Posts Tagged “Anthropology”

06w01:1 The Human Machine

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2006 week 01 number 1 (the human machine)

Happy New Year. – Timothy

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DNA seen through the eyes of a coder | Bert Hubert
http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/
“This is just some rambling by a computer programmer about DNA. I’m not a molecular geneticist. […] I’m not trying to force my view unto the DNA – each observation here is quite ‘uncramped’. To see where I got all this from, head to the bibliography. […]DNA is not like C source but more like byte-compiled code for a virtual machine called ‘the nucleus’. It is very doubtful that there is a source to this byte compilation – what you see is all you get. The language of DNA is digital, but not binary. Where binary encoding has 0 and 1 to work with (2 – hence the ‘bi’nary), DNA has 4 positions, T, C, G and A. Whereas a digital byte is mostly 8 binary digits, a DNA ‘byte’ (called a ‘codon’) has three digits. Because each digit can have 4 values instead of 2, an DNA codon has 64 possible values, compared to a binary byte which has 256.”

Personal Identity, Neuroethics and the Human Brain | Michael S. Gazzaniga
http://realserver.princeton.edu:8080/ramgen/lectures/20050414gazzanigaVN350K.rm
Note: links to RAM file. Source page. A great and very illuminating presentation.

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emailed by Timothy on Monday 02 January 2006 @ 3:10 PM

05w33:1 Symbols

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 33 number 1 (symbols)


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http://tinyurl.com/burlh
“What most distinguishes humans from other creatures is our ability to create and manipulate a wide variety of symbolic representations. This capacity enables us to transmit information from one generation to another, making culture possible, and to learn vast amounts without having direct experience–we all know about dinosaurs despite never having met one. Because of the fundamental role of symbolization in almost everything we do, perhaps no aspect of human development is more important than becoming symbol-minded. What could be more fascinating, I concluded, than finding out how young children begin to use and understand symbolic objects and how they come to master some of the symbolic items ubiquitous in modern life.”
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emailed by Timothy on Thursday 18 August 2005 @ 3:45 PM

04w53:1 Presentations on Human Nature

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 53 number 1 (Presentations on Human Nature)
This issue of Good Reads provides links to three audio presentations, recorded at the Pop!Tech 2004 convention held in Camden, Maine, October 21-23, 2004. They are all provided by IT Conversations and are available to stream or download on the site. – Timothy
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Human Nature | Malcolm Gladwell
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail230.html
“Malcolm explores why we can’t trust people’s opinions — because we don’t have the language to express our feelings. His examples include the story of New Coke and how Coke’s market research misled them, and the development of Herman-Miller’s Aeron chair, the best-selling chair in the history of office chairs, which succeeded in spite of research that suggested it would fail. […]This presentation is one of many from the IT Conversations archives of Pop!Tech 2004 held in Camden, Maine, October 21-23, 2004.[runtime: 00:30:18, 13.9 mb, recorded 2004-10-21]” Related: http://www.businessinteriors.ca/products/seating/herman_miller_aeron.htm

Frans de Waal | Human Nature
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail231.html
“Frans de Waal tries to convince us that we’re all apes and that there’s little difference between us except that we walk on two legs. At first you think he’s joking. Perhaps not. A global ethologist and zoologist, de Waal is best known for his work on the social intelligence of primates. He thinks that if we ignore the importance of power struggles in the study of human nature, we’re making a big mistake. In his talk, he draws constant parallels between primate and human behavior and uses politicians as examples, including visuals of where aggression can also be used for reconciliation and how it plays a positive role, not just in politics, but in business and our social lives. [runtime: 00:30:36, 14 mb, recorded 2004-10-21]”

Joel Garreau | Human Nature
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail265.html
“‘Are we fundamentally changing human nature in our lifetime?’ Joel Garreau thinks that yes we will be…over the next twenty years. What’s driving this? He goes into great depth on Moore’s Law and later on, Metcalfe’s Law, which he received brownie points from Bob at the end of his session. He talks about technologies, how they are now aimed inward and gives a number of s curve examples.
[runtime: 00:49:23, 22.6 mb, recorded 2004-10-21] “

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emailed by Timothy on Monday 27 December 2004 @ 10:57 AM

04w48:3 The Religious Right and Evolution

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 48 number 3 (the religious right and evolution)


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Ronald Wright and Carl Zimmer on Evolution | The Current
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/media/200411/20041124thecurrent_sec2.ram
Ronald Wright -– Evolution has stopped | For some, it’s profoundly humbling to think that humans are the descendants of apes – and evolutionary cousins to chimpanzees and orangutans. We’ve evolved a long way as a species, but maybe not as far as we like to think. It’s been said that if a Cro-Magnon man from 40,000 years ago time traveled to the 21st Century and was given an up-to-date wardrobe and haircut, you wouldn’t be able to see the difference between him and anyone else on your bus ride home. […] Ronald Wright has been mulling over what this means to the history of human civilizations and the future of humanity. He’s best known as the author of Time Among the Maya and Stolen Continents. His new book is called the A Short History of Progress. We recently spoke with Ronald Wright and asked him to comment on one of the last lines of the book, which says our species is ‘an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.’
Carl Zimmer – Evolution Elsewhere | So humans still have hunter-gatherer brains, and yet they’re playing with nuclear technology. And if we don’t blow ourselves up, we might just pollute ourselves or consume ourselves into extinction. Well, if th at’s not scary enough, here’s another consequence of our slow pace of evolution Â… humans are speeding up the pace of evolution in the rest of the natural world. Carl Zimmer is the author of Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea and Parasite Rex. We reached him in New Haven, Connecticut.”
NOTE: Ronald Wright interview runs 2:07-12:52; Carl Zimmer interview runs 13:16-21:55

Evolution and the 3rd World & Georgia School Board | The Current
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/media/200411/20041124thecurrent_sec3.ram
Evolution and the 3rd World | Meredith Small is an anthropologist at the University of Cornell in Ithaca, New York. She is also a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s program ‘All Things Considered.’
Georgia School Board | Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, causing a sensation in Victo rian England and introducing the world to the concept of evolution. In 1925, the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial made a legend of Clarence Darrow – the lawyer who fought in a Tennessee courtroom to have the theory of evolution taught in schools over the objections of Creationists. Almost eighty years later, evolution and creationism have renewed hostilities in some American school boards. In Dover, Pennsylvania, ninth-grade biology instructors must now teach the theory of ‘intelligent design’ which critics say is just a disguised version of Creationism. It holds that life on earth has been guided and shaped by a divine intelligence – presumably God – that it didn’t get this way by the random genetic accidents of Darwin’s notion of natural selection. Meanwhile, in Cobb County, Georgia, they say they don’t teach the biblical Creation story in biology classes but in 2002, the school board found itself under pressure from two sides from parents who wanted Creationism in the classr oom and parents who felt the Bible had no place in science class. The school board’s compromise was to put stickers on science textbooks saying that evolution is ‘a theory,’ not a fact and that it should be ‘approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.’ The school board is now awaiting a decision on a court challenge to that policy. Jay Dillon, a spokesperson for the Cobb County school board, was recently interviewed on the radio program California Politics Today, and we aired an excerpt with what he told them. No one from the Cobb County school board returned phone calls from the CBC.”
NOTE: Real Audio Files; Meredith Small’s interview runs 0-8.13min | Georgia School Board discussion runs from 8:14min

Left Behind Series | The Current
http://tinyurl.com/6npp7
“The Left Behind Series is the most popular book series in the world. There are ten boo ks in all … so far. All of them have made the best-seller lists of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. All of the books are suspenseful, fast-paced books that explore the evangelical Christian saga of Armageddon.

Anna Maria Tremonti speaks with one of the co-authors, Jerry Jenkins.

Then we hear from two critics about the underlying theology of The Left Behind Series. Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple. He was in Jerusalem. Michelle Goldberg writes for salon.com and she was in New York. ” NOTE: broadcast date 1 January 2003

Jesus plus nothing: undercover among America’s secret theocrats | Jeffrey Sharlet
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1111/is_1834_306/ai_98468776/print
“Tiahrt was a short shot glass of a man, two parts flawle ss hair and one part teeth. He wanted to know the best way ‘for the Christian to win the race with the Muslim.’ The Muslim, he said, has too many babies, while Americans kill too many of theirs. […] ‘People separate it out,’ he warned Tiahrt. ”Oh, okay, I got religion, that’s private.’ As if Jesus doesn’t know anything about building highways, or Social Security. We gotta take Jesus out of the religious wrapping.’ ‘All right, how do we do that?’ Tiahrt asked. ‘A covenant,’ Doug answered. The congressman half-smiled, as if caught between confessing his ignorance and pretending he knew what Doug was talking about. ‘Like the Mafia,’ Doug clarified. ‘Look at the strength of their bonds.’ He made a fist and held it before Tiahrt’s face. Tiahrt nodded, squinting. ‘See, for them it’s honor,’ Doug said. ‘For us, it’s Jesus.’ Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their ‘brothers’: ‘Look at Hitler,’ he said. ‘Lenin , Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden.’ The Family, of course, possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the ‘total Jesus’ of a brotherhood in Christ. ‘That’s what you get with a covenant,’ said Coe. ‘Jesus plus nothing.'”

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emailed by Timothy on Friday 26 November 2004 @ 6:41 PM

04w48:1 The 2004 Massey Lectures

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 48 number 1 (The 2004 Massey Lectures)

Those of you on the Lecture List will have gotten this already, provided here primarily for the American subscribers and people outside of Toronto.

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The 2004 Massey Lectures on CBC’s Ideas | Ronald Wright
http://www.cbc.ca/listen/index.html
“Monday, November 22 – Friday, November 26
THE 2004 MASSEY LECTURES BY RONALD WRIGHT:
A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS

In his 2004 CBC Massey Lectures, A Short History of Progress, the acclaimed anthropologist and novelist Ronald Wright argues that only by understanding humanity’s patterns of triumph and disaster since the Stone Age, can we recognize the threats to our own civilization. With luck and wisdom, he suggests, we can help shape the future.

Each time history repeats itself, so it’s said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air , and water?the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? Can it be consolidated or sustained? And what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?

In A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age, can we recognize the experiment?s inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

Ronald Wright was born in England, educated at Cambridge, and now lives in British Columbia. A novelist, historian, and essayist, he has won prizes in all three genres, and is published in ten languages. His nonfiction includes the number one bestseller Stolen Continents, winner of the Gordon Montador Award and chosen as a bo ok of the year by the Independent and the Sunday Times. His first novel, A Scientific Romance, won the 1997 David Higham Prize for Fiction and was chosen a book of the year by the Globe and Mail, the Sunday Times, and the New York Times. His latest book is the novel Henderson?s Spear. Ronald Wright is also a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and has written and presented documentaries for radio and. television on both sides of the Atlantic.”

http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey.html

Note: because Ideas is broadcast across Canada at 9pm local, you can listen to it online by going to the ‘listen’ link above and selecting a city in a timezone where it is currently 9pm. So you listen to it a 8pm EST by clicking on Halifax,Fredericton, or Moncton and at midnight EST by clicking on Vancouver, with the other cities in between.

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emailed by Timothy on Monday 22 November 2004 @ 4:16 PM

04w45:2 Why We Sleep

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 45 number 2 (why we sleep)


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Why We Sleep | Jerome M. Siegel
http://www.npi.ucla.edu/sleepresearch/sciam2003/sciamsleep.pdf
“Various studies indicate that a constant release of monoamines can desensitize the neurotransmitters’ receptors. The interruption of monoamine release during REM sleep thus may allow the receptor systems to ‘rest’ and regain full sensitivity. And this restored sensitivity may be crucial during waking for mood regulation, which depends on the efficient collaboration of neurotransmitters and their receptors. […] Michel Jouvet, the pioneering sleep researcher who discovered four decades ago that the brain stem generates REM sleep, has a provocative suggestion for the large amounts of REM in immature animals. REM sleep’s intense neuronal activity and energy expenditure, Jouvet believes, have a role early in life in establishing the genetically programmed neuronal connections that make so-called instinctive behavior possible. Before birth, or in animals that have delayed sensory development, REM sleep may act as a substitute for the external stimulation that prompts neuronal development in creatures that are mature at birth. Work by Howard Roffwarg, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and his colleagues support this idea. Roffwarg found that preventing REM sleep in cats during this early period can lead to abnormalities in the development of the visual system.”
PDF file: 327K

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emailed by Timothy on Saturday 06 November 2004 @ 5:26 PM

04w44:2 Homo Floresiensis

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 44 number 2 (Homo Floresiensis)


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Homo Floresiensis has been discovered | Matt Webb
http://interconnected.org/home/2004/10/27/homo_floresiensi_has
“Oh yes, other thing about H. floresiensis, the exciting bit: Even more intriguing is the fact that Flores’ inhabitants have incredibly detailed legends about the existence of little people on the island they call Ebu Gogo. The islanders describe Ebu Gogo as being about one metre tall, hairy and prone to ‘murmuring’ to each other in some form of language. They were also able to repeat what islanders said to them in a parrot-like fashion. ‘There have always been myths about small people – Ireland has its leprechauns and Australia has the Yowies. I suppose there’s some feeling that this is an oral history going back to the survival of these small people into recent times,’ said co-discoverer Peter Brown, an associate professor of archaeology at New England. […] The myths say Ebu Gogo were alive when Dutch explorers arrived a few hundred years ago and the very last legend featuring the mythical creatures dates to 100 years ago. But Henry Gee, senior editor at Nature magazine, goes further. He speculates that species like H.floresiensis might still exist, somewhere in the unexplored tropical forest of Indonesia.'”


From 18,000 years ago… | Tim Radford

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1337735,00.html
“The new creature, officially titled Homo floresiensis but nicknamed ‘the hobbit’ by some researchers, upsets the orthodox view of human evolution. It means that researchers will now start looking for unexpected human remains in other isolated regions of the world. It also confirms the belief that modern humans – the only survivors of the genus Homo – are an evolutionary exception. For most of the seven million years of the human story, there were a number of co-existing species of humans. ‘We now have the remains of at least seven hobbit-sized individuals at the cave site, so the 18,000-year-old skeleton cannot be some kind of freak that we just happened to stumble across first,’ said Bert Roberts, of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, one of the authors. “

New Species Revealed: Tiny Cousins of Humans | Nicholas Wade
http://tinyurl.com/6rklw
“Once upon a time, but not so long ago, on a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people, whose adults stood just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.”

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emailed by Timothy on Saturday 30 October 2004 @ 8:12 PM

04w44:1 The Status of Sex

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 44 number 1 (the status of sex)


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Roughgarden Interview | The Current
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/media/200410/20041021thecurrent_sec3.ram
“It’s a rite of passage between parent and child. For generations, the story of the birds and the bees has been an efficient way to answer complicated questions, such as ‘where do babies come from?’ And why do males and females get together to make them? Now some scientists are arguing that we’ve only been telling a part of the story. In her new book Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People, Joan Roughgarden argues that the animal and human world is way more sexually complex than we thought it was—especially when it comes to orientation and gender. She’s a biology professor at Stanford University, who has also discovered that, in fact, homosexuality is common in 3-hundred species—-from lesbian lizards to bisexual Bonobo chimpanzees. Joan Roughgarden was in San Francisco, California. ” Real Audio file (20:06min)

Glad to be asexual | Sylvia Pagan Westphal
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996533
“Discovering our sexuality, we are told, is a perfectly normal process that must be celebrated[…]co ncepts such as celibacy or abstinence work on the implicit assumption that we are deliberately rejecting sexuality. Doctors tell us that if we lose interest in sex we must seek help with the problem. Unsurprisingly, one of the hardest things about being asexual is convincing other people that there is nothing wrong with you. Tell someone on the street that you are asexual and they’ll stare at you in disbelief, says Jay. The immediate supposition is that you’re just a late bloomer, he adds. “

Survival of genetic homosexual traits explained | Andy Coghlan
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996519
“The researchers discovered that women tend to have more children when they inherit the same – as yet unidentified – genetic factors linked to homosexuality in men. This fertility boost more than compensates for the lack of offspring fathered by gay men, and keeps the ‘gay’ genetic factors in circulation. The findings represent the best explanation yet for the Darwinian paradox presented by homosexuality: it is a genetic dead-end, yet the trait persists generation after generation. “

Platypus sex is XXXXX-rated | Rachel Nowak
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996568
“In most mammals, including humans, sex is decided by the X and Y chromosomes: two Xs create a female, while XY creates a male. In birds, the system is similar: ZW makes for a female, while ZZ makes for a male. But in platypuses, XXXXXXXXXX creates a female, while XYXYXYXYXY creates a male. In other words, rather than a single chromosome pair, platypuses have a set of ten-chromosomes that determine their sex”

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emailed by Timothy on Monday 25 October 2004 @ 5:02 PM

04w43:3 Life Molecular

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Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 43 number 3 (life molecular )


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Human Gene Total Falls Below 25,000 | Nicholas Wade
http://tinyurl.com/5jkcq
“Coincidentally, French researchers are reporting in the same issue of Nature that they have decoded the genome of a biologically important fish, the spotted green pufferfish. They say it has 20,000 to 25,000 genes, the identical range now estimated for humans. How can it be that humans, seen by some as the apotheosis of creation, have the same numb er of genes? The question is the more pressing because genes are subject to a rigorous ‘use it or lose it’ rule. Those not vital to an organism are quickly rendered useless by mutations. Also, the human brain seems particularly dependent on genetic complexity, because about half of all human genes are active in brain tissue.”

How do you persist when your molecules don’t? | John McCrone
http://www.sci-con.org/articles/20040601.html
“Do you know the half-life of a microtubule, the protein filaments that form the internal scaffolding a cell? Just ten minutes. That’s an average of ten minutes between assembly and destruction. Now the brain is supposed to be some sort of computer. It is an intricate network of some 1,000 trillion synaptic connections, each of these synapses having been lovingly crafted by experience to have a particular shape, a particular neurochemistry. It is of course the information represented at these junctions that makes us who we are. But how the heck do these synapses retain a stable identity when the chemistry of cells is almost on the boil, with large molecules falling apart nearly as soon as they are made?”

The Hidden Genetic Program of Complex Organisms | John S. Mattick
http://tinyurl.com/6et5s
PDF File 518K

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emailed by Timothy on Saturday 23 October 2004 @ 6:55 PM

04w22:2 Fat

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Highly recommended code red.

The first one’s title is coloured red today because I’m trying out a new rating system. I’ll admit that some of these good reads have only really been interesting, while others are “must reads” since they’re so educational and enlightening. How do I distinguish them from the rest? Well, today I’ll try colouring their titles red. The first article to be so endowed comes to us from Harvard magazine; so we know that it’s intellectually nutritious, beyond it’s subject matter, tracing America’s – and humanity’s – relationship to food and the current obesity issue. This one had a startling breadth of coverage, explaining not only why the waistlines are expanding but why our wisdom teeth are impacting and I can’t recommend it highly enough. In keeping with the concept of this posting and it’s amazing bites, it is quoted a bit more heavily that usual. – Timothy

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The Way We Eat Now | Craig Lambert
http://www.harvard-magazine.com/on-line/050465.html
“Many foreigners already view Americans as rich, greedy over-consumers, stuffing themselves with far more than their share of the planet’s resources, and obese American travelers waddling through international airports and hotel lobbies only reinforce that image. Yet our fat problem is becoming a global one as food corporations export our sugary, salty, fatty diet: Beijing has more than a hundred McDonald’s franchises […] Personal responsibility surely does play a role, but we also live in a ‘toxic environment’ that in many ways discourages healthy eating […] you’d want to make healthful foods widely available, inexpensive, and convenient, and unhealthful foods relatively less so. Instead, we’ve done the opposite.’ Never in human experience has food been available in the staggering profusion seen in North America today. We are awash in edibles shipped in from around the planet; seasonality has largely disappeared. Food obtrudes itself constantly, seductively, into our lives?on sidewalks, in airplanes, at gas stations and movie theaters. ‘Caloric intake is directly related to gross national product per capita,’ says Moore professor of biological anthropology Richard Wrangham. […] This represents a drastic change from the 1950s, when people ate far more of their meals at home, with their families, and at a leisurely pace. The 1950s were also an era in which the kitchen?not the television room?was the heart of the home. […] The old order Amish of Ontario, Canada, have escaped much of that advertising, and the TV viewing as well. They have an obesity rate of 4 percent, less than one-seventh the U.S. norm. Yet the Amish eat heartily, and not all health food: pancakes, ham, cake, and milk?but also ample amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables. It seems that the secret to the ‘Amish paradox’ is their low-technology lifestyle, which entails vastly more physical activity than its modern correlate. […] ‘The Amish are not freaks,’ says professor of anthropology Daniel Lieberman, a skeletal biologist. ‘They are just anachronisms. Human beings are adapted for endurance exercise. We evolved to be long-distance runners?running a marathon is not a freak activity. We can outrun just about any other creature.’ “

The Starving Criminal | Theodore Dalrymple
http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_oh_to_be.html
“From the dietary point of view, freedom has the same effect upon them as a concentration camp; incarceration restores them to nutritional health. This is a new phenomenon, at least on the scale on which I now see it. Last week, for example, I treated in my hospital a skeletal man who had been released from prison only two months before and had in that short time lost 44 pounds. A recidivist, he had served many short sentences for theft, and his weight went up and down according to whether he was in prison or at liberty. This is a common enough pattern of weight gain and weight loss among the males of my city?s underclass. It has a meaning quite alien to those who believe that modern malnutrition is merely a symptom of poverty and inequality. […] Not all the malnourished are drug-takers, however. It is when you inquire into eating habits, not just recent but throughout entire lifetimes, that all this malnutrition begins to make sense. The trail is a short one between modern malnutrition and modern family […] In fact, he told me that he had never once eaten at a table with others in the last 15 years. Eating was for him a solitary vice, something done almost furtively, with no pleasure attached to it and certainly not as a social event. The street was his principal dining room, as well as his trash can: and as far as food was concerned, he was more a hunter-gatherer than a man living in a highly evolved society.”

When Real Food Isn’t an Option | Donald G. McNeil Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/weekinreview/23mcne.html?pagewanted=print&position=
“In a world where the rich spend millions on ways to avoid carbohydrates and the United Nations declares obesity a global health threat, the cruel reality is that far more people struggle each day just to get enough calories. In Malawi, children stand on the roadsides selling skewers of roasted mice. In Mozambique, when grasshoppers eat the crops, people turn the tables and eat them, calling the fishy-tasting bugs ‘flying shrimp.’ In Liberia during the 1989 civil war, every animal in the national zoo was devoured but a one-eyed lion. Dogs and cats disappeared from the streets of the capital. ” NOTE: The New York Times requires registration; but if you’ve looked at NYT content before and haven’t deleted your cookies, that may not be necessary. However if prompted, use the following username: goodreader100 and password: goodreads (courtesy of goodreads.ca).

The big fat con story | Paul Campos
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1200549,00.html
“In 1853, an upper-class Englishman could be quite unselfconscious about the fact that the mere sight of the urban proletariat disgusted him. In 2003, any upper-class white American liberal would be horrified to imagine that the sight of, say, a lower-class Mexican-American woman going into a Wal-Mart might somehow elicit feelings of disgust in his otherwise properly sensitised soul. But the sight of a fat woman – make that an ‘obese’ – better yet a ‘morbidly [sic] obese’ woman going into Wal-Mart… ah, that is something else again. ”

‘Soft flesh feels very, very good’ | R.M. Vaughan
http://tinyurl.com/26cla
“Anti-fat hysteria is everywhere. A Canadian chain of health clubs has a catchy radio jingle that features the mean-spirited lyrics, ‘Don’t wanna be a fat guy, a fat guy — jiggly, wiggly, Jello-y fat guy!’ Even more staid institutions, such as the Canadian Paediatric Society, have joined the anti-feeding frenzy, releasing a shrill, overwrought report last fall that called childhood obesity an ‘epidemic.’ The report was endorsed, not surprisingly, by various physical-education lobby groups — the same folks who tortured you with chin-ups and ‘shirts v. skins’ games in Grade 7. Large folks looking for relief from the ostensibly more open-minded art world have found little to comfort them on the gallery walls. When not presenting fat people as grotesques, the Western art world tends to represent body fat as a metaphor for all that is wrong and decadent in our affluent society. ”

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emailed by Timothy on Thursday 27 May 2004 @ 2:26 PM