Well, of course, nevertheless, the video depicts a long run.

Thanks for finding this, really incredible, and a bit of refutation of De Vany. This may also suggest whey Ethiopians are the world's best distance runners. They are close to the ancestral genes.

Andrew, I believe the paleo grandparents nurtured the children while the parents were out for dinner and a movie, thus a reason to live far past their reproductive years.

I hadn't seen that video. I like it.

Here's a good one (long) on Adams' exposure to evolutionary biology…
[youtube _ZG8HBuDjgc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc youtube]

Cool. Nice video for sure.

This was my short answer to the distance running issue a week or so ago…
<img src="http://evolvify.com/files/2010/11/marathon-tweet.jpg&quot; />

There’s also a huge difference between beasting out on the marathon, half killing yourself, and persistence hunting (which is what most proponents of evolutionary arguments in favor of distance running cite).

There’s that great Attenborough video of the San tribesmen hunting the kudu…
[youtube fUpo_mA5RP8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUpo_mA5RP8 youtube]

…These dudes went for hours, but they were not trying to make 26.2 miles in under 3. They lope along, stop to examine the tracks, rest, and divide the share of labor, sending the fast one off on the final stretch to run the animal down. Seems like a sensible way to do it.

I liked the ‘extensions of men’ phrase. It made me think of the ‘extended phenotype’ coined by Richard Dawkins in the seventies.

Our mindset to see and use tools could explain why health professionals typically want to solve everything with tools (drugs, operation, …) and why, very often, patients also like these solutions.

There is a really great video by the late Douglas Adams (and Dawkins and Pinker and Diamond and Dennett) you can see here:
[youtube msAF_MDYWNE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msAF_MDYWNE youtube]

Douglas Adams makes this tool using so very clear.

Thanks for this blog. I really like it so far!!

Oh yeah… I forgot to mention…

Not sure what the problem might have been, but I've added an email address to the contact page as an alternative for anyone having problems with the submission form.

I skipped this on my first pass-through because I remember a recent article on the question of current/recent human evolution. The general tone was that it’s still occurring, but it’s not obvious. Alas, I must not have saved it so you just get my conjecture…

Long-term, I think the proliferation of novel tools will have a profound impact on human evolution. I’m not sure whether that means nuclear annihilation, the same sort of infertility we’ve bred into the plants in our food supply, or immune system deficiencies. The negative examples are the easiest to think of, but there are probably positives as well.

Your point about sexual selection, or “mate selection”, is a great one. It highlights that the psychological component (sexual attraction in this case) of our evolutionary history can sometimes override otherwise deleterious tendencies or trends in the population as a whole.

All of this needs to be tempered by a couple things. One, the potential mating pool respective to each individual is enormous. While the theoretical maximum group size of ancestral hunter-gatherer bands is 150, we have access to Russian (insert country of your choice) Mail-Order Brides, and the other zillion dating sites on the internet.

Also, grocery store culture (and social democracy) limits both the downside of selection by starvation and the upside (from a natural selection point of view) of selecting those more adept at resourcefulness. Resourcefulness doesn’t have a direct survival benefit, but it does act as a resource signaling cue (See ‘The Mating Mind’ linked above). Thus, we see a shift from a strong natural selection pressure to a stronger sexual selection pressure. Again, tempered by the population size.

The game theoretic sorting of individuals by relative attractiveness also comes into play. I’m sure there’s a scene that demonstrates this – (the way folk psychology often does) in Swingers, The Tao of Steve, and a zillion other films – that talk about “punching your own weight” in relation to attractiveness.