• Paleo isn’t just about humans eating an evolutionarily appropriate diet, but also eating plants and animals that are being fed an evolutionarily appropriate diet. Grain fed ruminants, vegetarian fed chickens, and petroleum fed plants are off the menu.
• Government intervention in the food supply is more about money than “your safety”.
• Fat is not an evil macronutrient, but crucial to healthy humans with healthy brains.
• Industrial agriculture is generally anathema to the paleo diet (see first guideline).
• All agriculture displaces wilderness that edible animals would inhabit. These animals would be part of an optimally sustainable food system, but are precluded from existence by farmland, fences, and culling by humans who feel they compete with their bottom line.

See It (Watch free online)

Farmageddon (2011)
Synopsis: The government is doing all sorts of fascist bullshit to snuff out small farmers, and really doesn’t want you to drink raw milk. Democrats and Republicans are shills for mega industrial agriculture corporations.

Dirt! The Movie (2009)
Synopsis: Agriculture is the worst mistake in human history. The soil of our home planet is crucial to our survival, but we’re a pathological species destroying our lifeblood. Fix it or die.

A River of Waste: The Hazardous Truth About Factory Farms (2009)

Fat Head (2009)
Synopsis: Fat phobia is a communist U.S. government  plot.

Food Fight (2008)
Synopsis: Eat local and organic small-scale food. Industrial agriculture and its operatives are spawn of Satan.

The World According to Monsanto (2008)
Synopsis: Monsanto pretty much owns everything you eat, and should have its corporate charter revoked. Everyone should divest from mutual funds and organizations that support them, and their shareholders should be exiled to a penal colony with nothing but GMO soy. Upon eating their own product, they will become sterile and no longer produce devil offspring.

King Corn (2007)
Synopsis: Corn derivatives are in everything thanks to bizarro corporate-whoring policies of the U.S. government. Don’t eat corn or anything with corn in it.
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Patent for a Pig (2006)
Synopsis: Monsanto will steal your lunch and rape your children if you give them a chance.

Super Size Me (2004)
Synopsis: Fast food is for fat and lazy assholes.

See It (Paid)

In Search of the Perfect Human Diet (2012)
Synopsis: This one guy was unhealthy, tried a bunch of diets (including vegan) with no great success until stumbling on paleo. Sauron is banished from the land, The Death Star explodes, and everyone finds true love in the end.

Pros

• This is the only one of the bunch that explicitly details and recommends the paleo diet. Paleo as fuck. #PAF

Cons

• This is a marginal negative, but it’s pretty much by the book, Loren Corain “Paleo” — including the focus on lean meats. The “lean” bit is a silly thing to worry about. Also, “meat” is too often thought of as muscle tissue. Just eat animals, preferably wild animals that you’ve caught or hunted, and otherwise fed a species appropriate diet (cows eat grass, chickens are not vegetarians, etc.) — and eat the whole damn thing.
• Only available via DVD purchase. Apparently they’ve tried to stick to paleolithic movie distribution. To get your hands on it, you’ll have to shell out $24.95 + $6.95 shipping (in the U.S.). I’d rather see them make a few cents each off a few million people than a few bucks each off a thousand. I think they’d probably agree, so I’m not sure why they made it so difficult to watch this. Que sera.
• The website is out of date or they’re engaged in some sort of scarcity marketing scheme. It’s still listing the DVD as “pre-order” even though it’s been out for months.

Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (2010-2011)
Synopsis: The food system in the United States of America is a sham, and largely beholden to political interests who don’t give a fuck that they’re making kids fat and lazy. A famous English chef that half of the women I know want to have sex with tries his damnedest to disrupt the status quo bureaucracy. I actually misted up a couple times during this.
Season 1
Season 2

Ingredients (2009)
Synopsis: The food supply is mostly tasteless garbage, and people who appreciate food should revolt. Chefs and restaurant owners discuss methods of getting around corporate garbage food.

Watch streaming on Netflix

Food, Inc. (2008) *Oscar Nominee
Synopsis: Industrial food production is evil, and the system is rigged in favor of corporations that should be wiped off the face of the earth post haste.

Watch streaming on Netflix

FrankenSteer (2006)
Synopsis: Feedlot beef purveyors are a lot like robber barons, but not all have twisty waxed mustaches.

Watch streaming on Netflix

The Future of Food (2004)
Synopsis: Evil GMO seeds will invade your farm  then the evil companies that “own” them will sue you into oblivion.

Watch streaming on Netflix

Skip it

Forks Over Knives (2011)
Pros

• Feigning interest in it may help you get a lovely veg*n girlfriend that you can then convert to paleo, at which point she’ll become even more attractive.
• Sort of in favor of whole foods which implicitly excludes grains.

Cons

• Vegan propaganda

Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead (2011)
Synopsis: I don’t remember. Probably something about some unhealthy people taking some non-paleo foods out of their diet, and crediting veg*nism for their success.

Pros

• It’s in English and a lot of people speak that language.

Chow Down (2010)
Synopsis: Three folks who eat a bunch of garbage switch to a vegetarian diet and discover that removing a bunch of non-paleo junk from your diet makes you a little healthier.

Pros

• Viewing it is optional

Cons

• Veg*n propaganda
• Cheesy (ironic vegan joke) writing
• Poor production
• Often looks like bad acting rather than documentation of real people
• Dr. T. Colin Campbell
• Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr.
• Dr. Joel Fuhrman

The Beautiful Truth (2008)
Synopsis: A predominantly vegetarian  juice heavy diet, along with putting coffee up your butt, can cure cancer.

Pros

• Viewing it is optional

Cons

• Veg*n propaganda
• Dr. Max Gerson

Well you can try to add others I may have missed, but comments may not be working while I’m rebuilding the site behind the scenes. If comments aren’t working, tweet suggestions to @evolvify and I’ll add them if they fit my somewhat arbitrary guidelines. Mwah!

A few important quotes:

“agriculture, because it’s catastrophic, must constantly have new land. it also continuously needs new land because it creates excess population… for 10,000 years, agriculture compensated for its weaknesses by taking new land.”

“…in 1960 we ran out of new land, period. We’ve colonized some new land since 1960, but we’ve lost an equal amount to things like salinization an loss of water… We were at 3 billion people then…”

“…the result [of the Green Revolution] was a tripling of production of both rice an wheat.  The result of that is that something like 75% of human nutrition today is covered by corn, wheat, and rice — three grains. The ultimate result of that was we were able to increase human population, support that extra population, plus ramp it up further. So, in my lifetime human population has doubled from 3 to 6 billion people.”

“The hidden fact in all of that was that all of the increased production depended not just on short plants, but on energy — fossil fuels. Because the chemical fertilizers that took advantage of that short plant architecture come from natural gas… It’s a straight conversion from natural gas into fertilizer. but, at the same time, we’re using enormous amounts of energy to plow those fields with tractors, to process the food… you can’t go out an eat a piece of grain like you can a green bean or tomato. It must be process in some way. It must be cooked. And to transport that food.

“The result of all that is that if we look at about 1940, an American farmer was using roughly a calorie of fossil fuel to make a calorie of food. Today, that same farmer uses something like 10 calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of food…. petrochemicals have become embedded in our food supply.”

“We put off the catastrophe of a generation ago with fossil fuels. In other words, we didn’t colonize new farmland, we colonized new oil fields, and new watersheds to make irrigation water… that strategy will collapse. We will be at exactly the position we were a generation ago when we had 3 billion people we couldn’t feed, although now we have 6 billion — exactly double the number.”

The vegan argument — that farmed animals represent an unsustainable use of resources — is absolutely correct. Unfortunately, this argument is a half-baked idea that plays on what’s more inefficient while burying the ultimate truth that all farming is inefficient. Implicit in the argument is that farming requires inputs (resources), and as Manning puts it, agriculture is “catastrophic”. Embodied in the ultimate roots of paleo (read: a dietary framework informed by evolutionary theory) is that argument taken to its conclusion: all farming represents an unsustainable use of resources. In a full ecological conception of paleo, fossil fuel inputs would not be required.

Agriculture creates excess population. The argument that we need more agriculture to support higher population fails to recognize its inherently circular nature.

I highly recommend Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. I’d say it’s one of the Top 5 most important books of our time. I suspect Manning’s most recent book, Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape is equally great and important, but I haven’t read it at the time of this writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving on.

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

Vision

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

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

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

Premises

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

Comments on Common Missteps

Principles

1. Egalitarian

• Near zero difference in political power

2. Nomadic

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

3. Play

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

4. Self-sufficient

• Hunt
• Gather
• Quasi-gathering via minimal horticulture

5. Property rights distinguished from land rights

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

6. Non-State

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

7. Self-reliant

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

8. Individualist

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

Additional Inspirations

Foundational References

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

UPDATE Spring 2015

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

A few important snippets:

“Think of an animal in the zoo. It’s deprived of things that keep that animal going — the smells, the sights, the sounds, the instincts… the hunting. And they become psychotic. Literally psychotic. Their behavior is gone. They’re social animals and we can understand their behavior so the term “psychotic” makes sense… In wolves for instance… dogs certainly. There are more psychotic dogs around us than any other kind.

I think we have done something to ourselves that is exactly analogous to that. We put ourselves in a cage. This cage of civilization and cities, and in a way it has made us psychotic.”

More important snippets:

If you would have a group of hunter-gatherers — and this has happened a lot — hunter-gatherers watch behavior of people in our society, they would think we were crazy because of the way we behave… because we are. And we have become crazy because we have lost that physical contact with what goes on around us. We are sensual beings.

We try to replace it a gillion different ways… but it’s a substitute for what was there all along — that opening that can occur from being out there…

…and it’s difficult to explain it to someone who’s never experienced it. But when you’ve experienced it it’s not some great magical mystical thing so much as it’s just very real. It’s just a sensual thing to simply go back and live the way we evolved to live.

We can think of this also in terms of ethics. I’ve finally come to decide to define ethics as being true to your genetic heritage… We try to say that we are not that way, that we are not animal, and therefore we suppress those things within us.

…a proper system would examine as deeply as we can, and as rationally as we can, what we are, and what we’re meant to be. Then you can allow your life to somehow mirror that — mirror your genetic heritage.”

I highly recommend Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. I’d say it’s one of the Top 5 most important books of our time. I suspect Manning’s most recent book, Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape is equally great and important, but I haven’t read it at the time of this writing.

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Part of my agreement with the large component of the environmentalist community that happens to be veg*n is that farming animals is a horribly inefficient use of resources. In a sense, I’m simply agreeing and taking that argument to its logical conclusion — the vision I’d like to see realized is zero farming of anything. I see your critique of feedlot beef, pig shaped cages, and robot chicken farms, and I’m raising you with a critique of soy, corn, wheat, rice, et cetera. Farming of animals is an inefficient use of resources precicely because it relies on the farming of vegetarian staples such as corn and soy. Limiting a sustainability critique to the farming of animals is a stillborn failure. So I must ask, assuming it’s not just a disingenuous facade, why do sustainability conscious veg*ns stop at animals?

It disturbs me that vegetarians/vegans didn’t seem to take the briefest of moments to reflect on this report as an indictment of farming‘s inherent unsustainability, but spoke of it enthusiastically as a vindication of their anti-animal ideology. It was broadcast and shared in almost “I told you so” fashion.

Some of the standard tropes espoused in the piece:

 Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world’s leading water scientists.

Adopting a vegetarian diet is one option to increase the amount of water available to grow more food in an increasingly climate-erratic world, the scientists said. Animal protein-rich food consumes five to 10 times more water than a vegetarian diet. One third of the world’s arable land is used to grow crops to feed animals. Other options to feed people include eliminating waste and increasing trade between countries in food surplus and those in deficit.

In the long-term, following this rhetoric would lead to horrific consequences. Malthus wasn’t wrong in principle, his timing was just a little off. As long as the “veg*nism as global savior” narrative is taken seriously, and we double-down on agriculture as a solution to the problem of overpopulation (that it is the very cause of), we simply increase the human suffering that the failure of agriculture is inevitably hurtling toward. It doesn’t matter if it’s a decline in the fossil fuel inputs that act as agriculture’s life support system, water for irrigation, or desertification through topsoil degradation. One way or another agriculture’s current productivity will falter (he says while U.S. agriculture suffers from a massive drought).

Note how environmental arguments against eating animals are weakened when resource scarcity is removed from the calculus. Note that conversely, removing resource scarcity does not resolve the catastrophic ecosystem displacing environmental degradation caused by agriculture. Arguments can be made that excessive grazing in confined area can be problematic, but agriculture must be problematic.

The real, nitty-gritty, fundamental problems at the root of the farmed animal critique are not animals, but 1) the catastrophic and resource sucking characteristics of farming, 2) the zero sum game of farms displacing wild animal habitat that would require zero artificial inputs, and 3) human overpopulation.

The following quote from the same article tends to get glossed over by the veg*n cheerleaders. It clearly highlights the problems even when removing animals from the equation. The implications of this statement should not be ignored, then insidiously deflected by changing the subject to eating animals. This applies to all agriculture:

“With 70% of all available water being in agriculture, growing more food to feed an additional 2 billion people by 2050 will place greater pressure on available water and land.”

Perspective: Every farmed vegetable, tortilla, slice of bread, chunk of tofu, and other plant-based food you’ve ever eaten, required the destruction and displacement of an ecosystem to get to your face. Veg*nism is objectively not an environmentally beneficially strategy. When presented as such, it is little more than ideology buried in a flawed and superficially commonsensical narrative.

Rather than the short-term delusion that a global veg*n diet is any thing more than kicking the can down the road, I submit the following:

1. The eradication of all farming — to eliminate the resource parasite of agriculture.
2. Restoration of habitat such as the “Fertile Crescent” and North American prairie that have both been obliterated by agriculture — to restore wild animals to the human food chain.
3. The absolute control of every woman over her own reproduction — to naturally and gradually resolve the overpopulation problem.

What other solutions should we consider?

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

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

(all emphasis that follows is mine)

Article One

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

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

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

Article Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you! I welcome your thoughts below.

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

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

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

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

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

Impetus Ingredient 1: Frustration

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

Hunter-gatherers don’t train.

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

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

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

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

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

Think Like a Geek.

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

Eat Like a Hunter.

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

Train Like a Fighter.

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

Look Like a Model.

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

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

Common Threads

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

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

Hyperlithic

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

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

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

You’ll be hearing more about it, but at the moment, I’m on the verge of sleep-deprivation-induced mania.

I’ve been working on getting this project launched for months. I’ve had a lot of help, but the work is not quite done. This project is seriously important to me, and your contributions are more important than you know — even if that contribution isn’t cold-hard cash.

Oh, and… the rewards hint at another mind melting project I’ve been hard at work on.

Evolvify is all about theory and testing ideas, but adventure and the more visceral connections of our evolved selves to the environment we’re adapted to inspires me infinitely more. The taste of wildness in a padded world with rounded corners and warning labels and anesthetized everything is worth all efforts. The casting off of the moribund roles of indoctrinated industrialized agrarians is a necessary step, but only the first step. Are humans the only animal evolved to remain in the zoo after the gates have been flung open? Certainly not. The only flaw is that we’re evolved to imagine things that do not exist. There are no gates on this zoo.

Go outside and play.

First, a disclaimer: I have no moral qualms with with sex. My current interpretation is that, in humans, sex is a factor we use in deciding with whom to reproduce. If that’s true, the cult of monogamy serves, in some degree, to benefit individuals whose reproductive success is improved under that system. I also have no qualms about the theoretical underpinning of pick-up artists (PUAs) so far as it’s about jettisoning cultural baggage and presenting one’s self in the best light. Translation: I don’t hate the game.

Here’s where I do object: The hackneyed use of evolutionary psychology and pop-paleoanthropology to craft narratives of our evolutionary past, then use them to justify behaviors or strategies. Among PUAs, this is commonly manifested in a narrative that goes something like: “Humans evolved emotional responses that influence attraction in the paleolithic. During this period of human evolution, we lived in tribes. Because of the protective advantages, resource advantages, and social advantages of tribal leaders, women evolved an attraction to tribal leaders, a.k.a. alpha-males. Therefore, men should act like alpha males to attract women.”

Side Note: Lately, John Durant of hunter-gatherer.com has been writing about sorta similar things in the context of masculinity. While John’s recent posts have reminded me of my intent to write about this subject, I haven’t seen him construct this narrative. So… unless I missed something, the timing of this post is mostly a coincidence.

As to not be accused of constructing a straw-man, here are some quotes from “Mystery”, of the TV show The Pick-Up Artist. I can already hear the PUAs interjecting… “Yeah, but brah… he doesn’t represent all PUAs.” I fully agree with that point, but I don’t particularly give a fuck.

Evolutionary psychology and hunter-gatherer anthropology are ridiculously important and useful to a zillion things, and they continue to be held back by the pop-PUA bullshit that gets circulated endlessly. In other words, it makes my life difficult because I have to waste my time dealing with flak from people who object to the bullshit narrative — while I agree with their objections to the narrative. Darwin’s baby gets thrown out with the bathwater because a few people want to sell an image and a bunch of poorly researched ebooks.

The other objection I can hear rattling around in the most vapid of PUAs’ heads is, “Um, dude… So what, it fucking works.” That’s true in many cases, but it’s still a logically flawed argument. I’ll let those using it try to figure out why on their own.

But I digress… the quotes:

“Our emotional circuitry is designed to best suit our [survival and reproduction] based on an ancient environment and tribal social order that once existed tens of thousands of years ago.” – The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed (2005)

“Our emotions, and the behaviors they cause, are best adapted to a primitive tribal environment that no longer exists.” Revelation (2008)

“A friend that says, ‘He’s dated playboy models.’ Peacocking that screams tribal leader. Demonstrations of leading men in the group…. These are plotlines, and my game is full of them… learning that you are the tribal leader, having a jealousy plot line infuriate her…” The Pickup Artist: The New and Improved Art of Seduction (2010)

Anthropology argument against tribal alpha-male narrative

The main references cited in the PUA books mentioned in these posts are Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Evolution of Desire by David Buss (2003). I recommend both books, but the citations tend to misrepresent them. In the case of Dawkins’ book, it was written more than three decades ago, and anthropology has progressed radically in that time. Further, Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, not an anthropologist. Using his work as an anthropological reference is bound to be somewhat problematic.

There is no good reason to believe that humans evolved in hierarchical tribes between tens of thousands to two million years ago. To the contrary, there is a mountain of evidence showing that humans evolved in largely egalitarian bands that punished attempts of dominance with social sanctioning, banishment, and death (Boehm 1999). Yes, that’s basically saying that alpha males got offed by their social group — not exactly a benefit to reproduction. It appears that human ancestors likely lived in dominance hierarchies sometime in our distant past, but probably prior to the evolution of the hominin (human) line (Boehm 1999; Debreuil 2010). These works indicate that whatever “alpha” dominance tendencies evolved in our remote ancestors has most likely been evolving in the opposite direction for a couple million years. Among related primate ancestors, we see varying levels of dominance hierarchies, but the most recent common ancestor likely dates to 6 million years ago — a very far cry from merely “tens of thousands of years ago.” It must also be noted that as an evolutionary process, these behavioral traits exist on a continuum, and can’t be precisely mapped on a timeline. However, the “tribal” evolution narrative appears to be simply wrong.

Evolutionary argument against tribal alpha-male narrative

Without going into tedious detail, it’s unlikely that the alpha-male behavioral type (however imprecise that classification may be) is particularly adaptive. Traits that confer significant reproductive advantage tend to spread through a population rapidly. That basically means that traits that consistently vary widely among a species are probably not under significant selection pressures. If being alpha was the ne plus ultra of mate wooing strategies, there would be a whooooooollle lot fewer “betas.”

Evidence of what works better

If evolved human dominance behaviors have been decreasing over time, we would expect to see something else evolve to replace it. Because of the evolution of hominin brain size and cognition across the paleolithic, we might expect that whatever trait evolved via sexual selection related to these developments. Indeed, humor and intelligence appear to be more attractive to women than testosterone-related masculinity when it matters most — during female ovulation (Kaufman, et al. 2007). Greengross & Miller (2011) also found that humor relates to intelligence, and predicts mating success. Further, their data showed that Christopher Hitchens was right, and that males use humor to be selected by women.

Verdict

Masculine or “alpha” behavior is attractive to some women sometimes. It appears to be a retained trait from multiple millions of years ago, that was once advantageous, but has lost its significance with respect to the population as a whole. I’ve personally experimented with gender stereotypes enough to know that the opposite of masculinity can be attractive to women as well. When successful, either approach will lead to massive selection bias.

So, the PUAs are partially right on the attractiveness of masculinity. However, their narrative is a myth, and buying into such myths can limit reproductive success — or whatever term the PUA flavor of the month is using for “fucking” these days.

Then again, if you have intelligence, and the humor related to it, you probably already know that playing one strategy for every game is itself a sub-optimal strategy.

References

Boehm, Christopher (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.

Dubreuil, Benoit (2010). Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies: The State of Nature.

Greengross, G., & Miller, G. F. (2011). Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males. Intelligence, 39, 188-192. [PDF]

Kaufman, S. B., Kozbelt, A., Bromley, M. L., & Miller, G. F. (2007). The role of creativity and humor in mate selection. In G. Geher & G. Miller (Eds.), Mating intelligence: Sex, relationships, and the mind’s reproductive system (pp. 227-262). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [PDF]

Over the past year, I witnessed a lot more criticism of evolutionary psychology than expected. Most of it seems to amount to little more than the political and emotional gasps of a dying blank slate paradigm. One criticism that I did pay credence to is that the anthropological narrative used in evolutionary psychology (and pop-renditions in particular) might be in need of some improvement. The fundamental underpinnings of EP recognize the importance of getting the paleolithic (EEA) component of this right. Of course, opponents of EP simply assume a fatalistic pose and tell us to pack it all in and give up because it’s impossible. Sorry haters, I’m not giving up that easily.

I’m not going to analyze any perceived divergence from what I see in the anthropology and the ‘narrative’ (as some would use as an epithet) of evolutionary psychology today. What I’m reflecting on today, and I hope you’ll entertain yourself, is the humanity of these individual people that we tend to reduce to categorizations and statistics. I recently finished one book, and am about 80% through two others, that have added a depth to my relationship with the words, numbers, and charts I’m bombarded with daily. I’ve mentioned about all of these before to varying degrees, but today I’m thinking about them in a more personal frame rather than my usual use — debunking agrarian arguments.

My Life With the Eskimo by Vilhjalmur Stefansson – This name gets batted about the Paleo community all the time in the context of the Inuit diet — consisting almost completely of animal products. I actually started reading it because the 77Zero Expedition Kickstarter project I’ve alluded to follows some of the same route as his 1909-1912 expedition. My interest in the contents from multiple angles certainly influences my experience with it, but I’ve found it enthralling. I found myself cracking up out loud at times, and enthralled most of the rest of the time. I gotta admit, his account of coming in contact with a tribe that had never before seen white men left me a little verklempt (talk amongst yourselves). The book is a monster in terms of insight into the religion, language, tradition, and lifestyle of hunter-gatherer. It’s also packed with insight on the transition from HG life to sedentism. I found this ridiculously useful because of Stefansson’s treatment of the subject. He’s basically just reporting his interactions, with less of an agenda than earlier conquistador style explorers and the cultural relativist social scientists later in the 20th century. I’ll be reading as much of his other work as possible.  [FREE ePub version for Nook, Kindle, etc.]

Resilience, Reciprocity and Ecological Economics: Northwest Coast Sustainability by Robert Trosper, PhD – This provides a political and economic breakdown of the tribes native to the Pacific Northwest. As I’ve spent most of my life in Alaska, Washinton, and Oregon, this hit me on a more personal level in terms of relationship to ecological inputs.

Against the Grain by Richard Manning – To be honest, this book incited the range of negative emotions from frustration to anger to resentment to disgust. I’ve talked about it in other recent posts so I’ll leave it at that for now.

I’ve recently started looking into the pockets of hunter-gatherer life in the Scottish Highlands that existed to some degree until at least the 18th century as well. My Thanksgiving challenge to you is this: look into the hunter-gatherer history of your local area, and the area of your family’s recent heritage. There are hunter-gatherer examples in the history of almost everywhere, and I predict that you’ll develop a connection that’s more significant than “our ancestors ate animals, fruit, and vegetables”.