vs. boredom also maps to wildness vs. civility.

My concern in all this is not petty battles between the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum political parties in the United States. This is a war between the wild animal side of our shared human nature and the warped motives of our modern world to pave, sterilize, and install child-proof caps on the entire planet, convert it to a personal ATM machine for a few individuals, then sell it back to us as if they’ve done us some favor. Newsflash: Disneyland has always been a cheap imitation of my imagination, and I don’t take kindly to milquetoast plutocrats trying to sell me tickets to their lobotomized version of The New and Improved Simulated Earth. And… this war ain’t limited to the borders of Los Estados Unidos.

OregonWild discusses the gray wolf’s return to Oregon after 168 years with a bounty on its head. Also, Vilhjalmur Stefansson says wolves are delicious.

• Against the Grain, book by Richard Manning (2005). Thanks to J. Stanton and Elizabeth Miller for the recommendation.
• America’s Lost Landscape: The Tallgrass Prairie, award-winning documentary film (2005). Available on DVD and through Netflix streaming.

The agrarian has offered us a devil’s bargain. By inducing population levels unsustainable by our planet’s naturally ecology through industrial agriculture, they now offer to sell us back the same product on the basis of said artificially inflated population. Their solution to unsustainable population? Shocker, doubling-down with more industrial agriculture.

“In the fertile lands of the Unites States and Canada a saying grew up that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” because the Indian encumbered the land which the farmer needed for cultivation of crops, and the miner for his digging and delving. The Indian was in the way and had to go, for we could not let questions of mere humanitarianism and justice restrain us from taking posession of the valuable lands that the Indian had inherited from his ancestors. In the South, economic and humanitarian interests were diametrically opposed, and the economic had their way. In the North, economic and humanitarian interests happened to coincide. The northern land was valueless to the farmer, and the country was of value to the trading companies only in so far as it produced fur; and furs could best be secured by perpetuating the Indian and keeping him in possession of the lands, because dead men do not set traps. The only good Indian in the North was the live Indian who brought in fur to sell.” – Vilhjalmur Stefansson, My Life With the Eskimo, 1912

The agriculturalists are quick to proclaim that we can’t survive without them. They declare that we’re better off under their management. These are, of course, imperialist lies.

“Some have said seventy-five million bison were on the Plains at the time of first European contact… Many think thirty million is a reasonable compromise… It almost doesn’t matter. The point is that… there were  tens of millions of buffalo, which means there was plenty to go around, especially for hunters on foot and armed with simple hunting weapons. There is no evidence that Aboriginal hunting of bison, over at least twelve thousand years, was making any serious dent in the population. On the contrary, evidence from the bones at many different sites of differing ages suggests that bison were certainly holding their own in terms of numbers, if not actually becoming more numerous through time.” – Jack W. Brink, PhD. Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains, 2008

Context: An average bison may yield 500 lbs. of meat after butchery. 500 lbs * 75 million = 37.5 billion pounds of meat. Assuming a 300 million population (roughly the current U.S. population), that equates to 125 pounds of bison for every individual in the U.S. at historic bison population. Obviously you can’t eat them all at once; this is just to provide some context. And… that’s just one species. How well did you say land management through barbed wire and farm agriculture are working again?

The agriculturalist has decimated the natural animal habitat of our planet. They have plowed grassland ecosystems naturally balanced with wildlife and offered us deserts and fossil fuel thirsty crops engineered on the barren lands of their parasitic tendencies. They have replaced the the equilibrium of an ecosystem in which we once thrived with mass extinction through mass extraction. Do not let the time that separates us from the agrarian subsumption of so many ecosystems serve as a chasm between us and the reality.

When speaking about the global ecology holistically, there is no such thing as sustainable agriculture. There are exceptions of course, agriculture ensures the sustainability of imperialist states. Agriculture ensures the sustainability of slavery — whether through slave labor, or its modern abstraction, wage slavery. Perhaps this is the sustainability we’re being promised by those offering agriculture as ne plus ultra sustainability.

The premise of all empires is that the backwards, uncivilized, primitives (read: the other) would be better off under the helpful guidance of their enlightenment. Despite a history of hunter-gatherers resisting assimilation by the state and its coercion, we’re told that those not blessed by our agrarian nightmare will be happy to subsist with the best of what industrial agriculture can provide. Forget that this claim has been demonstrated to be false time and again. The American Dream of unbridled consumption as a birthright is an illusion bearing the gift of an 80 hour workweek, alienation, and atomization. The dream is an easy sell, because we’re biologically driven to show off, but that impulse is a hollow replacement for living a vibrant life and demonstrating personality.

If you want less factory farmed meat, I have a solution: get the corn, soy, and wheat farms out of natural bison habitat. Of course, this is but one example.

And… for the sake of sustainability… I hereby forsake corn, soy, and wheat consumption… a practice not possible without fossil fuel agriculture and the GMO gestapo. Sustainability, you’re welcome.

Agriculture isn’t going away any time soon, but agrarians would do well to engage in some hard thinking on the full implications of their ideology. It’s certain that many veg*ns are unintentional imperialists — lulled by a life mediated by spectacular capital and swept away by its promises. It’s important to see its adherents as individuals, but ultimately: Veg*nism is imperialism. Drop the facade; self-righteousness doesn’t look good on imperialists.

And if you think hunters do not revere the animals that provide them with sustenance, you ain’t got no soul (in the James Brown sense). Try getting some via my recent post on life in ANWR, Robb Wolf on Discovery, The Wild Within on Travel Channel, or the San bushmen in a persistence hunt…

If you don’t at least begin to get it after that, you don’t know soul and I’ll let you get back to your robotic existence of denying humanity.

It was exactly one year ago today that I first uttered the phrase, “paleo is a logical framework applied to modern humans, not a historical reenactment.” That idea seemed pretty straightforward to me, and it was well-received to the point of being quoted in a real life book (you should buy it, but not just for that reason). And sure, Robb and Andy misattributed it to somebody else in a podcast in the distant past, but I already forgave them for that. So here I am, still beating the drum of the paleo framework despite internal and external attempts to refute it, supersede it, minimize it, water it down, or exact (Exacto?) its death by a thousand cuts. Well folks, it still works. But really, this should come as no surprise…

“This guy is irritatingly correct, time and time again, even when he has limited evidence.” – E. O. Wilson on Charles Darwin

Maybe the blogs I read and the people I talk and listen to aren’t representative of the paleo community, and maybe I’m just imagining things, but the paleo zeitgeist has seemed rather buddy buddy with the white devils of late. Of course, I refer here to rice and the [non-sweet] potato. Support seems to come along the lines of, “potatoes/rice are starches. starch is good for you. therefore potatoes/rice are good for you”; “sure, raw potatoes/rice might have saponins or glycoalkaloids or lectins or phytates, but those compounds aren’t always bad, and they’re destroyed by cooking anyway”‘; “sure, rice is a grain, but what about population X and population Y who eat rice and don’t drop dead from these supposedly ‘toxic’ substances”; and commonly included with one of the first two, “I love potatoes/rice” or “potatoes/rice are good”. Even setting aside the restless and ubiquitous specter of The Self-Justification Diet, there are significant problems with these arguments. I’m not going to deconstruct them at length here, but suffice it to say that they’re all logical fallacies of one stripe or another.

Even if I convince you that the individual arguments are flawed, the endeavor still wouldn’t tell you the paleo framework was correct or useful. So rather than that, I’ll introduce recent research that those looking at things from a microscopic perspective have been missing all along. Not surprisingly, the research demonstrates proximate effects that were effectively predictable with the paleo framework.

The two relevant components of the basic paleo framework are:

1. Humans are probabilistically less likely to be adapted to foods introduced more recently into the human diet. This applies to the potato, which is indigenous to South America, and was not available to humans in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, or myriad island populations, until the Spanish brought them back to Europe in the late 16th century. All of those populations have been consuming potatoes for only 300-400 (I’m being generous with that second number) years.
2. Because they can’t run away or fight back like animals, many plants have evolved chemical defense mechanisms. Because the ultimate goal of evolution is reproduction, and not survival, we can predict that chemical defense mechanisms are likely to be concentrated in the reproductive parts of plants. In many cases, this is the seed. Rice is a seed of a plant, and is therefore probabilistically likely to have chemical defense mechanisms.

The Meat

Why miRNAs are important

As a wise man once said, “Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy.” Without delving into genetics, let’s just agree that gene expression is a proven concept. Roughly, your genome consists of a lot of conditional statements that result in the production of proteins which have wildly varied effects. Our genetic code is shaped by the environment in which we evolved. By matching the inputs of our environment to the conditions ‘expected’ by our genes, we may optimize the expression of our genes. Please know that this is a vast oversimplification, but is useful for thinking about our individual health and well-being.

For now, let’s just say that RNA relates to gene expression, and miRNA is short for “micro RNA”, which is just a subset of RNA.

“…the rapidly developing new field of miRNA, which plays an important role in modulating virtually all biological processes (e.g., cell proliferation, development, differentiation, adhesion, migration, interaction, and apoptosis) through its fine tuning of gene regulation.” (Sun, et al. 2010)

“miRNAs have been widely shown to modulate various critical biological processes, including differentiation, apoptosis, proliferation, the immune response, and the maintenance of cell and tissue identity. Dysregulation of miRNAs has been linked to cancer and other diseases.” (Zhang, et al. 2011)

 The study

This study was recently published in the journal Nature (September 2011). It contains novel findings that miRNA from plants remains stable after cooking and digestion by humans. This plant miRNA has been found in significant quantities in human blood and tissue. Further, it has been demonstrated to interfere with human miRNA by mimicking it and binding to the receptors, then influencing gene expression in ways different from the miRNA produced naturally by our bodies.

Unless otherwise noted, all following quotations refer to Zhang, et al. 2011. Emphasis has been added by me.

 Abstract
Our previous studies have demonstrated that stable microRNAs (miRNAs) in mammalian serum and plasma are actively secreted from tissues and cells and can serve as a novel class of biomarkers for diseases, and act as signaling molecules in intercellular communication. Here, we report the surprising finding that exogenous plant miRNAs are present in the sera and tissues of various animals and that these exogenous plant miRNAs are primarily acquired orally, through food intake. MIR168a is abundant in rice and is one of the most highly enriched exogenous plant miRNAs in the sera of Chinese subjects. Functional studies in vitro and in vivo demonstrated that MIR168a could bind to the human/mouse low-density lipoprotein receptor adapter protein 1 (LDLRAP1) mRNA, inhibit LDLRAP1 expression in liver, and consequently decrease LDL removal from mouse plasma. These findings demonstrate that exogenous plant miRNAs in food can regulate the expression of target genes in mammals.

This wasn’t a gender thing:

” Upon investigation of the global miRNA expression profile in human serum, we found that exogenous plant miRNAs were consistently present in the serum of healthy… men and women.”

This effect was not tiny. Significant amounts of plant miRNA were found in humans:

“the tested plant miRNAs were clearly present in sera from humans, mice, and calves… when compared to the endogenous mammalian miRNAs known to be stably present in animal serum, these plant miRNAs were relatively lower, but in a similar concentration range.”

The following quote demonstrates that not all plant miRNA is digested. Some is digested more than others, and some is not digested at all:

“the levels of MIR168a and MIR156a, the two plant miRNAs with the highest levels in the sera of [human] subjects, and MIR166a, a plant miRNA with modest level, were assessed… MIR161, whose expression level was undetectable, served as a negative control.”

The three plant miRNAs found were present in different levels in different plants. Note that cooking influenced the miRNA content differently by specific miRNA and by plant. While levels in rice decreased dramatically with cooking, levels in wheat increased with cooking. After cooking, all MIR156a levels remained significantly high.

It is worth noting that these three plant miRNAs, MIR168a, MIR156a, and MIR166a, were detected in [rice and] other foods, including Chinese cabbage (Brassica rapa pekinensis), wheat (Triticum aestivum), and potato (Solanum tuberosum).

“Interestingly, plant miRNAs were stable in cooked foods.”

It is important to note the following context. Much of the study was centered around MIR168a in rice. This was not because rice or MIR168a have better or worse effects in humans, but because the effect of each miRNA across each gene locus is unknown at this time. The effects of MIR156a are unknown, so we cannot draw the same conclusions about wheat or potatoes as we can about rice. It is known that plant miRNAs have a tendency to interfere with gene expression, but that precise expression remains a question as large as the numbers of gene expressions that can be interfered with against the number or miRNAs we might ingest from all over the plant kingdom.

“most plant miRNAs can act like RNA interference… [W]e performed bioinformatic analysis to identify any sequences in the human, mouse, or rat genome with perfect or near-perfect match to MIR168a. Approximately 50 putative target genes were identified as the target genes of MIR168a”

This known mechanism is why this study focused on MIR168a and rice:

“LDL is the major cholesterol-carrying lipoprotein of human plasma and plays an essential role in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. Downregulation of LDLRAP1 in the liver causes decreased endocytosis of LDL by liver cells and impairs the removal of LDL from plasma… Concomitant with a significant elevation in MIR168a levels in the livers of mice after 1 day of fresh rice feeding , LDLRAP1 expression dramatically decreased in the group of fresh rice-fed mice. In these experiments… LDL levels in mouse plasma were significantly elevated on days 3 and 7 after fresh rice feeding… the level of liver LDLRAP1 was not related to the levels of plasma cholesterol or triglycerides… the elevation of fresh rice-derived MIR168a… specifically decreased liver LDLRAP1 expression and thus caused an elevated LDL level in… plasma.”

Plant miRNAs mimic endogenous mammalian miRNA, bind to their receptors, and inhibit protein expression:

“Plant miRNAs execute their function in mammalian cells… in a fashion of mammalian miRNA…the results that MIR168a was also able to target the artificially expressed LDLRAP1 protein in 293T cells (Figure 3I-3K) strongly demonstrate that plant MIR168a could bind to its binding site located in exon 4 of mammalian LDLRAP1 gene, and then inhibit LDLRAP1 protein expression.”

Why the focus on disruptive plant foods, and not animal foods?

This was one of the biggest questions I had before and after reading the study. Unless I missed it, no specific mention is made of what happens when humans or other mammals ingest mammalian miRNA. This leaves the question open as to the scope of miRNA influence we may obtain through food. Upon closer examination, I did find one point of entry into further inquiry on this question. It seems that there is a difference across the board between mammalian miRNA and plant miRNA. This does not mean that all plants are bad to eat or that all mammals are good to eat. Nor does it mean that all plants are good to eat or that all mammals are bad to eat. It’s likely still true that there is no such thing as food and that everything we might ingest simply exists on a multi-dimensional spectrum of healthful to toxic.

“Plant miRNAs are 2′-O-methyl modified on their terminal nucleotide, which renders them resistant to periodate. In contrast, mammalian miRNAs with free 2′ and 3′ hydroxyls are sensitive to periodate… Indeed, as shown in Figure 1E, most mammalian miRNAs in human serum, such as miR-423-5p, miR-320a, miR-483-5p, miR-16, and miR-221, had an unmodified 2′, 3′ hydroxyls and were therefore oxidized… In contrast, MIR156a, MIR168a, and MIR166a in human serum remained unchanged…”

Whether mammalian miRNAs found in human serum were exogenous or endogenous is not specified. If we knew that they were exogenous, and they were oxidized, we would have a significant difference in mechanism between plant and mammal miRNA. If we assume that the mammalian miRNAs mentioned are all endogenous, we can still see a significant difference, but the question remains open as to whether ingested mammalian miRNAs remain stable after ingestion, are oxidized in the digestion process, or are metabolized via another mechanism.

Still a lot of unknowns

At this point, we can’t definitively say a lot about the effects of plant miRNAs (or mammalian for that matter). Is it possible that the cooking-stable, digestion-stable MIR168a found in rice is the only plant miRNA that interferes with human gene expression? Sure. But is that probable? Nope.

Is it possible that there is an unknown benefit to gene expressions altered by miRNA? Sure. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s possible that humans have adapted to use plant miRNAs as a cellular signaling mechanism to activate conditional clauses wherein different genes are expressed in order to optimize phenotypic adaptation to a plant-rich environment. What is the probability of this? It is not improbable that an organism would adapt to such a signaling mechanism given sufficient evolutionary pressure, genetic variance, and time. However, there are issues with this line of reasoning. First, in non-agricultural phases of human evolution, the plants would be engaged in an evolutionary arms race to continue to evolve their chemical defense mechanisms as humans adapted to them. Second, it currently appears that this effect does not exert acute deleterious effects on individual humans that would effect survival and reproduction enough to provide significantly strong selection pressure. Third, while time is less important than selection pressure in evolution, it remains true that a few hundred years is indeed very short in evolutionary time, and this period of time is not unknown to history. Had this sort of selection taken place, we wouldn’t have stories of the Irish potato famine (too few calories), we’d have stories of the Irish potato poisoning, in which thousands upon thousands would have died from eating potatoes (too many toxins).

There are many other unknowns. Perhaps you’ll share some in the comments.

Commonly questioned practices this study got right

There are often complaints that studies on mice cannot be extrapolated to humans. This can be a fair criticism, but is not likely to be used to mount a successful challenge to this study. Wherever ethically acceptable, humans were tested.

In particular, actual human blood and tissue samples were taken. These samples convincingly demonstrated the presence of plant miRNA in human blood and tissue in levels relatively equal to miRNA produced naturally by humans.

Further, these levels were compared against mice and calves. An example of the data is shown to the left. Note that the mice tended to demonstrate the lowest relative levels of miRNA. Humans represent the highest levels for the most relevant miRNA. Therefore, it is more reasonable to expect the effects measured in mice would be more pronounced in humans if we could control humans’ diets enough to conduct this experiment.

What conventional medicine should be saying about this study

It seems pretty simple: Rice elevates MIR168a in humans. Elevated MIR168a impairs the liver’s removal of LDL, or “bad cholesterol”. Increased LDL cholesterol causes atherosclerosis which leads to cardiovascular disease. Rice increases LDL cholesterol, and therefore, eating rice causes cardiovascular disease.
Now, I don’t completely buy into this narrative — particularly because there’s no mention of LDL particle size in this study. However, this article was published in Nature, one of the most prestigious journals on the planet, and there’s no uproar. If this study had concluded that eating red meat interferes with the liver in a way that raises “bad cholesterol”, would it not be the cover story everywhere?

How this study might fit with a paleo diet framework.

It’s hard to say anything definitive about this study beyond the convincing proof that rice miRNAs interfere with human gene expression. That said, we can use the paleo framework to make some predictions. We can predict that miRNAs that are evolutionarily novel are more likely to be deleterious to human health than beneficial. We can also suppose that even if the bulk of miRNAs are deleterious to humans, there may be a minority that are beneficial to most humans, and a few might be beneficial to humans with particular alleles.

The view that known individual components are not always harmful, and therefore shouldn’t be totally avoided, still leaves big gaps in our knowledge, and makes our daily decisions about what to eat susceptible to the undiscovered.
Paleo is bigger than lectins and phytates and saponins.

We’ve been presented with many past arguments about rice and potatoes being fine, but too high in carbohydrates to recommend for everyone.
The paleo framework is bigger than metabolic syndrome.

The more we learn about wheat, the more nefarious compounds we find.
Paleo is bigger than gluten free.

Although I personally think bok choy sucks based on taste, I never had a health reason for disliking it…
Paleo doesn’t know everything.

Potatoes and rice, still not paleo.

What I’m doing differently in light of this study

• Less likely to deviate from sashimi at sushi restaurants.
• Downgrading potatoes and rice from “neutral nutrient-poor waste of time” to “sneaky untrustworthy bastards”.
• Downgrading wheat from “probably a bad idea for everyone” to “all the shitty stuff about wheat plus the shitty stuff about soy”.
• Downgrading bok choy from “Hey, I’m not going to eat this, would you like it?” to “I’m not making out with you if you eat that”.

What I’m doing the same in light of this study

• Preferentially consuming animal foods.
• Scaling carbohydrate/starches daily in relation to activity levels
• Eating carrots and sweet potatoes when I want to ingest subterranean plant storage organs (because orange is sexier than white).
• Remaining skeptical of the applicability of populations isolated by geography like islands (Kitavans) and other extremes (Inuit) to humans in general.
• Aping Darwin while recognizing that Science provides us with limited evidence for us to use in our everyday lives, yet trying to be irritatingly correct anyway.

<sarcasm>Eat your vegetables folks, particularly if you want your gene expression impaired by the plant kingdom.</sarcasm>
Final thought: Think like a geek. Eat like a hunter. Train like a fighter. Look like a model. (Play and live like you don’t live in a zoo is always implied)

References
Sun, W., Julie Li, Y.-S., Huang, H.-D., Shyy, J. Y.-J., & Chien, S. (2010). microRNA: A Master Regulator of Cellular Processes for Bioengineering Systems. Annual review of biomedical engineering, 12, 1-27. [full-text PDF]

Zhang, L., Hou, D., Chen, X., Li, D., Zhu, L., Zhang, Y., Li, J., et al. (2011). Exogenous plant MIR168a specifically targets mammalian LDLRAP1: evidence of cross-kingdom regulation by microRNA. Cell Research, 1-20

Libertarians, please hear me out. I once considered myself among your numbers, but I got over it. The reason I got over it may be the very reason you were drawn to it, or cling to it now. For some reason, there seems to be a proclivity to chant the infallible virtues of libertarianism within the paleo community. This is likely influenced by many factors. Perhaps the paleo diet attracts a disproportionate number of individuals with low Agreeableness. This isn’t an unreasonable explanation considering the community’s general rejection of conventional wisdom and opposition of mainstream nutritional advice. While I think personality may be part of it, I suggest that much of the impetus springs from flawed conceptions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors — whether in popular conception, or in the anthropological literature.

“Everyone’s entitled to their opinion… but you’re not entitled to your own facts. Sorry, you’re not.” -Michael Specter (probably not originator)

As part as the certification course required to wear my kilt in the United States of America, I was forced to watch Braveheart no less than 5 zillion times. Thus, I am well versed in the emotional appeal of yelling “FREEDOOoooommm…” until the blood loss from disembowelment lowers one’s blood pressure to levels no longer capable of sustaining breath and consciousness. As this pertains to libertarianism, there are a number of assumptions that need to be addressed before identifying oneself with the political philosophy. Libertarians who haven’t put any hard-thinking into the full meaning and implications of libertarianism seem to gravitate to it because of the more superficial associations with freedom. Look, it even starts off with the Latin root for freedom, liber! Individual liberty here we come! Great! Wipe off your blue face paint.

It ain’t that easy.

<sarcasm>But! But! The government of the United States of America told me that freedom is a good thing, and it intuitively seems like a good thing, and libertarianism puts it right up there in the front for all the world to see and know and love. Hooray! I’ve finally found the political party of my dreams that will let me live with personal freedom in an environment where everyone’s freedom is enforced by…</sarcasm>

Wait… enforced? Enforced doesn’t sound like liberty. Since when does “America the Beautiful” end, “Let the fear of enforcement ring”? Who’s doing this enforcement of freedom? How did we get from ad hoc hunter-gatherer bands to enforcement? The scope of those questions is slightly bigger than this piece affords, but let’s work toward that.

I’m not saying that all libertarians are unsophisticated in their attempt to reconcile libertarianism with human-nature. For example, these are Jason’s words from a recent post on his blog, Evolving Economics…

” [Libertarianism] is the preferred arrangement given human nature and the shape of the world today.” [source]

While I respect Jason’s thinking on many matters, I don’t find that libertarianism generally makes any sincere attempt to reconcile itself with human-nature. Saying “freedom is human nature, therefore libertarianism” is not enough. In a future post, I’ll outline improvements that libertarians could easily make that would bring it more in line with human nature AND the shape of the world today. In other words, libertarianism in its current iteration is burdened with sub-optimal and sub-accurate dogma. If libertarianism was a true political philosophy, rather than an ideology, it would self-correct in the face of new understanding.

Libertarianisms’ ground-rules

There are almost as many conceptions of libertarianism as there are libertarians. Because it seems to represent the popular conception of libertarianism, this is the basic framework I’ll be referring to in this piece:

“Libertarianism is grounded in the Principle of Equal Freedom: All people are free to think, believe, and act as they choose, so long as they do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. Of course, the devil is in the details of what constitutes “infringement,” but there are at least a dozen essentials to liberty and freedom that need shielding from encroachment:

1. The rule of law.
2. Property rights.
3. Economic stability through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system.
4. A reliable infrastructure and the freedom to move about the country.
5. Freedom of speech and the press.
6. Freedom of association.
7. Mass education.
8. Protection of civil liberties.
9. A robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states.
10. A potent police for protection of our freedoms from attacks by other people within the state.
11. A viable legislative system for establishing fair and just laws.
12. An effective judicial system for the equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws.”

– Shermer (2011) [emphasis mine]

Libertarianism is incongruent with observed hunter-gatherers

First of all, the hunter-gatherer ethnography is completely made up of bands characterized by egalitarian political organization, or at least something that looks egalitarian in practice (Boehm 2001). This egalitarianism is mainly manifest as a tenacious unwillingness of the group to be dominated by any one individual. Political upstarts are subject to corrective “leveling” mechanisms exacted at the behest of the group. These tend to take the form of non-violent (physically speaking) mechanisms of social pressure (Gray 2009) that may escalate to banishment from the group, and in some cases, killing of the offender (Boehm 2001).

Libertarianism offers no protection from hierarchical domination, and differs from agrarian state capitalism primarily in its desire to simply swap out government officials with business officials (Black 1984).

“we are at least entitled to the acknowledgement that there is nothing in the slightest unlibertarian about organization, hierarchy, leaders and followers, etc.” – Rothbard (1981) [emphasis mine]

“[Conservatives’ and libertarians’] articulation is not always harmonious but they share a common interest in consigning their conflicts to elite or expert resolution. To demonize state authoritarianism while ignoring identical albeit contract-consecrated subservient arrangements in the large-scale corporations which control the world economy is fetishism at its worst. And yet (to quote the most vociferous of radical libertarians, Professor Murray Rothbard) there is nothing un-libertarian about “organization, hierarchy, wage-work, granting of funds by libertarian millionaires, and a libertarian party.” Indeed. That is why libertarianism is just conservatism with a rationalist/positivist veneer.” – Black (1984)

“Authority is the very essence of social organization. Hence, it can not be absent from any single institutional organization.” – Malinkowski (1960)

While there may be nothing “unlibertarian” about oganization, hierarchy, and [authoritarian] contract-consecrated subservient arrangements, such principles are un-egalitarian and un-hunter-gatherer (Boehm 2001).

Referring to Shermer’s framework, at least five of the fundamental principles of libertarianism are contrary to what we observe in hunter-gatherer bands [in bold above]. I say at least because I am, for the moment, ignoring the gaping chasm between “laws” in their conception under a libertarian state (oxymoron much?), and social norms. This precludes the discussion of three further points which present further points of incongruence, though on a slightly different level. In the absence of codified laws, hunter-gatherer bands tend to shun physical punishment in favor of controlling social violations via social sanctioning mechanisms such as humor and play (Gray 2009).

I do not mean to fall into the fantasy “noble savage” trap by claiming violence does not occur among HGs. When social sanctioning of individuals remains ineffective after multiple transgressions, AND if forcing the individual out of the group does not work, then a coalition of individuals may decide to kill an individual (Boehm 2001). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors weren’t operating in a state of cerebral political enlightenment

I’m compelled to point out that the flip-side of the “noble savage” argument is also problematic. This occurs because the calculus for indexing violence among HGs involves a zillion data points consisting of songs and jokes and other social progressions levied against an individual, then all of the sudden, murder. In this way, the physical violence curve goes from flat to total violence in a way unfamiliar to our minutiae of legal gradations. Unfortunately for the fidelity of the picture, ethnocentricity leads to exclusion of things like jokes and songs from being recorded in the category of “violence”. Since hunter-gatherers have neither abstracted economic systems nor permanent land, sanctions such as fines and prisons are not available or practical options. From our perspective, this appears to result in what we might consider overly harsh punishments for social violations. Thus, HGs end up with a an apparently disproportionate level of violence because of errors in categorization of violence, and lack of alternative methods of sanctioning available to HGs.

Five Hunter-Gatherers V. Libertarian Incompatibilities

1. Property Rights.

For appropriate discussion of this principle, we must distinguish between two types of property: 1) Property made by individuals from natural resources, and 2) Property consisting of land (and the natural resources related to land).

An informal system of property rights does appear in HGs with respect to personal items such as tools. Such items tend to be fashioned from natural resources by individuals themselves. While the amount of property is almost trivial, there is some room for conversation on property rights in case #1.

However, by definition, hunter-gatherers have no ownership connection to land. The land ownership principle in libertarianism is an unfounded assumption of absolutely agrarian origins, and is completely unsupported by hunter-gatherer anthropology. Attempts to assert HG property rights must account for the fact that if a person moves several feet, the rights of the former space are immediately abandoned and flow to the new space. Thus, any ‘rights’ are more correctly described as rights of the individual’s body, which must at all times occupy some space, and not rights to the land per se.

It would be wise at this point to ask: “If not in hunter-gatherers, when do land rights arise?” We find the answer to this in what anthropologists refer to as delayed-return cultures (Woodburn 1982).

“Greater equality of wealth, power and of prestige has been achieved in certain hunting and gathering societies than in any other human societies. These societies, which have economies based on immediate rather than delayed return, are assertively egalitarian. Equality is achieved through direct, individual access to resources; through direct, individual access to means of coercion and means of mobility which limit the imposition of control; through procedures which prevent saving and accumulation and impose sharing; through mechanisms which allow goods to circulate without making people dependent upon one another. People are systematically disengaged from property and therefore from the potentiality in property for creating dependency.” – Woodburn (1982)

It is precisely at the shift from immediate-return to delayed-return societies that we see property (land in particular) rights arise.

Hunter-gatherers do not observe, and are not concerned with, land rights. HGs tend to reject land rights claimed by others (Scott 2010); point 3 below bears on this further. They do maintain personal property — to which we may ascribe some modern notion of rights — primarily in the form of tools. I do not advocate principles which would deny the right to the fruits of one’s labor, but a full analysis of this will have to wait for another day.

2. Economic stability through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system.

We must parse this further and recognize that two claims are here implied. 1) Economic stability is sufficiently important to human individuals to warrant its optimization, and 2) Economic security is only possible through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system. The term “economic” stability carries some assumptions that make it difficult to map to HGs. For the sake of discussion, this must be roughly understood to mean biological needs, as these tend to be the only concerns of HGs. Because of the mechanism of neo-Darwinian evolution, I will take claim #1 as true. In this, I include the biological drive to signal and display mate quality.

Hunter-gatherers do achieve economic stability, but not through banking or monetary systems. This is manifest by a psychology naturally focused on being in the present, and the absence of time conceptualization (lack of worry and planning for future events). Stability is gained primarily individual (and direct) self-sufficiency, and sharing (Woodburn 1982). This sharing maybe at times be considered voluntary, yet is also motivated by signaling and social sanctioning.

3. A reliable infrastructure and the freedom to move about the country.

This point implies some commonsensical, but problematic assumptions. These cascade into the incongruence of this and the remaining points about police and military. There are three issues: 1) Assumption of nationality (“the country”), and therefore, the legitimacy of a system of nation-states through which nationality may be attained, 2) The freedom to move about, 3) Infrastructure is required to enable movement, 4) It is the responsibility of the polity to provide said infrastructure. To remain withn the context of a hunter-gatherer political philosophy and libertarianism, we shall focus on issues 1 and 2.

“…we argue that the primitive state may have been a bad thing. To do so, we provide simple models of anarchy, of organized banditry, and of a state. We can think of the former as a “state of nature” and of the second as a society in which groups of raiders are relatively organized (the Vikings might be an example) but in which the settled population lack the kind of hierarchies or structures we associate with a state. By contrast, our state will have some minimal organization…” – Moselle (2001)

Nationality is a construct that has arisen directly from agrarians (Nozick 1974). It emerged out of the hunter-gatherer-incongruent concept of land rights on the small scale (Moselle 2001). Hunter-gatherers tend vehemently to reject assimilation into the nation-state system (Scott 2010), and there is more evidence of individuals attempting to escape the nation-state to join hunter-gatherer bands (Koehnline 1994) than the reverse.

The assumption of a system of nation-states may be the most ethnocentric and flimsy assumption made by libertarians attempting to formulate a political philosophy congruent with human nature. The notion of land rights is similarly poor and flimsy, but the nation-state concept builds on the land rights assumption with a mountain of other post hoc assumptions.

I already argued in favor of the freedom geographical movement in Part I of this series. However, limiting movement to one’s country of coincidental birth misses the point of that article.

4. A robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states.

This obviously relies on point #3. Since nation-states are assumed by default, but are already an incongruent construct, we can easily refute this point by simply remembering the fallacy of the nation-state system. However, hunter-gatherer anthropology (notably, the delayed-return or sedentary bands artificially created by geographical boundaries or modern property rights that don’t represent ancestral populations) is often used to demonstrate quasi-warfare and military action amount HGs. So let’s briefly look at hunter-gatherers’ relationship to the concept of military action.

In short, attempts to construe hunter-gatherer violence as warfare is a conflation of disparate categories of violence. As already described, hunter-gatherer violence leading to death tends to be a social leveling mechanism exacted when other options fail. However, family members of those being punished do not always take kindly to having their relatives executed. Thus, there is sometimes a tendency for retribution that will increase the death toll beyond a single individual.

Another sort of violence in hunter-gatherer tribes is that which is employed in service of mating opportunities. Again, when one man kills another man, family members may participate in retributive acts. In fact, this is one powerful scenario underlying the existence social sanctioning and other leveling mechanisms used in the preceding example of violence.

Note that the motivations of the violence in both of these scenarios is related to social/reproductive matters.

War is motivated by two primary factors: 1) Land, 2) Labor to cultivate the land — generally in the form of slaves — or provide other economic incentive based on said land (Scott 2009).

It is a testament to Homer’s insight into human-nature that he spun the Trojan War into a tale about the beauty of a woman and the jealousy of the men surrounding her. He demonstrates the power of reframing the context of armed group conflict as something personal and emotional, rather than the economic practice it always is. State propagandists have been capitalizing on this strategy ever since.

In other words, hunter-gatherers do not engage in warfare. We must not be lead astray by attempts to conflate violence motivated by personal/social conflicts of group members with violence motivated by land and the coerced labor needed to bring it into productivity. This act of decontextualization is commonly employed in misconstruals of hunter-gatherer violence.

There are zero examples of paleolithic tools designed for group warfare, or individual human-on-human violence in the archaeological record. Granted, tools used for killing animals for food may also be used for killing humans. However, human opponents are very different from non-human animal opponents. Throughout the neolithic history of implements of death, we see significant divergences in killing technologies used on prey, and those used to kill other humans. This is particularly true regarding groups of humans fighting other groups of humans. The dynamics of killing change, and this distinction drives differences in weapons accordingly. Thus, if humans were engaged in group conflicts with one another during the paleolithic, it would be reasonable to expect some divergence in weapon technologies for this purpose.

Primatology. Another common misconstrual of hunter-gatherer social behavior is the unsustainable generalization of other primate behavior to humans (Boehm 2001). Chimpanzees and gorillas both exhibit strong male-dominance hierarchies. This is often taken to indicate that humans have evolved in a way that justifies dominance hierarchies. While this question is complex, a brief examination of the chimpanzee and the gorilla will build our case against human warfare in the paleolithic.

Chimpanzees and gorillas both demonstrate dominance hierarchies. However, chimp violence and gorilla violence is characterized by many differences. While many of the differences are driven by their differences in mating strategy, there are two salient differences. Chimpanzee groups tend to consist of large numbers of related males living in a relatively fixed location. Gorillas tend to live in groups with one male and are relatively nomadic. Another difference is that chimps engage in group conflict with chimpanzees from other groups. Yes, chimps engage in land/territory based resource battles that resemble agrarian state wars in humans. Again, this is a complex topic, but I wanted to plant the idea that generalization from primates is not straightforward, and certainly does not support the libertarian notion of land rights (unless you’re a chimp?). See Boehm’s 2001 work for a thorough treatment of primates and hierarchy.

5. A potent police for protection of our freedoms from attacks by other people within the state.

Unpacking this statement reveals that many of the ‘freedoms’ requiring police protection within ‘the state’ are property crimes relating to the lack of “agrarian justice” in the modern nation-state system (Paine 1797; George 1879). Removing the assumption that ownership of land is a natural right alleviates many of the structural problems related to this. This is another good example of but one emergent property of the libertarian state that mirrors the current agrarian state.

Hunter-gatherers experience high degrees of personal autonomy/freedom without any form of police protection.

Human psychology guarantees sub-optimal well-being under libertarianism

As this article has run far longer than expected, I bridge this is-ought gap and cover this in a later post.

“the primitive state tends to result in lower levels of popular welfare than exist under organized banditry or anarchy. In some cases, our state can even increase disorder and decrease total output.” – Moselle (2001) [emphasis mine]

Libertarianism yields structures that mirror agrarian states

The following is Moselle’s account of the theories of the basic agrarian state. The specification of agrarian state is my addition. This is intentional — to show that these paragraphs lose very little of their meaning when also read through the mind of those wishing to justify the libertarian state. One must only change a few words for them to hold in both instances.

“In part, historians optimistic views of the state come, in the absence of evidence, from the theories of the state they have in the back of their minds. Theories of the state might address three issues. They might seek to explain the existence of the state, perhaps by some quasihistorical account of its origin. They might give a normative account of the state; that is, seek to legitimize the authority of the state. Finally, they might discuss the consequences of the state; that is, provide a model of the state. By far the most influential theory of the state, the contractual theory, does all three of the above.

In the typical contractual account, individuals live initially in a state of anarchy, and club together for protection. Economies of specialization lead to the hiring of agents to carry out this task, while economies of scale lead to the formation of (local) monopoly defense organizations. These “protective associations” can be identified as (minimal) states…

Contained in these accounts, however, is also an implicit model of what the state does. Typically the state provides certain services to its citizens, especially protection and the preservation of order. In return, citizens provide payments to their king or lord, perhaps in the form of taxes or feudal dues. Different contractual theories differ in the obligations both of the state and of its citizens. How good a contractual state is for the populace depends on the terms of this contract but, even in Hobbes’s least restricted of contractual states, life is preferable to that in his picture of anarchy. Indeed, if the supposed contract is agreed to by the populace as a whole, then they cannot be worse off under the state than under anarchy: their well-being were they to reject the contract places a lower bound on their well-being were they to accept.” – Moselle (2001)

Indeed, the libertarian account of the state is just another contractual theory of the state. It attempts to explain the state’s existence, to legitimize its authority, and provide a model of the state. Shermer happily jumps into this narrative by specifying specialized functions that lead to the hiring of agents to carry out the protection of individuals and contracts by way of military, police, legislators, and adjudicators. These “economies of scale” then lead to local monopoly defense organizations. Unfortunately for the libertarian contractual account of the state, the hunter-gatherer ethnography undermines the rationale for the state’s existence, its authority, and provides alternatives to its model.

Conclusion

A synthesis of hunter-gatherer political philosophy must account for the leveling mechanism of opting-out that was prevalent throughout the paleolithic, and the distinct change in behavior and mentality historically and invariably caused by the transition from nomadism (no land rights) to sedentism (enforced land rights).

Rather than account for either of these necessities, libertarianism begins its story with neolithic agrarians, and the land ‘rights’ (read: problems) associated with them. Thus, it cannot be considered to be in alignment with our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Indeed, it is possible to root the entirety of libertarian philosophy firmly in agrarian assumptions. In other words, libertarianism is NOT paleo.

I have not had time to make the connection from hunter-gatherer social conditions to human-nature in this post. Among other things, a discussion is warranted on the reasons we tend to paradoxically find the drive to egalitarianism present among already free people, while libertarian impulses primarily exist among those living under [relative] coercion with a gnawing sense of fear and uncertainty. Such a discussion is forthcoming.

And yes, I have intentionally avoided explicitly discussing the Austrian economic theory that tends to get bundled with libertarianism… for now.

Before you get all excited and go McCarthy on everyone, the reconciliation I will present in subsequent posts doesn’t end in ism, and doesn’t start with a ‘c’ or ‘m’. And… I’ll do it all without the redistribution of any person’s wealth.

I welcome your comments. Please avoid ad hominem and keep the discussion reasoned. Oh, I’m not the only one among the authoritarian-averse paleosphere who’s already jaded by another U.S. election cycle. After you’ve left a comment, maybe check out Richard’s post from a couple days ago.

References

Black, Bob (1984). “The Libertarian As Conservative“. Eris Society lecture.

Boehm, Christopher (2001). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. Harvard University Press.

George, Henry (1879). Progress and Poverty.

Gray, Peter (2009). “Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence“. The American Journal of Play, 1(4), 476-522. [full-text PDF]

Koehnline, J. (Ed.). (1994). Gone to Croatan: The Origins of North American Dropout Culture. Autonomedia.

Malinowski , B . 1960. A scientific theory of culture. Oxford University Press.

Moselle, B. (2001). “A Model of a Predatory State“. Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 17(1), 1-33. doi: 10.1093/jleo/17.1.1. [full-text PDF]

Nozick, Robert (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books.

Paine, Thomas (1797). “Agrarian Justice“.

Rothbard, Murray (1981). “A critique of the New Libertarian Manifesto“. Strategy of the New Libertarian Alliance. [online from Ludwig Von Mises Institute]

Scott, James C. (2010). The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press.

Shermer, Michael (2011).  “Liberty and Science“. Cato Institute (Cato Unbound).

Woodburn (1982). Egalitarian Societies. Man, 1(17), 431-451. [full-text PDF]

Mat Lalonde is to message dissemination as the average paleo blogger is to chemistry.

At the beginning of his talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium, Dr. Lalonde showed a picture of the CCB building that houses the Pfizer Lecture Hall at Harvard. He then contextualized the talk as: what he’d say if he were presenting to his peers in this building. While such an exercise has merit, the larger context of the talk seemed odd.

Most Readers of Paleo Blogs Are Chemists?

The implication in Mat’s talk is that those disseminating information based on evolutionary frameworks can’t really say many of the things they say and have them pass muster with chemists. I’m not sure how many chemists frequent various paleo blogs, but I’d guesstimate it’s roughly in the range of “not even close enough to think for a fraction of a second to attempt writing at a PhD. in chemistry level.” This might not be an issue if writing to a general audience and writing to trained scientists wasn’t, in many ways, mutually exclusive.

“so as a chemist i read [a] blog and the immediate thing that comes to mind is that this person is an idiot and i will never come to this blog again. you’ve lost all credibility. this is why chemistry is important folks” -Mat Lalonde

I find this insinuation – that chemists (or any other scientists) are unable to distinguish between a blogger who’s writing for an unscientific public and one who’s writing with the intent of scientific accuracy – to be rather thin. A chemist incapable of recognizing the difference, or unwilling to understand the value of targeting messages accordingly, has just lost all credibility in message dissemination. This is why marketing is important folks.

*I grant that I have taken the above quote somewhat out of context. However, its original use was intended to illustrate the point that being scientifically inaccurate makes one an idiot in the eyes of a scientist, not strictly a commentary on the blog in question.

The stated theme of the talk was “teaching” members of the paleo community how to build and maintaining credibility. Again, such an exercise is commendable, but I find significant oddity in choosing to direct paleo civilians’ (bloggers, et cetera) credibility efforts at the world’s foremost “core” scientists. Credibility efforts will have more effect if focused on credibility relative to the public at large. To my mind, a talk about building credibility in the context of moving paleo forward would have been more effectively delivered by someone who’s spent significantly more time on the other side of the Charles River, at Harvard Business School. A “How to forward the message of paleo” talk would have more impact presented by Don Draper than Mr. Spock.

“[in a talk to core scientists] there are no shenanigans to be made. you can’t make any exaggerations… People who overstate their claims… are treated to a question and answer period that makes a CIA interrogation look like a teenybopper interview.” -Mat Lalonde, PhD.

Statements of this nature are perfectly logical, philosophically correct, scientifically accurate, and maybe even economically optimal – when interacting with Homo economicus. Unfortunately, Homo economicus is a myth. Actual humans in the wild seldom respond optimally to messages crafted for stringent accuracy and epistemological certitude. Individuals among Homo sapiens love shenanigans and exaggerations and overstated claims. Had Mat’s talk been delivered to my peers (from the marketing world), he would have been exposed to a Q&A trainwreck akin to Dr. Sheldon Cooper giving unsolicited improv tips to the cast of SNL. Dr. Lalonde is as far out of his depth when it comes to spreading messages to the public as the paleosphere’s practitioners and propagandists are when it comes to organic chemistry. And that’s all fine, but I think Mat’s message needs to be tempered, and his talk recontextualized.

Optimizing Focus

Developing a level of education necessary for optimal credibility is a worthwhile endeavor. Unfortunately, investment in education significantly suffers from the law of diminishing marginal utility. For advocates of any position, the optimal point on the education curve will be somewhere above the bulk of those they wish to spread their message to, and below that of the foremost experts in the field. Indeed, those with a general audience will attain an optimal level of education/understanding somewhere just above that of their desired demographic, and likely well below that of doctoral level experts. Writing and conversation should be directed to this audience for optimal effect. Education and writing above this level is non-optimal, and potentially detrimental to your message.

For the vast majority of paleo bloggers, practitioners, and adherents, discussions of paleo are intended to help regular people. Regular people aren’t scientists. Talking science to non-scientists may increase perceived authority, but it will also tend to alienate and confuse people.

I highly recommend watching Mat’s talk. It’s valuable from multiple angles of consideration, but there are two I’d like you to keep in mind as you watch: 1) Where does the bar of scientific rigor need to be to engage in credible conversations with people you’d like to converse with or persuade? 2) How much does the scientific minutiae detract from the message for you, and potentially those you’d like to engage with in turn?

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27570335 w=640&h=360]

Having said all of the above, I conceptually agree with Mat in (at least) one regard. It is important for some members of the paleo community to raise the bar. In terms of demographics, there is room for a subset of thinkers to advance scientific hypotheses and engage with the scientific community.

Specific Comments on the Evolutionary Framework

Dr. Lalonde accurately provides examples of invalid applications of an evolutionary biology framework in the talk. With so many voices, we have no practical way to empirically evaluate how often these statements are presented in an invalid way. Let’s just assume that it’s frequent enough to warrant some attention. Consider the following example Mat provides:

“we evolved over millions of years without consuming the foods that became readily available only after the advent of agriculture, hence we are not adapted to them.”

Indeed, this syllogism is incomplete to the point of being invalid. However, I can also imagine many conversations in which its brevity would deliver more impact than an a sentence sanctioned by Science. Here’s the above statement unpacked into a little more scientifically correct construction:

Dietary constituents may exert selection pressure which, when significant, will subject advantageous traits to positive selection, and negative traits to negative selection, and may result in adaptation. Foods that did not become readily available for human consumption until the advent of cooking and/or agriculture have had relatively little evolutionary time to exert selective pressure on humans, and may not have exerted strong enough selection pressure to drive adaptation, and/or the requisite adaptations may not have arisen to be selected for, or may not have been selected for because of chance. Further, more recently introduced foods may have provided the paradoxical benefit of providing an important boost in calories that  increased the length of survival and overall reproduction rates in-turn, while simultaneously decreasing the objective health of individuals. Hence we are less likely to be adapted to such foods than foods consumed in greater quantities for longer periods of time across the span of hominin evolution.

The example Mat provides is invalid, but it’s a lot easier to fit on a T-shirt than my, somewhat more scientifically accurate, reconstruction.

I also find Dr. Lalonde’s dismissal of the evolutionary biology framework to be rather misleading. Consider the following:

“just because your hypothesis relies on “evolution” doesn’t make you any more right than anyone else”

This is statement is literally correct, but obfuscates the usefulness of the evolutionary framework in a way that inaccurately discounts its importance. In biological organisms which are subject to Darwinian evolution (all of them on planet earth), the probability of an evolutionary hypothesis being correct will increase relative to the known ecological constituents relevant to the species in question. The probability of a hypothesis being correct increases relative to the increase in knowledge from phylogeny, phylogenetics, biology, archaeology, ethology, biochemistry, ecology, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. While all strictly untested hypotheses may be philosophically equal, they are not necessarily equal in their probability of being “right.”

Mat makes another statement that is true while counterproductively discounting the evolutionary framework. In reference to applying the term anti-nutrient to all species equally with respect to individual substances:

“whether or not a substance is an anti-nutrient depends on the species ingesting the substance, because it depends on their digestion process.”

Absolutely true. However, in analyzing an organisms evolutionary pressures, we can begin to make probabilistic predictions as to their strategy as defense mechanisms. Organisms with predators of a certain type are more likely to have engaged in an evolutionary arms race to develop defense mechanisms targeted at said predators. Knowing something about the predators allows us to formulate hypotheses via probabilistic reasoning that are significantly more likely to be correct than chance. Phylogenic relatedness has direct bearing on our ability to predict the accuracy of such hypotheses. Indeed, this is implied in the above quote, but becomes lost when attempts are made to discount the value of evolutionary logic.

Rather than prove his point, Dr. Lalonde here demonstrates exactly what you lose when you discount the value of the evolutionary framework:

“if you look at things that athletes would be eating on a quote unquote paleo diet, you’ve got things like yams and cassava. and if you look at the antinutrient content, it’s the same order of magnitude… so if you’re going to tell someone, ‘hey, you should not eat grains and legumes because they contain anti-nutrients’ a biologist – a plant biologist – is just going to look at you and say, ‘wow, this guy’s a moron.’ this stuff is really important, and you’re going to loose credibility immediately if you make statements like that. so it’s not the way to sell it. you have to evaluate these things on a one on one basis.”

Yes, ignoring the evolutionary framework and focusing on the proximal anti-nutrient content will tend to lead you astray. However, applying the evolutionary framework to things like yams versus things like grains allows you to quickly make decisions that are more likely to be good decisions.

Takeaways

1. Take Mat Lalonde’s advice if you’re trying to “sell” an idea to a scientist in a relevant field.
2. If you’re trying to “sell” an idea to the vast majority of people, simple heuristics are what humans are adapted to. Strict logical validity bordering on scientism is an anti-nutrient that will prevent your message from being digested.
3. Mat Lalonde is a tremendously valuable asset to the scientific understanding of nutrition and to the paleo community (even if he doesn’t consider himself part of it), and I love learning from him in his areas of expertise.
4. The science needed to positively adjudicate every question on nutrition is simply not available. When confronted with the absence of data, the evolutionary framework of paleo has an above average probability of quickly approximating optimality.
5. Scientists who discount that hypotheses are bolstered by evolutionary logic do so to their own disadvantage.

Addendum: A Less Right Hypothesis

“if your movement is going to move forward it will have to be taken seriously by core scientists, and if it is to be taken seriously by core scientists, then you should present it in these terms. the reason why this is also useful is that scientist love to be handed projects on a silver platter.”

The first premise is simply false. The “movement” can go a long way without being taken seriously by core scientists. It would probably be helpful if more core scientists were on-board. Adoption might happen faster if core scientists were on-board. Counterpoint: The issue of climate change is a great example of how leading with mountains of science and scientists doesn’t necessarily translate to moving forward.

Skin Color and Beauty

Tanning seems like an obvious case for the social constructivists to prove, once and for all, that our conceptions of beauty are products of immersive socialization. We hear the arguments about pasty skin being attractive in times when the bourgeoisie lounged indoors counting money and adjusting powdered wigs while the proletariat labored in the fields. The story goes that having a tan was a dead giveaway that one was a low-status individual. Of course, we’ll momentarily ignore that this narrative tends to leave out the part that darker skin also carries varying racist overtones. In any case, the social constructivist points to modern society in which very few people know farmers, let alone have ever labored on a farm.

Since the cultural milieu has shifted away from an agrarian dominated context, the stigma of sun-induced dark skin has lifted. With the swing in culture, the attractiveness pendulum has swung the other way as well. This is evidenced by the widespread obsession for the “healthy glow” gained from spending time in the sun. The narrative has subsumed this observation and explained that, in fact, tans are now a signal of bourgeois status because, clearly, proletarian office drones don’t have expendable leisure time to spend laying around on the beach. Doesn’t the story fit together so nice and commonsensically!?

The Color Theory of Tanning

Design nerds, get out of CMYK, RGB, or HSV mode for a second. Scientists working with human visual perception use the (aptly named) Lab color space to most accurately replicate the way our eyes process inputs. For non-uber design geeks, Lab represents a 3-axis color system represented by L, a, and b. The L-axis describes the spectrum from Lightness-darkness. The a-axis describes the spectrum from red-green. The b-axis describes the spectrum from yellow-blue. I’ll try to just use “red-green”, et cetera when possible, but the shorthand is woven into all of the charts and quotes from the papers.

Sun tanning primarily changes values along two axes, the L (lightness) and b (yelowness). The increased melanin resulting from tanning results in a decrease in lightness and an increase in yellowness (Stamatas, et al. 2004). Therefore, we can make the simple prediction that if people indeed prefer tans resulting from the sun, we should see a preference for relatively darker skin and relatively yellower skin.

Though tanning has now been popular in Western culture for decades (Melia & Bulman. 1995), studies haven’t isolated the color variables necessary to test the “tan is beautiful” hypothesis until now. Ian Stephen, PhD and colleagues presented research in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior that address this question. Their study involved a group of white UK-based students who rated white faces, and a group of black South African students who rated black faces. The data from both groups was similar, and both are shown below…

South African rater’s adjustments of black face and similar results of Scottish rater’s of white face

The picture on the left is an example of the extremes available in the adjustment along both axes for the black faces. Note that the UK raters were rating a different face (not shown here).

Both cohorts show a strong grouping to the same quadrant. However, the quadrant selected was not what we’d expect if the “tan is beautiful” hypothesis was true. We should expect to see both groupings shifted to the top-left quadrant. It turned out that yellowness was perceived as a positive indicator of health, but relative lightness was preferred over darkness. Based on these data, we must conclude that the “tan is beautiful” hypothesis is incorrect.

The social constructivist narrative is also refuted by these findings. Since tanning behaviors are heavily influenced by socialization, we would expect to see a preference in the data for darker relative skin tones. Further, a constructivist explanation seeking to simultaneously explain pro-darker skin tanning in white individuals AND pro-lighter skin attitudes in black individuals would require the data to show the South African data to be in a different quadrant than the UK data. These data refute the existence of a culturally imparted ideal of beauty or health that can be plotted on the spectrum from lightness-darkness.

Since the “tan is beautiful” hypothesis and social constructivist arguments both fail, what explanations are we left with?

The Pasty Veg*ns Are Sexier than Sun-Bathed Carnivores Hypothesis

Enter the carotenoid. Sun exposure isn’t the only thing that affects skin color. Significant consumption of [carotenoid-containing] plant matter also impacts coloration. Stephen, et al conducted a study (results in the same paper) measuring the relationship in fruit and vegetable intake with skin color and the change in skin color resulting from carotenoid supplementation. They found that both supplementation and fruit and vegetable intake correlated with, and increased skin yellowness as measured by spectrophotometer. Further, the measured colorations were inconsistent with coloration changes from melanin (sun tan) and hemoglobin. The carotenoid coloration data fit with the results above; namely, an increase in yellowness without an decrease in lightness. This lead to another study (also reported in the same paper).

This time, rather than isolate the axes for lightness and yellowness, they provided raters with the ability to optimize for health along one axis corresponding to melanin coloration and another corresponding to carotenoid coloration. The results…

Scottish raters’ adjustments of Caucasian face. Melanin on the vertical axis. Carotenoid on the horizontal.

In a post about the same study on his blog Primal Wisdom, Don Maetz provides a heading “Carotenoid Complexion and Sun Tan Not Mutually Exclusive”. While that is literally true, it is also possible that the perception of health signaled by carotenoids and sun tans are mutually exclusive. In fact, that is what the cumulative data in Stephen, et al seems to indicate.

As the preceding image shows, when given the option to specifically optimize the appearance of health for melanin and/or carotenoids, raters unanimously preferred higher levels of carotenoid, but were almost equally mixed in preferences for melanin coloration. This adds support to the refutation of the “tan is beautiful” hypothesis, and opens the door for the “pasty veg*ns are hot” hypothesis.

Methodology

The usability of data in similar previous studies has been questioned on the grounds that giving raters the choice between two options on each axis, then asking them to choose between them, is prone to errors. Stephen, et al first narrowed the image samples to ranges that might be seen in normal populations, then allowed 13 variance points along each axis. Rather than showing all at once, raters were asked to adjust the spectrum up or down to optimize the appearance of health. When plotted across both axes, this results in 39 possible selections. This seems sufficient, but I’m not sure why they didn’t allow infinite adjustments along each axis.

Other criticisms have been made that the use of Photoshop® does not provide an image representative of real-world faces. However, it’s difficult to provide a wide range of skin tones for one individual with photographic accuracy. Surely, using different individuals with different skin tones would introduce myriad variables that would render coloration assessments useless. So while there is some validity to this line of criticism, I find it rather thin.

Criticisms/Improvements

• I’m not sure that South Africa’s history makes it the best choice for disentangling variables concerning race-based perceptions. So while I do think the method employed limits cultural influence somewhat, I’d like to see the study done where the two countries involved weren’t formerly linked via colonization. Also, the level to which South African college students are subject to “Westernization” is difficult to know.
• Since individuals’ colorations were tested before and after carotenoid supplementation, it would have been nice to see ratings of photos of this cohort before and after. Many other variables have the potential to spoil the results, but the hard parts of that experiment were mostly done by default.
• I don’t like celery.

Tanning Obsession: Evolutionary Misfire

Based on this research, I would suggest that visually perceivable results of carotenoid consumption were a reliable signal of health, and that preference is a serious candidate for positive selection that continues to influence our perceptions of health and beauty today. It is difficult to disentangle how much of this selection pressure may have been influenced by direct benefits to health and reproduction, and how it may also be an indirect signal of resource gathering ability. The data support the former…

“Carotenoids are associated with immunocompetence anddisease resistance in humans. Supplementation beneficiallyaffects thymus gland growth in children and increases T-lymphocyte number andactivity in healthy adults. Carotenoid levels become reduced in individuals with HIV and malaria, and in individuals with elevated levels ofserum α1-antichymotrypsin.”

…but the indirect role in sexual selection is a question for another day. For now, chalking up the motivation toward sun tans as an evolutionary misfire seems reasonable. When given the option, raters prefer carotenoid pigmentation to melanin. However, when not given a choice…

“In the single-pigment transforms, all faces were increasedin carotenoid and melanin color to improve healthy appearance. No effects of face sex or participant sex, or theirinteraction were found. Participants increased melanin and carotenoid color more in faces that were initially low in b*. Initial L* and a* values had smaller effects. Participants increased carotenoid more than melanin coloration.”

This demonstrates that the yellow gained through tans somewhat outweighs the darkening that comes along with it. Thus, “yellower is better” and “lighter is better” do not appear to be equal in heuristic value and could signal other things not considered here.

Application

My current interpretation of the health implications is that a veg*n diet is inferior to a paleo diet in important categories. At the same time, strictly carnivore interpretations and/or meat & potatoes interpretations of the paleo diet seem to be inferior to veg*n diets with respect to healthy carotenoid levels. For me, that means taking the best of the veg*n and paleo approaches and eliminating the worst of both approaches. Sure, you paleo-leaning veg*ns out there can disagree, but the meat & plant paleo camp will have better looking bodies. Sure, you anti-plant-matter-leaning paleos out there can disagree, but the veg*n-leaning paleos will have better looking skin. So… do you want to be right, or do you want to be healthy and hot?

Sun exposure appears to be best used as a tool for optimal levels of vitamin D and secosteroids, not a shortcut to health or hotness. Don’t argue with me, take it up with the data. You should definitely get some sun, but you probably can’t use color as an indicator that you’ve reached an optimal level.

Summary (Just Do This)

• If health is your goal, eat a ton of carotenoid-dense fruits and vegetables.
• If looking healthy is your goal, eat a ton of carotenoid-dense fruits and vegetables.
• Get sun for the vitamin D and the secosteroids.
• Don’t get sun just for the color.
• Oh, you should probably subscribe so you don’t miss adding another dimension to the equation with the findings from this study: “Who is the fairest of them all? Race, attractiveness and skin color sexual dimorphism“

References
Glenn, E. N. (2008). Yearning for lightness: transnational circuits in the marketing and consumption of skin lighteners. Gender & Society, 22, 281–302. *also appears as a chapter in The Kaleidoscope of Gender: Prisms, Patterns, and Possibilities‘  (2010).

Melia, J., & Bulman, A. (1995). Sunburn and tanning in a British population. Journal of Public Health Medicine, 17, 223–229.

Stamatas, G. N., Zmudzka, B. Z., Kollias, N., & Beer, J. Z. (2004). Non-invasivemeasurements of skin pigmentation in situ. Pigment Cell Research, 17, 618–626.

Stephen, Ian D., Vinet Coetzee, and David I. Perrett. “Carotenoid and melanin pigment coloration affect perceived human health.” Evolution and Human Behavior 32, no. 3 (May 2011): 216-227. [full-text pdf]