“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.

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.

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]

What pains me most is that it’s actually a great strategy conceptually, and one that has served humanity well over millions of years. Somebody made a really bad movie about a guy who promises to move to Canada in the event that George W. Bush won the election for his second term. Of course, we all know how that turned out and he actually follows through with his stated intentions. Now, I take this act somewhat seriously. After all, I moved to Panama City, Panama shortly after the same election. Granted, I’d intended to anyway, but it was extra motivation in light of my frustration with the fear-drenched American politics and rampant jingoism exemplified by the political climate at the time. That endeavor lead to, or highlighted, two insights.

To those short on motivation in the domain of thought, leaving the United States (for any reason) is tantamount to heresy. These ardent right-wing authoritarian followers aren’t amenable to the idea that the brainchild of Jefferson and Madison has weathered time exactly as Jefferson predicted (not well, and needing of revolution in order to maintain its greatness). For them, what is is what was meant to be; ordained by the infinite wisdom of the founding fathers <sarcasm>who emblazoned “In God We Trust” on our currency</sarcasm> in the hopes that a mint could forever engender the support of some invisible magical overlord.

It is not in my blood to side with sloth and indifference in service of monotony. No, I shall take my measure of justification from the admiration of the pioneering spirit implied by the enlightened of those before us:

To remind [King George III] that our ancestors, before their emigration to America, were the free inhabitants of the British dominions in Europe, and possessed a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness. That their Saxon ancestors had, under this universal law, in like manner left their native wilds and woods in the north of Europe, had possessed themselves of the island of Britain, then less charged with inhabitants, and had established there that system of laws which has so long been the glory and protection of that country. Nor was ever any claim of superiority or dependence asserted over them by that mother country from which they had migrated; and were such a claim made, it is believed that his majesty’s subjects in Great Britain have too firm a feeling of the rights derived to them from their ancestors, to bow down the sovereignty of their state before such visionary pretensions. And it is thought that no circumstance has occurred to distinguish materially the British from the Saxon emigration. -Thomas Jefferson, The Rights of British America

Indeed, Jefferson recognized that voting with one’s feet was not only legitimate, but also a natural right and universal law. With a much narrower understanding of the ancestral migrations of humans, he outlined the mechanism of severing ties of authoritarians by vacating one territory in favor of frontier.

This strategy has evolutionary precedent. Our ancestors largely depended on individuals acting in concert to improve their individual survival. Hunter-gatherer bands were more effective hunters and gatherers than individuals or pairs. Extrapolating (I think fairly) from modern hunter-gatherers, they were well aware of this advantage and sought to maintain group solidarity. Surely, this had its upper limits as hunting and gathering does not scale very far in relation to coverable territory. The difference between hunter-gatherer life and modern life with respect to groups is that a significant number of people voluntarily leaving could also reduce the group size to below optimal levels. Thus, in a dispute, it would have often been advantageous for both sides to reach a compromise. The ultimatum game of, “if you don’t like it, then leave”, had much more serious consequences. As such, its power as a political act was more significant.

Nevertheless, leaving was always an option for individuals and any coalition that could be organized. Political coercion was absolutely limited by this dynamic.

James C. Scott extends the “frontier” concept in ‘The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia‘. In Jefferson’s time, as with ancestral hunter-gatherers, frontier existed just over the horizon from civilization. Rather than define “frontier” as the raw frontier as we imagine it, he delineates further by geographical barriers imposed upon states’ abilities to exert control over various populations. In other words, hillbillies (and corollary Asian populations referred to by similar pejoratives) were quite literally outside of state-sponsored civilization by nature of geographic isolation. He further asserts that, just like hunter-gatherers and American settlers:

At a time when the state seems pervasive and inescapable, it is easy to forget that for much of history, living within or outside the state—or in an intermediate zone—was a choice, one that might be revised as the circumstances warranted…. When [burdens] became overwhelming, subjects moved with alacrity to the periphery or to another state.

Until nation-states enveloped the remaining unclaimed corners of the globe in the 19th and 20th centuries, 100% of human existence included the ability for the industrious to venture into the frontier. This is the second insight I discovered once my visas renewals ran out, and was faced with a legal change in the United States that would have made continuation of my business illegal (according to the U.S.) merely because of my citizenship. In eerie defiance of Jefferson’s criticism of King George III’s tyrannical Britain, a “claim of superiority or dependence [was] asserted over [me] by [my] mother country from which [I] had migrated. As Scott puts it, things have changed now that:

“the sovereign nation-state is now busy projecting its power to its outermost territorial borders and mopping up zones of weak or no sovereignty.”

To clarify the reality of my second insight: there is no more frontier on this planet, excepting the sea. Unfortunately, humans aren’t particularly well adapted to life in excess of 200 miles from land (international waters). Thus, the dynamic of imposed human political obligation has shifted drastically and recently. When someone now says, “if you don’t like it, leave”, they fail to understand that there is nowhere to go. There is no Jeffersonian solution of “going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies… likely to promote public happiness.” Quests for new habitations lead only to other occupied territories with entrenched regimes.

It is true that citizenships can be wrangled in other nations. However, the process is highly restricted, and ultimately results in nothing more than trading one overlord for another.

Ironically, all signatory nations to the United Nations have agreed that it is a fundamental human right to be able to move freely across borders and relocate wherever one chooses. Those nations that signed the document (U.S. included) agreed to implement laws to support this right. However, it was signed in 1948, and travel has become more restricted in the years since.

• Fact: The modern absence of frontier is contrary to our hunter-gatherer past.
• Fact: The modern tendency of nations to claim superiority over their citizens is contrary to the principles the United States used as justification for declaring independence from Britain.
• Fact: The modern system of international law to which nation-states agree that a frontier-esque existence is a universal human right.
• Fact: The modern nation-states are in material breach of the contract to which they agreed.

It seems that too many people embrace the half-sentiment and half-responsibility of the first sentence in the following quote without grasping the importance of the rest.

“People say that if you don’t love America, then get the hell out. Well, I love America. We love the people of America very much, but when it comes to the government, it stops right there. The government is a bunch of corrupt thieves, they are rapists and robbers. And we are here to say that we don’t have to take it anymore. We are here to say that we are here to tell the truth…” -Born on the 4th of July

As a foundational property of a hunter-gatherer philosophy, I’ll have more to say about this in the future. For now, what other implications do you see in the recent shift in this dynamic? Do you think there’s a way to apply the hunter-gatherer concept of endless frontier in our lives within the framework of the current nation-state system?

Part II: The Libertarian Question

It has been amply demonstrated that there is no shortage of arguments about how to reconcile the problem of health care within the bounds of market capitalism. Likewise, great lengths have been taken to demonize certain options as socialist in nature. I assert that all such arguments arranging possible solutions into a capitalist versus socialist dichotomy obscure the fundamental issue on the side of the problem. In other words, arguing about “who pays” is irrelevant because the “what we’re paying for” side of the equation doesn’t qualify as capitalism (or socialism for that matter). This is true for [at least] two reasons.

Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for a private profit; decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are made by private actors in the free market; profit is distributed to owners who invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses and companies. –Wikipedia

To call something market capitalism, it must conform to [at least] two criteria:

1. The private actors involved must be making a[n uncoerced] decision.
2. The supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments must be subject to market forces.

The health care system exploits evolved human nature

Rational choice ends where questions of health and survival begin. This is true of food and exercise choices. Evolution has a nasty habit of biasing organisms to weight their immediate impulses much higher than future probabilities. The classic example of this from behavioral economics is giving people a choice between receiving $100 today or $110 tomorrow. Then, ask the same people to choose between receiving $100 dollars in 30 days or $110 in 31 days. For our purposes, the number of people who choose $100 today or $110 tomorrow isn’t important. What is important is that almost everybody chooses $110 in 31 days in the second case, including the people who chose $100 today in the first case. From a rational standpoint, the absolute difference in waiting is identical in both scenarios, but people value the future 1-day wait as much less painful than the time from now to tomorrow. That’s some insight into why we’ll make unhealthy nutrition and fitness decisions today even though we’ll pay for it in the future, but it isn’t all we need to know in our discussion of health care.

The Darwinian imperative of all things is to survive to reproduce. In humans, we have not only similar survival instincts as other animals, but also an extra layer of conscious awareness that allows us to imagine the future. We don’t just act to avoid death, we engage in conscious mental gymnastics to avoid death. Despite zero empirical evidence, many humans go so far as to believe in a ghost that survives their body at death. Our dual levels of instinct and thought about instinct puts us in a remarkable category of death avoiders. How does this influence our ability to make health care decisions?

In short, our survival bias negates anything that might resemble a decision or choice when matters of life and limb are ate stake. When asked the question, “how much is it worth to save my legs,” what is the answer? I suggest the answer is “however much I have to give”. Taken from the other direction… When presented with the information that, “to save your legs will cost $70,000, are you willing to pay it?”, what is your answer? I suggest that the question you answer is not, “are you willing to pay”, but “do I have (or can I come up with) the money?” If that is possible, the answer is yes.

There are limits to the value of limbs of course. When Aron Ralston was faced with the scenario, “how much are you willing to pay to survive?”, the answer was: “my arm”. However, to give a value to that choice, we would have to know the dollar value placed on his life, AND whether he would have been willing to also give his other arm, or two legs, et cetera. Ultimately, survival is the most important, but we “know” that losing a limb is bad for survival/reproduction probability. We know because we can picture the difficulties of missing limbs, and we know because of the physical pain that provides a direct signal.

No, there is no effective decision involved in the evaluation of serious medical care. The price is almost infinitely variable depending on a subjective ability to arrange funds, and not an objective utility valuation; the answer is always yes if the funds can be arranged. To capitalize on individuals with no effective decision is the very definition of extortion.

There is no free market for health care services

We must be careful to resist seduction by the illusion of market forces. It is true that there is a sort of quasi-market in health care services. In some instances, insurance companies influence prices, and the prices insurance companies are willing to pay impacts the market to some extent. However, this is merely inverted extortion in that medical service providers are coerced by the threat of payment refusal. The nuances here are irrelevant because this dynamic merely represents the price fluctuations of a quasi-market.

Two conditions must be met for a free market to exist. One, there must be price competition between providers. Two, the private actors ostensibly making the decisions must exert choice influence on the service providers.

Neither of  the above conditions are met in the health care “market”. In most situations, service providers are chosen by geographic necessity. Further, competition between providers is largely based on reputation and referral, not price. Thus, the first condition fails on either of two counts. Typically, prices for procedures are not known until after they have been performed. Upon admission for a procedure, an effective blank check must be agreed upon by the consumer of services. Options may be given, but they are typically framed in cost-benefit terms revolving around probability of success or failure, and various side-effects or discomforts to be expected. Again, not in terms of price.

To compound the lack of the market meeting conditions to be called a free market, all of this is amplified by the characteristic non-decision of the previous section. When there is no effective decision, there is no mechanism through which the consumer of health care services could exert choice influence even if there was a functioning market.

The business of health care is fundamentally anti-capitalist

I haven’t introduced anything novel. I have merely laid out the definition of capitalism and pointed out that health care meets none of the requirements of a system that can be defined as capitalism. The only thing resembling market capitalism is the flow of money. If the health care business does not qualify as capitalism, what is it?

It’s safe to say that it isn’t socialism. No, the lack of customer influence upon the pricing mechanism in combination with the extortionate property of de facto non-decision most closely resembles a point somewhere between authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

With no real influence on price, and no real choice, why should we be content to discuss the capitalist or socialist ramifications of who will pay for the services. Whether payment is from individuals, or the collective, true capitalists should be outraged at the unquestioned authoritarian monolith that’s willing to take money from anyone and everyone who agrees to be subject to its predatory tendencies.

Note: I don’t find it necessary to delve into conspiracy theories or the specter of “evil” insurance companies to explain this. While those things are interesting discussions, all of this can be a true outgrowth of emergent properties in the system without invoking them. I hope it goes without saying that doctors and other workers in the health care system don’t create the systemic problems either.

I highly recommend investing an hour into watching this video. It’s a great archaeology/anthropology introduction for everyone interested in modern diets. It touches on a lot of the main concepts necessary to understand what the heck is being talked about when referencing the methods used to figure out what was going on during the paleolithic era. The talk is super-approachable for intro purposes, but Teresa Steele is also an actual scientist, so more advanced folks will probably appreciate some of what she discusses.

The Australopithecus afarensis to Agriculture Talk (3.4 million – 10,000 years ago)

One concept that seems obvious, but I’d never consciously considered is the size of animals eaten by humans vs. other primates. It’s easy to look at a timeline of the paleolithic and see that human ancestors ate some meat, but there’s a key distinction. Humans eat animals much larger than themselves, while all other primates eat animals much smaller than themselves. Thus, talking about primates as “meat eaters” is factually true, but it ignores a huge difference between Homo sapiens and other surviving species. Hunting large game necessitates a degree of cooperation that is on an entirely different level than the individuality of hunting small game. Since we know Homo neanderthalensis also hunted in groups, we can start to make some interesting comparisons with the rest of the Homo lineage.

“I’d like to add to that one of the things that’s unique about humans among primates is how much meat we consume. A large percentage of our calories come from meat on average – compared to other primates. Amongst primates, chimpanzees eat the most amount of meat. And humans on average eat about 10x the amount of meat as other primates.”

The interesting question professor Steele attempts to address in her research and in this talk is: “When did the differences in human and chimpanzee diets evolve?” The implications of this answer impact us in terms of social organization, evolved behavior, and optimal diets in the modern context. A big factor in determining this is that there is little evidence of hominin plant consumption during the Acheulean (~1.6 m – 100,000 years ago) period of the paleolithic. Admittedly, part of this is because plant evidence doesn’t fossilize as well as bones, but it’s interesting that the plant eating assumption persists on such small amounts of evidence. As usual, this refutes the vegetarian position in terms of evolutionary biology.

“Humans specialize in nutrient dense, hard to extract sources, while chimpanzees specialize in ripe fruits and plants that have low nutrient density which are also easily collected.”

The relative difficulty of resource extraction also carries implications for human society versus primates. This impacts the necessity of tool use and social organization to sustain expanding populations. Thomas Malthus’ famous prediction that human population would be restricted by a linear growth in the food supply compared to an exponential growth in population comes to mind. The Malthusian limit suffers from an assumption that humans are stuck in the chimpanzee mode of resource collection. To be fair to Malthus, it’s still possible that there is a limit on production that is simply beyond the date he predicted. Thus, the growth in production and population since his prediction doesn’t completely refute his hypothesis. The questions raised by Malthus remain at the foundations of geopolitical debates to this day.

Looking at this from the perspective of adaptive evolution, we also see foundations for hypotheses to explain the explosive growth in human brain size over the paleolithic. Dealing with the problems of tools and groups certainly placed different pressures on the evolution of humans. In other words, the information in this video underpins everything I write about on evolvify. Watch it. Love it.

Methods of study

1. Archaeological record (tools, artifacts, bones)
2. Skeletal morphology (bone mechanics & dental structure)
3. bone chemistry

[cft format=0]

• Human Diet Unique in High Meat Content
• Australopithecus afarensis Diet
• Cut-Marked Bones 2.5 Million Years Ago
• Evidence of Ancient Hominids Eating Aquatic Animals
• Acheulean Hunting and Scavenging (Homo erectus)
• Exceptional Preservation Sites with Wood Spears
• Neandertals in Europe
• Bone Chemistry Findings
• Hunting Technology
• Middle Stone Age in Africa
• Modern Humans in Europe
• Plant Use
• Intensification of Resource Extraction
• Why Humans Replaced Neandertals
• Conclusive Evidence of Cut Marks
• Ratio of Fatty Acids in Diet and Brain Size

I hate postmodern feminism. As a man by birth, not by choice, I call shenanigans on the idea of a vast male conspiracy in which I’m hopelessly complicit. The charge that I am conditioned from birth to oppress all of the women I love, all of the women I know, and all of the women on the planet is not one with which I’m likely to acquiesce. The notion that I’m doomed to omni-directional socialization smacks of Christianity’s putrid communicable mind-disease of “Original Sin”. But while Christianity offers potential salvation through authoritarian subjugation of our minds and the rest of our human nature after a life of guilt, postmodern feminism offers nothing more than perpetual guilt and a labryinthian trial of futility that would lead Josef K to rejoice in the relative clarity of his nightmare of Kafka’s prison. Like the magical monotheisms’ strategic defense by placing its rules outside the observable world and beyond the understanding of feeble brains, postmodern feminism holds its truths just on the other side of spectacular society’s aim or grasp. We are all inside the conspiracy, and thus, forever powerless to question its pervasive hold with our tainted minds.

But let’s get to the bad news…

Apparently, I am guilty as charged. I openly view women as different from men… and I like it. What’s worse, I have been known to love women precisely because of their femininity. And I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I have been successful in being smitten by oppressing women to degree that they have appreciated my undying appreciation of said femininity. Thus, I have apparently pulled off the masterstroke of Pavlovian conditioning by convincing women that there is something special different about them worthy of distinction, and that that inherent beauty defect is a point of delineation warranting irrepressible affection and admiration objectification.

Yet despite my actual loathing for postmodern feminism, and tongue-in-cheek embrace of their accusatory program, I consider myself a Darwinian feminist. Let’s be clear… that is a political position of feminist bias influenced by Darwinian science. This is not to be confused with the scientific position of feminist Darwinism, in which scientific hypotheses are formed through the perspective gained by freeing oneself from the scientific community’s irrepressible patriarchy (Vandermassen 2008). I take this position of political bias because since the agricultural revolution, feminists have an indisputable point (generally speaking). One of the first sociopolitical developments of agricultural society was property. Besides land, women were subjected to the forefront of the legal ownership construct. It’s difficult to disentangle the development of agriculture, writing, law, oppression, and theistic religion. This difficulty is explained in their mutually supportive natures (the Matrix beta version?).

In my overlap into the paleosphere, I wonder about the influence of gendered conflagrations of caveman romanticism. I think the first of Melissa McEwan’s posts I ever read was on the question of ‘Sexism and Paleo‘. Though I disagree with a few of the points in that piece, I share a disdain for the popularized caveman stereotype. On one level, I’ve wandered around a lot of wilderness looking for caves, and I can verify that they’re not a reliable strategy for shelter from the elements or protection from predators. Thus, I vote for burying the “caveman” concept along with agricultural dominance hierarchies and the vegetarian myth. On the psychosocial level, I see the caveman image of a clubbed woman being dragged off to be used as a reproduction machine as an overt misogynistic cultural amplification of testosterone-drunk wish-thinking. As a man, I’m also not going to pretend that I can’t imagine where that impulse comes from. If you take that last sentence as a justification, you don’t understand me and should probably stop reading now.

*Much of what follows was influenced by a 4-participant, 5-article throwdown in the “Feminist Forum” feature on the intersection of feminism and Darwinism in a 2008 issue of Sex Roles…  a peer-reviewed, openly feminist leaning journal. The journal is offering free and direct access through December 31, 2010. Rebecca Hannagan wrote the target article which was reponded to by feminists Laurett Liesen, Griet Vandermassen, and Celeste Condit. Hannagan also provides a follow-up on the others’ comments.

“Ignorant” Evolutionary Psychology vs. “Ignorant” Feminism

And thus begins the typical impasse between evolutionary psychology and feminism. Feminists charge evolutionary psychologists with indiscriminate justification of evil, and evolutionary psychologists accuse feminists of misunderstanding that the “job of scientists is to find out how things work, to try to be evenhanded with the evidence, and to present their findings…” (Vandermassen 2008). The project of science is understanding. The project of evolutionary psychology is understanding psychology in the context of evolution. Beware anyone who conflates understanding with justification.

“Evolutionary psychologists’ continued ignorance of feminism and their ongoing failure to recognize the vast contributions by feminist evolutionists is at worst the continuation of male bias, and at best scholarly negligence.” (Liesen 2008)

“[P]reviously considered an “archaic debate” [, genetic determinism], turned out to be a real concern still in the minds of many feminists. As Jonathan Waage and Patricia Gowaty (1997) write in their conclusion, “[t]erminology, politics, and ignorance are, inretrospect, major barriers to the dialectic of feminism and evolutionary biology” (p. 585).” (Vandermassen 2008)

Darwin: More Feminist than the Feminists

Darwin’s world-view was certainly steeped in a world of Victorian ideals. As such, he tended to ethnocentrize, anthropomorphize, and Victorianify a bit too frequently. However, behind the now anachronistic veneer, his wisdom was potent.

“Darwin also attributed a more important evolutionary role to females than did most evolutionists for nearly a century after him: female choice in sexual selection. Since females bear the greater parental investment through pregnancy and lactation, they have more to gain from being highly selective about with whom to mate than do males. As a result, certain traits are selected for in males if, over time, females choose to mate with the males that bear those traits more than those who do not.” (Hannagan 2008)

That first sentence could have also read, “Darwin also attributed a more important evolutionary role to females than did most feminists for nearly a century after him.” In the concept of sexual selection, we have a solid foundation from which to sweep away all attempts to legitimize gendered patriarchy. In the concept of sexual selection, we have a power structure that, excepting violence, is nearly irrefutable for men. Across the millions of species of the animal kingdom, females exercise ultimate say in selecting with whom to reproduce. The whims of females have given us everything from the peacocks’ tail (Darwin 1972) to the bowerbirds fantastic nests and 12 foot antlers of the Irish elk (Coyne 2009) to our very creativity and intelligence (Miller 2001). Sexual selection is almost universally ignored, and when it is considered, is often misunderstood as a patriarchal mechanism for herding women. Competition between men acts as a fitness cue that aids women in selecting mates (intrasexual sexual selection). Direct displays by men to women also act as fitness cues to aid women in selecting mates (intersexual sexual selection). This isn’t to say that dominance hierarchies don’t exist in various species, but it is necessary to question the assumption that intrasexual selection is a dominance hierarchy rather than a fitness cue. Intersexual selection is always the latter.

The positive implications of sexual selection for a Darwinian feminism are many. Yet ironically, and to the detriment of their program, postmodern feminism has attacked evolutionary biology after missing the point.

Another area that’s often ignored or assigned to the evils of patriarchy is competition between females. It would be naive to assume that sexual selection is unidirectional. It is true that females have the highest degree of choice, but men also gain reproductive advantage by choosing the “best” mate. Intrasexual female competition has serious negative consequences. Stereotypically female behaviors from fashion to makeup to anorexia have been attributed to competition between females (Li, et al. 2010). Interestingly, Li, et al also found this intrasexual competition functioning similarly in homosexual men. Activities motivated by intrasexual female competition have traditionally been prime targets for postmodern feminists to assign to patriarchal power structures. However, it seems that this may be a misguided confusion of intrasexual and intersexual competition.

Men and Women Are Different

That is not a claim or implication that a male brain or a female brain is better, it is a statement of fact. While – Top 5 target of anti-evolutionary psychology deniers – Steven Pinker had already convincingly refuted “blank slate” conflagrations in his 2001 book, “The Blank Slate” (linked below), neuroscience has since been demonstrating differences via fMRI and other brain studies. Sexual dimorphism (differences) in brain development have been observed to be directly influenced by differences in XX vs. XY chromosome factors (that is at the genetic, pre-hormonal level), and by gonadal hormone differences (e.g. testosterone) (Arnold 2004).

“Genes that are found on the sex chromosomes influence sexually dimorphic brain development both by causing sex differences in gonadal secretions and by acting in brain cells themselves to differentiate XX and XY brains. Because it is easier to manipulate hormone levels than the expression of sex chromosome genes, the effects of hormones have been studied much more extensively, and are much better understood, than the direct actions in the brain of sex chromosome genes. Although the differentiating effects of gonadal secretions seem to be dominant, the theories and findings discussed above support the idea that sex differences in neural expression of X and Y genes significantly contribute to sex differences in brain functions and disease.” (Arnold 2004) [emphasis mine]

“Many neurological and psychological diseases vary in incidence or severity between the sexes. Some of these diseases are known to involve X-linked genes. The vulnerability of males to mutations of X-linked genes is an obvious source of sex differences in diseases. However, more subtle variation of the same loci probably accounts for some of the differences in psychological and neural function among populations of males and females.Recent improvements in methods to manipulate and measure gene action will lead to further insights on the role of X and Y genes in brain gender.” (Arnold 2004)

Recent theoretical developments in neuronal plasticity have given the postmodern feminists and other blank-slaters a new angle to make us all the same. Some now claim that the overarching and nefarious social construct causes brains to physically develop gender identities based on patriarchal domination by way of language faculty alteration (Kaiser, et al. 2009). That’s right folks, males are so crafty that we’ve figured out how to physically alter the neuronal structure of women’s minds to do our bidding as hapless automatons. To say that gender bias goes deep is apparently an understatement of mind-bending proportions. Curiously, all such studies seem to recognize, or ignore, sex differences in the brains of all other animal species, but resort to neck-down Darwinism when considering humans. Again, the postmodern feminist position parallels that of religion in its insistence that evil forces corrupt us on unseen levels, and by excluding the human brain as the one thing Darwinian considerations can’t mustn’t be applied to.

Years after Pinker’s work, Hannagan is still comfortable enough about sex differences to say: “Broad personality constructs, such as neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness, are heritable and there are small but consistent differences between men and women on two of the big five personality constructs—extraversion and agreeableness.” (Hannagan 2008b) [emphasis mine]

This is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg regarding physical (brain included) and psychological differences.

Against the Caveman Mystique

It’s hard for me to imagine the caveman stereotype existing without the logically flawed, but evolutionarily advantageous, human cognitive availability bias (or heuristic). In short, since we find evidence of humans in many caves, but not out in the open, we tend to assume humans were more often inhabiting caves than out in the open. The art and human remains found in caves are not found there because a majority of our ancestors were “cavemen”. They are found there because caves offer protective value for preservation, and because caves are geographically obvious places to look. Thus, the probability we’ll look in caves multiplied by the probability of evidence being preserved in caves skews cave evidence to secure an artificially elevated place in our consciousness. It’s also the case that human remains are dragged to caves by whatever ate them, or humans died in caves by becoming trapped. All of this is further multiplied by the caveman narrative in culture… it’s easy to picture, and therefore remember, and therefore spreads.

The following excerpt is from a review of the apparently poorly received book, ‘The Caveman Mystique‘ by Martha McCaughey. While it’s directed at the McCaughey’s view of the caveman stereotype, I suggest that it should also be tested against feminist theory.

Perhaps the most curious omission in the book is any discussion of the evolutionary psychological view of the human female. We are repeatedly told the dubious notion that the evolutionary view of the male is that of the stereotypical caveman who drags women off by the hair for sex. But what is the corresponding picture of the female? Evidently McCaughey doesn’t think this is informative. If men are interested in having sex with as many women as possible, what does this say about women? It is a fact of simple arithmetic that the average number of sexual partners must be identical for males and females (assuming a 50-50 sex ratio). So if men have X female partners on average, the average woman must also have X male partners. What does this logic imply about the female side of mating? (McBurney 2009)

Hunter-Gatherers: Hierarchy vs. Egalitarianism

The hunter-gatherer stereotype often does no better than the caveman tripe. Rather than the overt “masculinity” of clubbing all women of one’s choosing, it’s replaced by the overt “masculinity” of killing a wily beast and the implied “masculine” domination associated with bestowing such a gift upon the rest of the band. Unfortunately, the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis that was forwarded to explain human cognitive development has been considered inaccurate almost consistently since the 1970s (Hannagan 2008).

In discussing sexual selection above, I argued that there is a fundamental refutation of patriarchy inherent in the Darwinian framework. That itself should sound the death knell for any attempts at misogyny or gendered political dominance. However, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer existence takes that a step further. It is likely that the prevailing form of social arrangement for the bulk of human evolution was social anarchism in the context of small hunter-gatherer bands. It is important not to assume contemporary stereotypes of socialism and anarchy here.

As found by anthropological studies of recent hunter-gatherer bands, hunter-gatherer bands exhibit high levels of communitarian and cooperative behaviors combined with an often explicit rejection of hierarchy. To observe this clearly, we also need to make a distinction between immediate-return hunter-gatherers and delayed-return hunter-gatherers. The immediate vs. delayed distinction refers initially to the timeframe in which they consume hunted and gathered food. With immediate-return bands, we see daily consumption of most food, little storage, and a tendency to an almost perpetually nomadic existence. Delayed-return hunter-gatherer bands tend to differ in that they are geographically isolated, or have borders imposed upon them by surrounding populations . In this transitional stage between ancestral hunter-gatherer existence and agriculture, we see more evidence of hierarchy, despite a lack of private property relative to modern agrarian cultures (Gray 2009).

Overall, we see a general lack of ownership or conceptions of private-property within hunter-gatherer social arrangements. The division of labor is an economic strategy that benefits both individuals and the group. Value is not necessarily assigned a priori to male or female, or to hunter or gatherer.

In some examples, anthropologists have noted a significant degree of male group control over “marriages”. This is often imposed not by potential suitors, but by the male family members of the woman. This is misleading as it’s often an ethnocentric assignment of our notions of monogamy on cultures which don’t necessarily share the same sexual norms. Even in societies with supposed marriages, females exercise a high degree of mate choice when it comes to actual reproduction:

“Having high status as a good hunter has been shown to raise a man’s reproductive success everywhere the relationship has been investigated, one of the pathways being that it gains him sexual access to more and higher quality women, whether officially or in extra-marital affairs.” (Vandermassen 2008) [emphasis mine]

At first glance, this would seem to refute my comment a couple paragraphs back about non-assignment of value to the hunter role. However, it merely reinforces my qualification that such value is not assigned a priori. Hunters, as a category, do not automatically benefit. Hunters who excel are assigned a higher fitness value and therefore tend to be selected by females to father offspring. This does however, refute the claim that arranged marriages act as true control over women’s reproduction.

Autonomy

In another word, freedom. Why is every sovereign individual (by that I mean every individual) in the 21st century born not as a human, but as a proprietary asset on the balance sheet of a nation-state? Why do all agricultural societies suffer from drastically diminished levels of freedom? Why do geographically and otherwise isolated delayed-return hunter-gatherer bands tend toward political hierarchy while their immediate-return analogues do not? The atomization of individuals within the supra-organism of culture has been elevated over the autonomy our ancestors were born with, but why?

For 99%+ of human evolution, every able-bodied human has had the option of leaving oppressive regimes. Every individual had the choice to opt out of social games stacked against them. The fact of human migration across the totality of earth is proof that this strategy was employed many times. However, it would have happened more rapidly if remaining in a group was not generally more advantageous for each individual. The ability to round up a group of like-minded individuals to leave was somewhat balanced by the group’s recognition of a general strength in numbers. Call it the invisible hand of exploration, or call it migration, but it acted as a perpetual check on all forms of unwelcome domination. Their complete lack of the geographical and legal boundaries we’re faced with today allowed an entirely different paradigm for human social interaction. This concept is not new. The right to cross all borders to leave oppression is legitimized in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, it is ignored by every country on earth for reasons beyond the scope of this piece. Further, the concept loses its actual value when there is no more frontier, but only trading one domination hierarchy for the flag of another.

The temptation to form in-groups and out-groups along lines of gender, ethnicity, education, running skills, or other coin flips is a curse of a stone age brain in an information age world. Yielding to such temptations will invariably lead to error. The unbearable lightness of paranoia that accompanies postmodernist cynicism is a direct path to your own distracted energy. You’re all formally invited to ditch the postmodern feminist doomsday machine for a refreshing trip to the history of the Galapagos…

Hey! I finished in under 4,000 words! Is this the part where I get called a misogynist then burned at the altar of Margaret Mead, or… perhaps you have other thoughts? (If you have questions or comments that you think are too far off topic, you can also post ’em in the forum.)

References
Arnold, Arthur P. “Sex chromosomes and brain gender..” Nature reviews. Neuroscience 5, no. 9 (September 2004): 701-8.
Curry, Oliver. “Who’ s Afraid of the Naturalistic Fallacy?”. Evolutionary Psychology (2006): 234-247.
Gray, Peter. “Play as a Foundation for Hunter- Gatherer Social Existence s.” The American Journal of Play 1, no. 4 (2009): 476-522.
Hannagan, Rebecca J. “Gendered political behavior: A Darwinian feminist approach.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7/8 (2008).
Hannagan, Rebecca J. “Genes, Brains and Gendered Behavior: Rethinking Power and Politics in Response to Condit, Liesen, and Vandermassen.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7-8 (September 2008): 504-511.
Kaiser, Anelis, Sven Haller, Sigrid Schmitz, and Cordula Nitsch. “On sex/gender related similarities and differences in fMRI language research..” Brain research reviews 61, no. 2 (October 2009): 49-59.
Li, N. P., Smith, A. R., Griskevicius, V., Cason, M. J., & Bryan, A. (2010). Intrasexual competition and eating restriction in heterosexual and homosexual individuals. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 365-372.
Liesen, Laurette T. “The Evolution of Gendered Political Behavior: Contributions from Feminist Evolutionists.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7-8 (July 2008): 476-481.
McBurney, Donald H. “REVIEW – The Caveman Mystique: Pop Darwinism and the Debates over Sex, Violence, and Science.” Sex Roles 62, no. 1-2 (June 2009): 138-140.
Trivers, R.L. . Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871-1971 (1972) : 136-179. Chicago, IL: Aldine. ISBN 0-435-62157-2
Vandermassen, Griet. “Can Darwinian Feminism Save Female Autonomy and Leadership in Egalitarian Society?.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7-8 (August 2008): 482-491.
Waage, J., & Gowaty, P. (1997). Myths of genetic determinism. In P. Gowaty (Ed.), Feminism and evolutionary biology: Boundaries, intersections, and frontiers (pp. 585–613). New York: Chapman & Hall.
Walter, Alex. “The Anti-naturalistic Fallacy : Evolutionary Moral Psychology and the Insistence of Brute Facts.” Evolutionary Psychology, no. 1999 (2006): 33-48.
Wilson, David Sloan, Eric Dietrich, and Anne B Clark. “On the inappropriate use of the naturalistic fallacy in evolutionary psychology.” Evolutionary Psychology (2003): 669-682.

Shocker! News just floated my way that Mr. McClellan just happens to also be a vegan advocate! An ABC affiliate reports (emphasis mine):

“For three years, [Cornell McClellan] served on the inter-national(sic) board for Earth Save, an organization founded by John Robbins, author of “Diet for a New America.” Their mission is to bring the world closer to a plant-based lifestyle. He was a member of Roots of Peace, a Chicago-based vegan group, whose mission is to educate the children and community about the benefits of a vegan lifestyle.” –ABC News Chicago

Well now does’t that put this hokum visual of your insides rotting in a bit of melodramatic context? “Eating a steak three times a day can potentially whittle your waistline, but the impact it’s having on your insides might not be as attractive”

The other main idea I proposed in the article was that religious folks often have an axe to grind with paleolithic diets because of the reliance on adaptive principles of Darwinian evolution. And double shocker:

Cornell’s Statement of Commitment
“I want clients to understand what needs to be done, and to commit to doing it. Living a healthy life is just one way to give thanks to God for the life He has given us.”

Now, I can’t say that Mr. McClellan is a Creationist at this point. However, the implications of the statement that “God” has “given us” life are many. It hints strongly at the negation of adaptation in human evolution. Notions of a creator god don’t allow room for evolution to happen in an adaptive way. Unlike the release of Darwin’s 1959 1859 work, “On the Origin of Species”, the paleo diet has a very real and visceral day-to-day meaning to people. Using the logical framework of a paleo approach tends to inherently keep the logic of evolution in one’s mind. Like Darwin’s book, paleo has the potential to cause further erosion of beliefs in Creationist myths and the anti-adaptationist motives of ID.

The new information on McClellan’s vegan advocacy adds another dimension to the lack of journalistic integrity in his original article. With this new light, the attempts to berate paleolithic diets by completely sensationalized rhetoric is amplified by concealing a very significant motivational bias. Sinister may be too strong of a word, but hiding a vegan advocacy agenda behind a nutritional propaganda is, to borrow the words of Mr. McClellan, “somewhat questionable”. Is that enough to qualify for “shill” status? You tell me.

UPDATE: November 7, 2010

McClellan apparently has a real problem with celebrities eating meat…

“McClellan bemoans the fact that celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Jessica Simpson have misconstrued vegan diets as being unhealthful; in a recent interview for her movie Salt, Jolie said that being a vegan “nearly killed me. I found that I was not getting enough nutrition.” …The best part of the article, though, is the fact that McClellan recommends Dreena’s cookbook Eat, Drink & Be Vegan” –Arsenalia.com

…and he’s clearly not skimping on the ultra vegan bias in general.

Perhaps the more important question is whether the vegan fad diet is healthy.

For a comprehensive list of paleo related links and, including some related to veg*an ideas, you might check out paleodiet.com.

Target

The seeds of this article have been on my mind for a while, but its timing is a reaction to an article I saw yesterday in the Chicago Sun Times titled “Meaty fad diet goes back to Stone Age“. Here we go… Back to the 3.4 million year “fad”. The author added to the fad rhetoric by calling the paleo diet “silly”. That sort of title is pretty common in the anti-paleo polemics that circulate in the blogosphere. However, this was from what I presumed to be a nominally significant traditional media outlet. It was clearly written by a non-journalist, which is fine I guess, but it struck me as particularly poorly researched. There were no online responses when I read it, so I fired off a hasty, but I think accurate, comment. At the time of this writing, it’s the first of a few comments, but who knows what whims might change that.

Semi-Irrelevant Backstory

When I first read the article, I read every word, but stopped at the 2nd to last sentence of the piece: “Cornell McClellan is the owner of Naturally Fit… a personal training and wellness facility.” Maybe it’s not fair nor accurate, but when I think gym owner / personal trainer, I envision a wall of supplements and meal replacement bars and powders… you know…. merchandise that needs to be “moved”. Thus, I tend to take their advice on nutrition with a grain of yeah, right. In missing the last sentence, I missed something that would have changed my comment somewhat. Here’s that non-trivial sentence: “He is also the fitness trainer for the President of the United States and the First Lady.” Yes, you may {insert scratching record sound here}.

Let it be known that I am was in no way hostile to the Obama administration when I read the article. Sure, I could work up a reasonable critique of a dozen or so things I think were bad policy decisions, but my critiques of the Bush Jr. administration would be measured in hundreds or thousands. For reasons mentioned by neither Democrats nor Republicans, I find the health care bill to be flawed. It also strikes me as unconstitutional, but I went to the law school of James Spader and William Shatner. To the Presiden’ts credit, as a non-theist, the following may be my favorite quote by any U.S. President since James Madison:

“I’m somebody who deeply believes that the bedrock strength of this country is that it embraces people of many faiths and no faith. This is a country that is still predominantly Christian, but we have… atheists, agnostics… that we have to revere and respect….” Barack Obama, September 28, 2010.<

The only reason I’m writing this article is that I got curious and googled Cornell McClellan. It was then that I found out he’s 1 of 16 official members of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition. It was only after finding that page that I went back to the article and connected all of the dots. I remain skeptical of its claim that Mr. McClellan has an “extensive knowledge of the human body and nutrition.”

The Meat of It

Cornell McClellan’s article really is garbage. I do encourage you to read the whole thing to take in the totality of its emptiness. The portrait of the paleo diet that he paints is more a cartoonish mischaracterization of the Atkins diet than paleo. And to be fair to the Atkins folks, it’s not a fair representation of them either.

The problem with this sort of article is that the average person sincerely looking for a way to improve their health is not likely to see through the unsupported assertions made by someone who’s a professional personal trainer backed by the President and officially promoted as an outstanding exemplar by the United States government. My thoughts and references follow each of the quoted snippets.

“a recent study has come out that refutes some of [the paleo diet’s] basic tenets. Findings from archeological digs in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic suggest that cavemen did not only rely on meat for sustenance, as evidenced by traces of starch grains found on stones used for grinding and preparing food.”

Well at least Mr. McClellan did go so far as to read the Reuters blurb on this and maybe even the NYT piece [“page not found” error as of this writing]. However, the actual study did not reveal evidence of “grains” in the sense that would be appropriate for a paleo diet discussion of grains… namely, cereal grains such as wheat, barley, amaranth, millet, et cetera. The grains being referred to are grains in the sense that they are particulates; that is, the result of grinding. The popular science media misconstrued this research ad nauseum when it was first published. Its implications for paleo dieters are approximately zero. It’s been refuted many times, but Melissa McEwen provides my favorite critique thus far. It’s based on the actual study, not the other journalists’ general audience pieces, and she even bothered to include a relevant chart from the study that shows the non-grain plants in question.

Not trivial in the media coverage of this study was the post-publishing opining by some of the article’s authors. At least one made a wild and unsubstantiated guess that they used the ground plant material to make bread. I ask again, who among you thinks mashed potatoes are the same as bread? Perhaps we have to be scientists to make such a determination?

Archeologists were shocked to discover that our carnivorous ancestors actually were making and preparing foods such as roots, vegetables and perhaps even cracker-like foods.

Now this is just ridiculous. First of all, no serious scientist currently thinks our ancestors were “carnivores”. It is widely accepted by archaeologists and anthropologists that humans evolved as omnivores. I’d let laymen off the hook on this distinction, but Mr. McClellan knows better and is exaggerating for effect. The paleo diet approach simply echoes a range of foods our omnivorous ancestors would have had access to. Second, there are longstanding hypotheses and evidence of hominid “preparation” of roots and vegetables. The rest of us know that crackers were invented by the Keebler elves, no earlier than the First Age of Middle-Earth. Proving that humans made crackers in the paleolithic is about as likely as leading us to a magical elven forest.

These recent findings suggest that man cannot live on meat alone, but that hasn’t stopped thousands of people from signing up for the Paleo Diet.

Now we’re getting ridiculous-er. The paleolithic diet doesn’t suggest that anyone could, should, or would survive on meat alone.  I’m sure someone could make a case that humans could survive on meat alone, but it would remain a question of how long and how well. Scientists do hypothesize that Neanderthals were mostly carnivorous, but they’re a separate species and that argument is beside the point.

a meat-heavy diet isn’t recommended for most people. Not only do I discourage any diet that disallows entire food groups, but cholesterol levels are directly linked to the ingestion of animal products.

Meat-heavy is vague, unhelpful, and pejorative in a way the author clearly intended. Here we also have a legitimate disagreement on what constitutes a food group. Grain might be a Food Group, but it is not a group of foods or nutrients required for human health. There are no essential nutrients found in grains that are not found in dramatically higher concentrations in the other “food groups”. Yes, grains, as a practical matter, are necessary to sustain the massive current global population of Homo sapiens with the current agribusiness-dominated farming system, but they are by no means necessary for individual people. Please examine your assumptions, Mr. McClellan.

The final claim about cholesterol and animal products is too big to discuss here. I’ll blindly assert his unsupported claim has been sufficiently refuted and address references should they be provided at some future time.

Eating a steak three times a day can potentially whittle your waistline, but the impact it’s having on your insides might not be as attractive. Sadly, Paleo dieters also are encouraged to limit fruit to small helpings, as it believed that our ancestors didn’t have access to the amazing produce offerings that we now do.

Until I see a citation for the “steak three times a day” charge, I’m going to assume that it’s again made up for dramatization of the author’s non-point. While our ancestors did eat a lot of meat when it was available, it wasn’t available in steak form three times a day. Such is life when you don’t have refrigeration and a pantry.

Paleo dieters are encouraged to adjust fruit consumption based on their current body composition and how much exercise they’re getting. Fruit generally has naturally high levels of sugar. Is it really sad to suggest that obese, sedentary individuals throttle back on their intake of sugar, while marathon runners shovel it down as needed?

Not only are these diet choices somewhat questionable, it’s also worth pointing out that our Stone Age ancestors were not eating factory-farmed meat, which is full of chemicals and hormones. Unless you have a spear handy and access to unlimited buffalo, you are going to have a hard time truly eating like a caveman.

Yes, the mythical all meat diet that excludes spuriously essential food groups and bans fruit would definitely be questionable. Unfortunately for the arguments of Mr. McClellan, that isn’t the paleo diet. The paleolithic dieters are fully aware of the problems with factory farmed, chemically-treated meat and make it a point to eat naturally fed (typically grass or pastured) meats. And yes, such meats are difficult to find at a fast food window, but they are often available at standard grocery stores. And as I’ve said before, paleo is a logical framework applied to modern humans, not a historical reenactment.

Finally, any diet that is as restrictive as the Paleo Diet is problematic because it requires cavemen-sized willpower, which means many people will soon abandon their hunks of meat for a modern-day helping of lasagna.

The willpower problem is a modern diet carbohydrate addiction problem, not a paleolithic problem. Direct links have been demonstrated between carbohydrate cravings and obesity (Spring 2008). In effect, suggesting that sufficient willpower is too difficult implies that we should all simply give up and submit to an unbreakable cycle of carbohydrate addiction. The cool thing about paleolithic diets is that most people find the addiction and cravings go away. Indeed, you find yourself quite full if you eat ample amounts of meat, fruit, and vegetables.

After discovering the naive nutritional understanding of “The First Trainer”, I’m a little worried for the President. I hope his doctors aren’t using similarly anachronistic, post-medieval methods. Nobody likes leeches and bloodletting.

McClellan’s sagelike advice? Don’t eat “Big Macs”. Deet deeeet deeet deet deeeet… This just in off the news wire.

Dear President Obama, myself and many others in the paleo community would be happy to update your nutrition regime. P.S. Please tell President Clinton he could probably use a bit more protein these days. Bonus: Many of us have a natural immune system resistance to TV and radio pundits. Which brings me to my next point…

Religion

Religion (in some forms) is fundamentally anti-paleo. Obvious culprits in this regard are Creationists. While I formally and warmly invite them to apply paleolithic ideas to their eating and exercise habits, it’s also pretty obvious that the paleo diet relies on the logic of Darwinian evolution. Some folks who believe in “intelligent” design may also be inclined to reject the logic of the paleo diet. The adaptive power of natural selection in evolutionary theory is a foundation of the paleo diet. If a divine force was guiding the process, adaptation would be irrelevant. It could be claimed that the “intelligence” knew all along that humans would need grain to force an artificially large population explosion, and therefore, paleolithic habits would be irrelevant.

I personally know Creationists who have been quite successful on the paleo diet. I wonder how they ignore the implications there. If their holy books tell them eating bread is a good thing, how do they reconcile that unhealthy advice with reality?

Corporate Interests

I don’t want to get all conspiratorial, but I think it’s at least worth considering financial influence in politics as it relates to pushback against paleolithic dieting. As the famous quote from the 1976 film All the President’s Men says, “Follow the money”. And lookey here, we just happen to be talking about one of the President’s men. The list below highlights a few publicly traded companies with direct financial interest in producing, fertilizing, transporting, and/or distributing paleo-unfriendly wheat & corn products for human consumption [2010 Fortune 500 Rank, $Revenue]. Major direct producers in bold.

• Wal-Mart [1]
• Exxon Mobil [2]
• Chevron [3]
• ConocoPhillips [6]
• CVS Caremark [18]
• Procter & Gamble [22]
• Kroger [23]
• Costco Wholesale [25]
• Walgreen [32]
• Marathon Oil [41]
• PepsiCo [50, $43 billion]
• Safeway [52]
• Kraft Foods [53, $40 billion]
• Sysco [55, $37 billion]
• Coca-Cola [72, $31 billion]
• Tyson Foods [87, $27 billion]
• Rite Aid [89]
• Publix Super Markets [99]
• Deere [107]
• McDonald’s [108, $23 billion]
• Coca-Cola Enterprises [113, $22 billion]
• Tesoro [139]
• General Mills [155 $15 billion]
• Smithfield Foods [163, $14 billion]
• Pepsi Bottling [174, $13 billion]
• ConAgra Foods [178, $13 billion]
• Sara Lee [180, $13 billion]
• Kellog [184, $13 billion]
• Monsanto [197]

I’ll just leave it at that for now. Government subsidies of the crops in question raises an entirely different, yet equally important level of questioning. If I get requests to flesh this out further, maybe I’ll put some more work into it.

Vegan / Vegetarian

Noooooo… Not again! There are a lot of veg*ans out there. They’re politically active, they like to team up, and they [some] hate that other people eat meat.

Guilt by Association / Ad Hominem

We see this time and again in propagandists rallying against those of unknown motives trying to quash the idea that eating grains is bad (see the reference to Gwyneth Paltrow in the intro here). This is true in attacks on anti-gluten folks and anti-paleo folks.  Indeed Cornell McClellan injects this approach into his piece, “celebrities such as Megan Fox are rumored to owe their hot bodies to this ancient diet plan… there is no secret behind the body of your favorite celebrity”. Dismissing something as a celebrity fad is itself a fad and it carries with it a very real sign (in the semiotic sense) value. Its cultural meaning instantly evokes mental images of superficiality, imminent expiration, and flakiness. Thus, accusing something of being a celebrity fad associates the idea of hollow vapidity to whatever is linked to it. Propaganda 101, baby.

Conclusion

We have good reason to question the personal business motivations, political motivations, and religious motivations of individuals launching derisive attacks at paleo. The financial stakes alone are in the hundreds of billions (more likely trillions) annually. The perceived religious stakes are just as powerful and perhaps more, if slightly less lucrative and less…um… what’s the word I’m looking for here? The stakes for vegetarians can be just as powerful and personal.

There are reasonable arguments within the scientific community that are worth having. However, when pieces such as McClellan’s hit the media with such a gaping chasm between the known science and the claims, red flags should go off and alarm bells should ring.

Yes, our knowledge of the paleolithic environment in which humans evolved is less than 100% complete. However, we know a lot more about it than Mr. McClellan and other politically motivated paleo haters would lead you to believe. We know enough to help people in a very real and immediate way. I’ll link up a couple books below, and feel free to ask me questions if you’re not sure about where to start or where to go next.

Slainte,

Andrew

UPDATE: Cornell McClellan is a vegan advocate!

References

Spring, B., Schneider, K., Smith, M., Kendzor, D., Appelhans, B., Hedeker, D., et al. (2008). Abuse potential of carbohydrates for overweight carbohydrate cravers. Psychopharmacology, 197(4), 637-647.