Health risk between vegans, vegetarians, fish eaters, low meat eaters and meat eaters.

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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Health risk between vegans, vegetarians, fish eaters, low meat eaters and meat eaters.

Post by brimstoneSalad »

carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:31 am Your argument appears to be based on a straw-man, never have I suggested anything about "healthfulness" or "optical diets" or any such nonsense. I made a rather brief comment, namely, that it would be surprising if meat was some "great devil" in our diet considering how long we've been consuming it.
What's a "great devil"? It seems people are pretty worried about heart disease and cancer later in their lives, and something that causes it would reasonably be called a great devil.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:31 amThe idea that species adapt to their environmental is not a "misuse of evolutionary biology", on the contrary, its precisely what happens.
Heart disease is not part of a species' environment if it never lives long enough to experience it. This is your misuse of evolutionary biology.

Your implication here IS that a species adapts so perfectly to an environment such that nothing in it could have cumulatively harmful effects. IF those harmful effects do not occur during the species' typical life in the wild, particularly the species' viable reproductive life, there's no reason to think it would adapt to prevent them.

In order to claim we even might reasonably be expected to develop a resistance to deleterious effects, you'd have to show that those deleterious effects occurred and that they did so early enough to exert significant selective pressure.

You made the claim, and if you don't understand why that puts the burden of proof on you to show those things are true I don't know what to tell you.

If you merely claimed that it wouldn't be surprising if it weren't some great evil in our 20s and 30s, you'd be right. In fact, that is in accordance with the evidence on heart disease prevalence.

Where you made an extraordinary claim is to say that evolution has something to say about the probability of something being harmful to us beyond that.

carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:31 am Beyond that one fundamental flaw in your comments seem to be that you're conflating life-expectancy and life-span and miscontruing life-expectancy. Life-expectancy doesn't tell you much about the distribution of ages so a life-expectancy of, say 50, doesn't mean its rare for people to life past that age. To know that you'd have to look at the actual distribution of ages.
Again, if you have some evidence that humans routinely lived longer than this, please present it.
You're making the claim here.

We already know that skeletons older than 40 are pretty rare, so the distribution was probably pretty tight, but I don't think that's my job to prove. You have a series of things to prove to make your claim plausible.
You'd need a lot of members of the species living and reproducing at those ages to show a strong selective pressure, or you need to show a lot of them lived that long and prove the grandparent hypothesis right.

Circular logic about menopause doesn't do that.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:31 amSecondly you seem to be conflating life-expectancy and life-span, a species life-span is not greatly impacted by their living conditions.
I'm not doing that, I'm arguing against your dramatic claim that we age that much more slowly than other great apes (your original claim was in excess of twice as fast). If that were true, then maximum observed life-expectancy wouldn't be so close. The oldest humans are only about 1.5x older than the oldest apes, and the difference would probably be smaller if we had a larger sampling of apes to compare (thus more long-lived members on the far edge of the curve).

There are confounding variables you are ignoring to come to exaggerated conclusions, and the fact of the small difference in maximal life span should be a big red-flag. If you don't see the problem with that, I don't know what to tell you.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:31 amLife-span refers to how the species ages biologically. Chimpanzees age around twice as fast as humans, just as dogs age around 4~5 times faster than humans. By 40 a chimpanzee is elderly where as a human is not.
We age a little more slowly, but at 40 a human is getting up there too; a lot of things start going down hill.
Maximum observed lifespans aren't that different (as I said, about 1.5 times), NOR is life-expectancy in the wild by any good evidence. Using any credible comparisons, chimps and humans probably had about the same life-expectancy.

The only way we're significantly different is linked to maturation, something you keep ignoring. Humans mature more slowly for a reason; the slow maturation is an evolutionary disadvantage, but the reason we have to do it (our brains) is an advantage that makes up for that.

This isn't "magic".
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:31 amThis is key to understanding why menopause in humans is surprising, unlike other primates human women age differently biological and reproduction wise.
It's not surprising at all, because it's based on the rate of ovulation, and the fact is that there's no reason to assume ancient man typically lived past menopause.
Contrary to your assertions, evolution would suggest that menopause is actually a pretty good measure of what natural life expectancy is.
It doesn't make sense for an animal to regularly outlive fertility; when this occurs, cycle length should increase so it's a slower burn.

Female chimps reach fertility at around 8, humans at around 12.
The menstrual cycle is 37 days in chimps, and 28 days in humans.

Humans usually reach menopause around by 50.

50 years - 12 years = 38 years

38 years / 28 days = 495.685841 cycles

495.685841 cycles * 37 days = 50.2142857 years

We would expect chimps to reach menopause by about 58.

This would lead us to expect that during our evolution we were actually around 14% shorter lived than wild chimps are, not longer lived.

But as a matter of fact, chimps do experience menopause, and at around 50 too (which suggests we lived about the same length, which modern research supports). It's Chimps who experience unusually early menopause based on ovulations, not humans.
Humans did not evolve to go through menopause early to become grandparents, the notion seems quite absurd when you consider the mechanisms at play.

The only thing that needs to be explained is why chimps go through menopause so much earlier than humans do with respect to number of ovulations, but that's very easily explained by the slightly accelerated ageing, which in turn is easily explained by slower growth and maturity in humans to facilitate more brain development (not in order to live longer :roll: ).

carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:31 amA second flaw is that you seem to believe that evolution requires strong selection forces but it doesn't.
Your argument is akin to arguing that men must commonly breast feed because they have nipples: they MUST be useful, otherwise they would have vanished since they're detrimental (they can chafe or become infected, etc.). :roll:
The reason that doesn't work is because the selective pressure against them is very weak relative to the changes needed.

In order for men to lose their nipples or have them further diminished, it must both be possible (something you haven't demonstrated, by the way) and have enough selective pressure to overcome the noise of environment and genetics in the context of other selective pressures.
A trait that is beneficial in theory can easily disappear by dumb luck if that benefit isn't strong enough to express itself above other variables.
Likewise, traits that are detrimental commonly stick around because they aren't detrimental enough to significantly impact reproduction above noise of genetic drift etc.

This is particularly true in a small population. And particularly in quickly evolving populations where other selective pressures dwarf the one you're concerned with.

Both of these describe early humans.

You might have a better argument if we were cockroaches or something with large quickly reproducing populations that have been relatively unchanged (just fine tuning) for a few hundred million years.

Look into vestigial structures, which are often useless, near useless, and deleterious -- but not enough so for evolution to work against them in any reasonable time frame.

carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:31 am If there is some gene that protects people from a common disease that strikes when you're 60+ that gene would obviously increase fitness for the individual and the gene would spread in the population.
No, it obviously wouldn't, no matter how strong the pressure would have otherwise been, if those individuals can't reproduce in their 60s.

In order to demonstrate selective pressures from a functionally post-fertile population you'd have to prove the grandparent hypothesis first -- something you also have not done.

carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:31 amThere are a ton of models you can plan with that will show how weak selection forces and dramatically alter a genome.
For bacteria or something, sure. Huge populations, fertile until death, mostly static structurally and just fine-tuning so the relative pressure is strong.

It's not impossible for a weak selective pressure to get lucky, but it's not something that's plausible. It's something that should surprise us when it happens.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:31 amLastly you've made a number of bold anthropological claims without evidence while asking me to give detailed evidence, I find that strange.
You're the one who made the original claim, and backing that up requires proving a series of required assumptions.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 6:31 amBut since each of the claims would require a lengthy discussion I'm not going to further address them.
That's fine, as long as you realize you haven't met your burden of proof here. We can drop this discussion if you'll stop making the claim that evolution tells us something about what we should or shouldn't be surprised about in terms of environmental effects on disease in old age.
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Re: Health risk between vegans, vegetarians, fish eaters, low meat eaters and meat eaters.

Post by carnap »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:32 pm What's a "great devil"? It seems people are pretty worried about heart disease and cancer later in their lives, and something that causes it would reasonably be called a great devil.
Something that clearly causes some specific disease or set of diseases that noticeably reduces life-span. At the moment there is no reason to believe that meat consumption, as a whole, causes cancer or heart-disease.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:32 pm Heart disease is not part of a species' environment if it never lives long enough to experience it. This is your misuse of evolutionary biology.
On the contrary, heart disease can start to develop in early adulthood. But this seems to be related to your belief that it was rare for people to live past 40 until recently. I'm not misusing evolutionary biology because I disagree with your claim, a claim that you haven't provided any evidence for.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:32 pm Your implication here IS that a species adapts so perfectly to an environment such that nothing in it could have cumulatively harmful effects.
Not at all and I never suggested such a thing, what I suggested is that it would be surprising if meat had profound negative impacts on our health.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:32 pm Again, if you have some evidence that humans routinely lived longer than this, please present it.
You're making the claim here.
Right and I provided evidence in a previous post, the study I cited looked at teeth and found plenty of older samples. But the samples were more common in the upper paleolithic period. I also pointed to research on hunter-gathers, these groups have similar lifestyles to our paleolithic ancestors and around 20~30% of the people in a given population are over 60 which.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:32 pm I'm not doing that, I'm arguing against your dramatic claim that we age that much more slowly than other great apes (your original claim was in excess of twice as fast). If that were true, then maximum observed life-expectancy wouldn't be so close.
You still seem to be misconstruing the term "life-expectancy", its an average. It doesn't make sense to talk about a "maximum". And there is nothing dramatic about claim, you'd find it any textbook on primatology. The life-span of chimpanzees is around 45~50, gorillas around 35~40 and so on. Human life-span is around 80. Again life-span isn't a claim about how long a given animal can expect to life, that is life-expectancy. Its a statement about how the animal ages.

The oldest living samples (which I think is what you mean by maximum life-expectancy) of chimpanzees and humans are roughly consistent with the life-spans are cited. The oldest chimpanzees are in their late 60's, oldest gorillas in their late 50's and oldest humans in their early 120's.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:32 pm Humans mature more slowly for a reason; the slow maturation is an evolutionary disadvantage, but the reason we have to do it (our brains) is an advantage that makes up for that.
All apes mature slowly, chimpanzees enter adulthood at around 13 years where as humans its more around 16~18 years. So the slower maturation in humans doesn't even come close to explaining the longer life-span.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:32 pm It doesn't make sense for an animal to regularly outlive fertility; when this occurs, cycle length should increase so it's a slower burn.
You're right it doesn't make sense which is why the human case is surprising, the life-span of human women is much longer than their fertility and that is really curious. You're speaking like there is no issue here and this is just an issue I'm pulling out of my ass, yet its been a curiosity to anthropologists for some time:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11223885

Your comments here are conjecture that are based on the idea that there is some how a fixed amount of eggs or number of cycles an animal can have, but neither are accurate. With evolutionary modeling you can test hypothesizes like this for plausibility and researchers have done just that, for example the study I just cited.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:32 pm Humans usually reach menopause around by 50.
Yes, but human fertility starts to dramatically decline at around 35. Between 40~50 women are in a period of pre-menopause, they still have a cycle but its very difficult to get pregnant naturally. This is why women in this age group typically utilize various technologies to have children.
I'm here to exploit you schmucks into demonstrating the blatant anti-intellectualism in the vegan community and the reality of veganism. But I can do that with any user name.
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Re: Health risk between vegans, vegetarians, fish eaters, low meat eaters and meat eaters.

Post by carnap »

Also a theme in your discussion is that diseases like heart-disease, cancer, diabetes, etc are only issues in old age but that is far from being the case. In fact cancers have a U-shaped distribution, where its most common in the young and old but less common in middle-age (though the specific types of cancers are more common with the young, middle-age or elderly) So if some component of meat promoted cancer there would be clear selection pressure for any gene that provided protection. As mentioned in my last post, heart-disease can start to develop in early adulthood and has a number of negative impacts on health before it becomes deadly (stroke activity, reduced blood flow, etc). Similar for type 2 diabetes, its a disease that progresses slowly over time and early stages have negative consequences.
I'm here to exploit you schmucks into demonstrating the blatant anti-intellectualism in the vegan community and the reality of veganism. But I can do that with any user name.
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Re: Health risk between vegans, vegetarians, fish eaters, low meat eaters and meat eaters.

Post by brimstoneSalad »

carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pm Something that clearly causes some specific disease or set of diseases that noticeably reduces life-span. At the moment there is no reason to believe that meat consumption, as a whole, causes cancer or heart-disease.
What's "clearly causes"? We're talking increased risks here, but there's every reason to believe the links are causal.

There is very strong mechanistic evidence, in addition to good epidemiological evidence (despite the noise) for some kinds of meat (red meats pretty clearly causes colon cancer, for example).
Harvard has a brief overview here:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/red-meat-and-colon-cancer

When it comes to fish, there appears to be a U shaped relationship with mortality, and it may be true that a modest amount of fish is more protective than harmful due to the DHA (although no reason to believe that algal DHA wouldn't be just as good or better for a vegan).

There are many reasons to believe that most animal products are harmful in any significant amounts, but that's kind of irrelevant to the point at hand which is your misuse of evolutionary biology to imply that they should not be.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmOn the contrary, heart disease can start to develop in early adulthood.
It can, but significant effects are rare, particularly when we're dealing with a population that is neither obese nor sedentary.
I wouldn't consider it a "great devil" in early adulthood or childhood. It's unlikely to kill anybody before 40.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmI'm not misusing evolutionary biology because I disagree with your claim, a claim that you haven't provided any evidence for.
You made the claim that evolution tells us something about this: you're the one who needs to provide evidence for all of the necessary assumptions that would need to be made for that to be true. I don't think conjecture counts as evidence.

It perhaps being plausible that some evolutionary account involves pressures for adaptation to meat's effect in the elderly is not the same as it being demonstrated to be probable that such an account is true.

You can't say "The Earth is flat" and then when I reply "No, it's an oblate spheroid" go on to suggest that I need to provide evidence for my counter-assertion, and explain in detail how your ad hoc hypothesis works, but in terms of evidence providing only crumbs that support the plausibility of *part* of the model.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmNot at all and I never suggested such a thing, what I suggested is that it would be surprising if meat had profound negative impacts on our health.
It would be surprising if the kinds and amounts of meat that we ate during our evolution had profound effects on our health before or during our reproductive peaks that reliably prevented reproduction, particularly with physical activity.

Nothing outside that is necessarily surprising, and if you want to assert that it is you need to provide some good evidence for why that would be.

More modest effects (which may be below the level of being a "devil") are not so surprising, because it could easily be that they DID have such effects because it's functionally impossible to evolve resistance to them (again, you need to show that it's even possible; examples in animals seem to suggest that it is not possible), but that the nourishment they provided (which is not needed now) more than made up for them.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmRight and I provided evidence in a previous post, the study I cited looked at teeth and found plenty of older samples. But the samples were more common in the upper paleolithic period.
You mean this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/magazine/who-lives-longest.html?_r=0
Rachel Caspari, a paleoanthropologist at Central Michigan University, studies the life spans of ancient humans, their ancestors and close relatives — together, known as hominins. In 2004, she and a colleague examined teeth from 768 hominin fossils representing three million years of primate evolution.

Looking at wear and other signs of aging in the teeth, Caspari split the fossils into groups of old and young adults, creating rough approximations of ancient demographics. Examing a span from between 100,000 and 30,000 years ago, Caspari found about four old adults for every 10 young adults. But beginning around 30,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic, this reversed: Caspari counted 20 old adults for every 10 young adults.
1. 768 fossils over three million years is probably not a good sample; what portion of those were actually upper paleolithic? And what did she have to compare them with? And what kind of biases affected corpse preservation, or which she had access to?

2. Old and young groups? Worst. Granularity. Ever.

3. Regardless of any of that, tooth wear is not a good sign of ageing without dietary and food preparation controls. Wear is highly influenced by environment, particularly moving into an era where food preparation with stone tools was likely more common.

If I can find the actual study later, I'll look it over, but this is pretty weak.

Even if you accept this as credible evidence for what you're claiming (and I see no indication it should even indicate the lifespans you're suggesting), this is a much shorter time period with much more advanced technology (including fishing), not much longer than how long we've been farming compared to the whole 200,000 years of modern Homo Sapiens.
It's also one with wildly variable cultural practices.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmI also pointed to research on hunter-gathers, these groups have similar lifestyles to our paleolithic ancestors and around 20~30% of the people in a given population are over 60 which.
1. What research did you "point to"? Did you forget to post a link? I looked back and still can't find anything. There were a couple other brief comments in that Times article, but nothing short of cherry picking to fit the narrative.
Popular work on tribal societies is rife with factual errors and bad methodology: http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer/
If you have a link to an actual study, please post it.

2. Even if you don't think the problems with the research you're paraphrasing completely discredit it, 30% should be an obvious red flag; that indicates a baby-boom a little over 60 years prior, and likely lower fertility since then or an incident that increased infant mortality or killed off a number of adults, not a stable demographic. Japan has those kinds of numbers and they have a serious problem. It's obviously an outlier, not representative of life expectancy (for that you need a real demographic study).

3. Even if that were true (which I do not believe it is), there's no good reason to think their lifestyles are very similar. There are huge technological and cultural differences today, as well as environmental ones and humanitarian aid and rule of law provided by neighboring states. It's a ridiculous comparison.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pm You still seem to be misconstruing the term "life-expectancy", its an average.
I meant to say lifespan.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmIt doesn't make sense to talk about a "maximum".
It makes sense to talk about the oldest examples we have observed; it's a very important data point when we have few other objective metrics to look at.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmAnd there is nothing dramatic about claim, you'd find it any textbook on primatology.
Which is an incredibly ignorant comparison given the serious confounding variables.
You can't claim that chimps should regularly reach their potentials in captivity with the same medical care, and ignore the captivity part. We also have significantly less ability to treat and monitor chimpanzees due to poor feedback and difficult behavior, even if the budget and knowledge were there to provide them the same level of care.

Some people just assume that our long lifespans today are as natural as those short lifespans commonly observed in chimps. This is NOT an assumption that should be made.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmThe life-span of chimpanzees is around 45~50, gorillas around 35~40 and so on. Human life-span is around 80.
You're just begging the question, and assuming the very conclusion you want to arrive at.

Chimps, Gorillas, and Humans are by no means living in equally "natural" environments that they evolved in.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmAgain life-span isn't a claim about how long a given animal can expect to life, that is life-expectancy. Its a statement about how the animal ages.
Which is something you're assuming by ignoring confounding variables.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmThe oldest living samples (which I think is what you mean by maximum life-expectancy) of chimpanzees and humans are roughly consistent with the life-spans are cited. The oldest chimpanzees are in their late 60's, oldest gorillas in their late 50's and oldest humans in their early 120's.
No they aren't. You're correct about humans, but not Chimps.

https://www.cnn.com/2012/04/21/us/oldest-chimpanzee-in-captivity/index.html
"Little Mamma" in that article, 74
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/local/new-little-mama-oldest-living-chimp-dies-lion-country-safari/16zwQ1k0ixvwmCqTdyip8K/
She died a few months ago, last November. She should have been around 79.

Around 80 vs. 120.

Not that dramatic a difference. Again, about 1.5 times, as I said. Which is about the same difference as the ratio for sexual maturity (8 years old vs 12 years old).

If we had larger populations of captive chimps to observe (as we have huge populations of humans to draw from) we'd no doubt have even older examples. Do you deny this?

You're trying to compare apples to oranges here, since the population samples we have create such a bias (and they're also in captivity).
Medical care is one thing that should increase life expectancy (and there's no reason to believe it's the same for veterinary care for reasons I mentioned and others I didn't), but captivity decreases it.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pm All apes mature slowly, chimpanzees enter adulthood at around 13 years where as humans its more around 16~18 years. So the slower maturation in humans doesn't even come close to explaining the longer life-span.
What the hell are you talking about? It explains it perfectly well.

Your arbitrary "entering adulthood" numbers maybe not as much (FYI, humans don't reach full maturity until the 20s, if you want to stretch chimp maturity out that far), but something more objective like sexual maturity maps to the differences we've seen for maximum lifespans.

carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pm
brimstoneSalad wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:32 pm It doesn't make sense for an animal to regularly outlive fertility; when this occurs, cycle length should increase so it's a slower burn.
You're right it doesn't make sense which is why the human case is surprising, the life-span of human women is much longer than their fertility and that is really curious.
Again, you are begging the question.

You are just assuming natural human lifespan (during the bulk of our evolution) WAS longer than fertility.
There is no reason to believe that.

The better explanation is that the age of menopause tells us what our natural lifespans were during the bulk of our evolution, and that longer lifespans today are happenstance of environment making it possible to live longer than we would have combined with a lucky side effect of slow maturity that evolved for completely unrelated reasons.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmYou're speaking like there is no issue here and this is just an issue I'm pulling out of my ass, yet its been a curiosity to anthropologists for some time:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11223885
I'm sure there have, but again they're just assuming menopause evolved for some important reason. There's no reason to assume that.

The simpler explanation is that we just did not usually live that long historically, which would be in line with most other species.

Even if we did live that long due to some happenstance of environment combined with slower growth, fertility just may not have changed (rather than having evolved to actually lose fertility), either because it did not have time to change, or due to many other possible reasons which have nothing to do with the grandparent hypothesis.

For example, risk of Down Syndrome starts climbing exponentially after 40. Due to human empathy, the presence of these children may have just been harmful to the tribe as resource drains (of course infanticide is common in tribal societies, but that would have just made these children useless and created conflict for no reason); it does not necessarily have anything to do with grandparents being important so much as the offspring they're capable of producing being less likely to survive, and more likely to drag others down.

Even without that, the mere existence of these infertile grandparents could still be a drain on the tribe, but just not enough of one to evolve some kind of kill switch at 50 (if that's even possible to evolve). There's no reason to postulate that we evolved in order to live longer, since their existence at all (if we lived that long) is much more easily explained as a side-effect of slower human growth and maturity (very important for brain development), and their being tolerated and cared for despite being a drain is easily explained as a side effect of human empathy (very important for group cohesion and cooperation).

The grandparent hypothesis is a ridiculous narrativization of evolution. It's a nice story and people favor it due to the emotional appeal of everything having meaning (and who doesn't love old people? It just FEELS true that they must be important), but it's a terrible ad hoc hypothesis with no credible evidence.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pm Your comments here are conjecture that are based on the idea that there is some how a fixed amount of eggs or number of cycles an animal can have, but neither are accurate.
Conjecture? :o OBVIOUSLY. :roll:

I'm not saying that they do, but given that we're closely related it's pretty plausible lacking other evidence that they are similar.
It's at least as credible as your arguments, probably more so because there are fewer needed assumptions. We don't even have to assume that we evolved to have a different number of eggs from our close relatives, which is reasonable.

My point is that arguments like these aren't that compelling. Evolution itself tells us very little.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmWith evolutionary modeling you can test hypothesizes like this for plausibility and researchers have done just that, for example the study I just cited.
Plausibility in the sense of not clearly impossible? That it could be true? Maybe. But that gives us no indication of meaningful probability.

And you only get to the former by piling on some extra ad hoc hypotheses.
Don't get the result you want? Just add more assumptions until it works! That's science, kids! :roll:

I don't have a problem with people speculating on the reasons this or that evolved, it's mostly just an exercise in storytelling (evolutionary fan fiction) when we have a sample of ONE and no hard evidence, but it's harmless in itself.
What I have a problem with is people extrapolating from those unproved hypotheses and using them to come to conclusions and then pushing those conclusions as arguments in place of modern empirical evidence. I feel like that's what you've been doing.

In order for a violation of it to surprise us, the hypothesis can not just be plausible in the sense that it's reasonably possible that it could be true for all we know because there might be a mechanism that could fit, it must be overwhelmingly probable that it's true.

It's not reasonable to come to any conclusions about any of this based on evolution. We should neither be surprised nor unsurprised about anything that turns up about meat and human health beyond a very limited period in adulthood and extreme outcomes that would preclude successful reproduction.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmYes, but human fertility starts to dramatically decline at around 35. Between 40~50 women are in a period of pre-menopause, they still have a cycle but its very difficult to get pregnant naturally. This is why women in this age group typically utilize various technologies to have children.
Yeah, not sure what this has to do with anything. It's hard to map human and chimp fertility carefully, I'm just using general numbers. Very likely chimpanzee fertility wanes later on as well.

carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:44 pm Also a theme in your discussion is that diseases like heart-disease, cancer, diabetes, etc are only issues in old age but that is far from being the case.
Never said that, but when they're caused by environment they typically manifest later (particularly the issues with most animal product consumption).
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:44 pmSo if some component of meat promoted cancer there would be clear selection pressure for any gene that provided protection.
:lol:
Genetic resistance to cancers caused by dietary exposure and resistance to cancers that affect children are totally different.
carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:44 pmAs mentioned in my last post, heart-disease can start to develop in early adulthood and has a number of negative impacts on health before it becomes deadly (stroke activity, reduced blood flow, etc). Similar for type 2 diabetes, its a disease that progresses slowly over time and early stages have negative consequences.
I addressed this earlier. Are they "devils" at that point, in your view?
Modest effects could be compensated for by nutritional benefits, and would also be particularly rare given other risk reducing behavior like good BMI and high physical activity.
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Re: Health risk between vegans, vegetarians, fish eaters, low meat eaters and meat eaters.

Post by carnap »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:27 am What's "clearly causes"? We're talking increased risks here, but there's every reason to believe the links are causal.
That there is strong evidence of a causal links rather than just associations. I'm not sure what links you have in mind,
brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:27 am There is very strong mechanistic evidence, in addition to good epidemiological evidence (despite the noise) for some kinds of meat (red meats pretty clearly causes colon cancer, for example).
There is evidence but its not conclusive which is why its ranked as a group 2 carcinogen rather than a group 1 by the WHO. Also there are two factors here, whether the link is causal and the magnitude of the risk. In the case of red meat most of the associations are with heavy red meat consumption but even if we assume the link is causal it doesn't increase your overall risk of developing cancer by much. With cancer its really someone's overall risk of developing cancer that is most interesting, some foods or eating patterns appear to lower your risk of some types of cancers while increasing others.

brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:27 am There are many reasons to believe that most animal products are harmful in any significant amounts, but that's kind of irrelevant to the point at hand which is your misuse of evolutionary biology to imply that they should not be.
You keep trying to distort what I've said here, to say it once more, all I stated is that it shouldn't be surprising that meat isn't some "great devil" in the human diet. You seem fixated on the "paleo diet" but that has nothing to do with my comments here.



carnap wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:27 pmRight and I provided evidence in a previous post, the study I cited looked at teeth and found plenty of older samples. But the samples were more common in the upper paleolithic period.

brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:27 am If I can find the actual study later, I'll look it over, but this is pretty weak.
This seems to be a pattern with you, you try to pick apart any study by pointing out some limitation (but...all studies have limitations) while providing no evidence for the claims you're making. "People rare lived past 40 in the paleolithic" isn't a default position, its an empirical claim that needs to be supported. Most of my comments here were an argument that the claim you're making is implausible.

In any case, a single study never provides anything close to conclusive evidence but they do provide evidence which is all I was intending on showing.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:27 am If you have a link to an actual study, please post it.
Sure, for example:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2007.00171.x

brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:27 am You can't claim that chimps should regularly reach their potentials in captivity with the same medical care, and ignore the captivity part. We also have significantly less ability to treat and monitor chimpanzees due to poor feedback and difficult behavior, even if the budget and knowledge were there to provide them the same level of care.
You still seem to be conflating life-span and life-expectancy, life-expectancy can be impacted by better living standards, etc but not life-span. Life-span is a statement about how an animal ages. Its rather apparent that chimpanzees age more quickly than humans, we don't need to look at maximum samples to know that but rather observe the biological age of chimpanzees at various ages. By 40 chimpanzees are clearly elderly while humans are not.

But as I pointed out, the maximum samples are roughly consistent with our respective life-spans (45 for chimps, 80 for humans).

brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:27 am Which is something you're assuming by ignoring confounding variables.
I'm not assuming anything, I'm telling you what the term means in biology.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:27 am https://www.cnn.com/2012/04/21/us/oldest-chimpanzee-in-captivity/index.html
"Little Mamma" in that article, 74
There is only one case that was beyond 60 and good reports don't exist for "Litte Mamma". There are reports of humans living beyond 120 as well but nothing that has been strongly verified. The numbers I gave were based on the average for the top 5 or verified samples.

brimstoneSalad wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:27 am The grandparent hypothesis is a ridiculous narrativization of evolution. It's a nice story and people favor it due to the emotional appeal of everything having meaning ...
Ridiculous? Its a widely head theory by Anthropologists. Perhaps, just perhaps there is a lot here you don't understand because you lack expertise in the field?

I'm not going to respond to any more of the specific comments because many seem to be rooted in the same error that I mentioned earlier, namely, conflating life-span with life-expectancy. Biological life-span defines how a specie ages and as such isn't impacted by medical care and similar factors, these factors change life-expectancy. People in developed nations today have much higher life-expectancy but they age roughly the same as people in hunter-gather societies. Exactly when human life-span started to increase isn't clear but since hunter-gather populations age at roughly the same rate as Europeans and other civilized groups the increase is very likely from the paleolithic.
I'm here to exploit you schmucks into demonstrating the blatant anti-intellectualism in the vegan community and the reality of veganism. But I can do that with any user name.
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Re: Health risk between vegans, vegetarians, fish eaters, low meat eaters and meat eaters.

Post by brimstoneSalad »

carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pm That there is strong evidence of a causal links rather than just associations. I'm not sure what links you have in mind,
Mechanistic ones, combined with the associations.
There aren't enough controls to get a smoking gun from associations with diet in most cases. And controlled studies on humans take too long.
carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmThere is evidence but its not conclusive which is why its ranked as a group 2 carcinogen rather than a group 1 by the WHO.
You can go ahead and move the goalposts, but there is strong enough evidence of a causal link.
carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmAlso there are two factors here, whether the link is causal and the magnitude of the risk.
Sure it is. So it is a "small devil" then? :D

You can draw an arbitrary line there, but in terms of foods people commonly eat it's up there.
Processed sugar and trans-fats are pretty bad too.
carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmWith cancer its really someone's overall risk of developing cancer that is most interesting, some foods or eating patterns appear to lower your risk of some types of cancers while increasing others.
What's relevant to your claim is whether meat stands out as increasing risk more than the typical components of a vegetarian or vegan diet.


carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmYou keep trying to distort what I've said here, to say it once more, all I stated is that it shouldn't be surprising that meat isn't some "great devil" in the human diet. You seem fixated on the "paleo diet" but that has nothing to do with my comments here.
Nope, you specifically fingered evolution as the reason we should not find it surprising. The implicit claim is that due to evolution we probably developed resistance to it and thus it should not be harmful to us.

If you just want to say it shouldn't be surprising because evolution says nothing about it so there's no reason to believe one way or another, that's fine.

Evolution doesn't tell us that meat should be unhealthy, nor does it tell us it shouldn't be unhealthy. It tells us nothing.

You don't seem to understand the nature of my objection to your claim.

carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pm This seems to be a pattern with you, you try to pick apart any study by pointing out some limitation (but...all studies have limitations) while providing no evidence for the claims you're making. "People rare lived past 40 in the paleolithic" isn't a default position, its an empirical claim that needs to be supported. Most of my comments here were an argument that the claim you're making is implausible.
I did provide evidence for the claim I made. I referenced Wikipedia on life expectancy based on proximal time periods, I explained why modern hunter gatherers are a poor model, I even linked to an article explaining how sketchy some anthropologists are when they distort the facts to romanticize hunter-gatherers: http://quillette.com/2017/12/16/romanticizing-hunter-gatherer/

You want some random article (like your link to the dubious NYT piece) briefly mentioning the anthropological evidence?

Here, one of the top Google results after the paleo propaganda: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-think-neandertal/201311/the-truth-about-the-caveman-diet
I'll even quote it for you:
The second error in premise is perhaps even more significant. The caveman diet is a great diet if you want to live to be 30 or 35 years old. That was the adult life expectancy until very, very recently (indeed, it wasn’t until well after the advent of agriculture that life expectancies began to rise—in agricultural communities!). We know this from skeletal evidence. Individuals older than 40 at death are very rare in the Palaeolithic record. At the 300,000 year old Spanish site of Sima de los Huesos, archaeologists found the remains of 32 individuals who had been dropped down a shaft in a cave. They appear to have died natural deaths, and none of them was over thirty years of age. It wasn’t that the caveman diet killed these people. It is just that almost no one lived long enough to develop the medical conditions we associate with long-term consumption of large quantities of animal protein and fat. Thus, just because cavemen did it does not mean it is good for you.
There you go. Now you can go on the same wild goose chase you set me on.

carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmIn any case, a single study never provides anything close to conclusive evidence but they do provide evidence which is all I was intending on showing.
Yes, and here the evidence is very weak.

You don't have the evidence to back up your claims about evolution meaning we shouldn't be surprised about something.

AGAIN, it's not just longevity that's at issue.
You also have to prove that the grandparent hypothesis is even true; even if they lived longer, it's equally plausible that longer lived elders were a drain on their tribes, and they just didn't kill them or let them starve because they loved them.

You're like a Christian whipping out Pascal's wager under the assumption that Christianity is the only game in town, and that it's not just as plausible that Atheists go to heaven and Christians go to hell under some other theistic system.

There could have just as plausibly been selective pressures FAVORING things like atherosclerosis from diet to save the grandchildren the burden.

There are several points you need to demonstrate, and a failure at any one of them means your claim isn't substantiated. My job is inherently easier, and I did make arguments against all three points (including it even being possible to develop such a level of resistance).

carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmSure, for example:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2007.00171.x
Did you read it?

This is not stable demographic data, it's only based on reported deaths. That's pretty poor quality evidence.

And, it presents my case for me (along with a cringe-worthy paragraphs of mental gymnastics from the authors trying to rationalize their bases).

See figure 3.
I'll attach it for your convenience:
Figure3.JPG
From that paper, here's a brief summary of the actual evidence...
It is usually reported that Paleolithic humans had life expectancies of 15–20 years and that this brief life span persisted over thousands of generations (Cutler 1975; Weiss 1981) until early agriculture less than 10,000 years ago caused appreciable increases to about 25 years. Several prehistoric life tables support this trend, such as those for the Libben site in Ohio (Lovejoy et al. 1977), Indian Knoll in Kentucky (Herrmann and Konigsberg 2002), and Carlston Annis in Kentucky (Mensforth 1990). Gage (1998) has compiled a set of reconstructed prehistoric life tables with similar life expectancies and computed Siler estimates for a composite prehistoric mortality profile. This and most other prehistoric profiles show l
50 of 2–9 percent and e45 values of 3–7 years.
The rest is speculation.

I agree that this isn't great evidence, but it's all there is, and trying to claim some speculative negation of the evidence based on other poor evidence doesn't contradict it, it just makes it a little harder to make very strong claims about it.

After a couple references to criticism of the historical evidence, the authors add their own:
The comparison of Siler estimates of prehistoric humans with those for traditional modern foragers poses a further challenge to the historical data (consistent with the criticisms discussed above).
Yeah? Or maybe it means the populations you studied don't look like these populations because of a whole slew of other variables, or YOU got it wrong because you're not using high quality evidence from a stable population.

Again, as I said before very high numbers of older people should be a red flag and indicate unstable demographics, not very long lived populations. Unless you have higher quality evidence, unstable demographics are the reasonable assumption.
Mortality rates in prehistoric populations are estimated to be lower than those for traditional foragers until about age 2 years. Estimated mortality rates then increase dramatically for prehistoric populations, so that by age 45 they are over seven times greater than those for traditional foragers, even worse than the ratio of captive chimpanzees to foragers. Because these prehistoric populations cannot be very different genetically from the populations surveyed here, there must be systematic biases in the samples and/or in the estimation procedures at older ages where presumably endogenous senescence should dominate as primary cause of death.
Good job begging the question.
Or, you know... you're just wrong. But that couldn't be!
While excessive warfare could explain the shape of one or more of these typical prehistoric forager mortality profiles,
No shit. But that would conflict with your utopian view of ancient man. There's also the fact that hunting is considerably more dangerous when you're also being hunted. Show me a hunter-gatherer population in modern day hunting megafauna and being hunted by them too. These creatures mostly died out by 10,000 years ago.

Sorry I'm getting irritated here, but the idiocy of comparing modern populations to paleolithic ones is very aggravating. These people have tunnel vision and ignore all of the many confounding variables.
it is improbable that these profiles represent the long-term prehistoric forager mortality profile. Such rapid mortality increase late in life would have severe consequences for our human life history evolution, particularly for senescence in humans.
You're kidding me? Again begging the question.
There's no reason to believe that we evolved specifically in order to live longer.

Circular f*cking logic.

We must have evolved for some reason to live longer, therefore we must have lived longer.

It's particularly aggravating that I had to waste time reading so much of that shit study which only BACKS UP my original claim and then offers speculative question-begging criticism.


carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmLife-span is a statement about how an animal ages. Its rather apparent that chimpanzees age more quickly than humans, we don't need to look at maximum samples to know that but rather observe the biological age of chimpanzees at various ages. By 40 chimpanzees are clearly elderly while humans are not.
So, in other words, you think they look old, so they're old. Good job. :roll:

The only objective evidence on that would be looking at the oldest lived samples.

carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmBut as I pointed out, the maximum samples are roughly consistent with our respective life-spans (45 for chimps, 80 for humans).
As I debunked, no they are not.
carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmThe numbers I gave were based on the average for the top 5 or verified samples.
Conveniently, you ignored my question.
brimstoneSalad wrote:If we had larger populations of captive chimps to observe (as we have huge populations of humans to draw from) we'd no doubt have even older examples. Do you deny this?
Nice try shifting the goal posts instead and demanding five cases -- something we would probably have, or more, if there was a larger population of chimps.
You also completely ignored my criticism of your claims that the medical technology affecting humans and chimps is equal -- it is absolutely not, and both sides are to blame for that. Chimps are terrible patients who don't usually tell you when something hurts and ask to go to the doctor.
carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmRidiculous? Its a widely head theory by Anthropologists.
That doesn't make it any less ridiculous. The circular logic is to blame for its absurdity.

Anthropology is a pretty soft science. Forgive me if I don't give the culturally biased opinions of most anthropologists much more credit than I give those of Feminist studies.
It's the very definition of soft science: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/soft-science
soft science
Word Origin
noun
1.
any of the specialized fields or disciplines, as psychology, sociology, anthropology, or political science, that interpret human behavior, institutions, society, etc., on the basis of scientific investigations for which it may be difficult to establish strictly measurable criteria.
carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmPerhaps, just perhaps there is a lot here you don't understand because you lack expertise in the field?
This is funny coming from you, as you casually dismiss consensus among dietitians; dietetics is a much harder science than most anthropology is; at least it's something that's actually measurable and falsifiable, whereas this conjecture on evolution isn't (as you accidentally showed before, if something doesn't pan out on its own anthropologists will just keep adding onto it until it "works").

carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmI'm not going to respond to any more of the specific comments because many seem to be rooted in the same error that I mentioned earlier, namely, conflating life-span with life-expectancy.
Not an error I'm making, except mis-typing once, I understand the difference quite well (and I don't think you really know anything about genetic lifespan; we have limited information based on maximum observed lifespans and I'm not sure if you understand how speculative that is), but you don't have to respond if you don't want to: just stop making the claim that evolution has something to say about what should or shouldn't be surprising in terms of dietary effects on diseases of age. Easy. Save us both a lot of stress and we can do other things. I'd rather not read another shitty study employing circular logic to justify their pet hypotheses against the actual evidence.
carnap wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 11:50 pmExactly when human life-span started to increase isn't clear but since hunter-gather populations age at roughly the same rate as Europeans and other civilized groups the increase is very likely from the paleolithic.
We likely started ageing (slightly) more slowly when we started maturing (slightly) more slowly. As I showed multiple times, 1.5x seems to be the correct number. What that DOES NOT mean is that we started actually living longer.
You seem to be the one confusing life-span and life expectancy, expecting the latter to adjust in accordance with the former is a bad argument to fit your own beliefs about paleolithic man... beliefs that go against the actual evidence.
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