Nepal pictures, history, people, facts

There's some evidence (see last Tuesday's New York Times) that exercise eliminates a lot of the health risks of being fat. There's also quite a bit of evidence that heart disease, one of the health risks often associated with being fat, is actually a result of on-and-off dieting, rather than maintaining a steady weight at any size. No: the evidence is that on-and-off dieting increases a person's susceptibility to heart disease more than being fat does.  Being fat is still strongly associated with some degree of rise in risk of heart disease. People do argue about the nature of the connection: that is, it could be not necessarily causative in the direct way: there are different ways that the connection could be. Lucy Kemnitzer

Not relevant to the point I was trying to make about abstraction. In other places you'd been saying that the abstraction was _link_ed to cooperation, and the cooperation was _link_ed to Neolithic hunting methods.  These are points you've made at various times in various contexts: I seem to have gotten them conflated into this argument, sorry. Lucy Kemnitzer

That doesn't rule out soft tissue changes, and the sort of thing being postulated would be pretty strictly confined to brain organization, and would spread easily. Just last night, I read an article that referenced other articles that claim an ongoing cognitive evolution for humans.  I need to find those references.   From the context in which they're cited, it seems like they're saying that people from, say AD 1500 weren't cognitively modern.  Seems an awfully weird tack to take, unless they're looking at very tiny changes in cognition over very long periods of time. I think that people are very wobbly when they talk about cognition and the significant differences in cognition caused by culture. When _I_ say somebody isn't cognitively modern, I know what I'm talking about, but I don't know if anybody else is talking about the same thing. Anyway, having said that, I'll now say this: to say that people in AD 1500 weren't cogntively modern is a yawn.  Of course they weren't: people in 1700 were cognitively different from people in 2000.  The signiicance of the cognitive difference, though, is different, depending on what you're talking about. Take Piaget

: What do modern morbidly obese people die of?  Heart disease, mostly, I : think.  There's also some form or relative of diabetes that develops in : some obese people. Consider, as a data point, that the massive Tongans I've referenced do NOT have high blood pressure or heart disease at the same rate as Westerners of the same weight. They're a lot healthier than one would expect given their weight and high consumption of saturated fats. Speculation is that they're not subject to as much stress in the village environment. Move them to Western environments and they start getting sick at the same rate as Westerners. On the other hand, massive Pimas have shocking levels of diabetes and heart disease, and suffer greatly for it.  Before you say it's stressful being a Pima, consider: it's stressful being any sort of Native American, and not all of them have the same rates of these diseases. I think it's wishful thinking to try to sever all of the connection between obesity and various diseases.  Which is not to say that the people who say that fitness consists of being slender are correct, either. Lucy Kemnitzer

I tend to believe it's the other way around: that culture was the driver for life span. Once we had a useful spoken language, and it became possible for people to pass on their experience to one another to a far greater extent than any other animal, a life span extended well beyond the reproductive period became a selective advantage. I would be very surprised if the maximum human lifespan has changed significantly on this timescale.  Such an effect (lifespan) depends too much on the entire structure of the organism to be readily modified through evolution in a few hundred thousand years.  Add to that the fact that it doesn't provide a direct survival benefit and you would slow such evolutionary modification even further.  I am at best a layperson in the field, so I could very well be wrong.  But I would be quite surprised nonetheless. Dan Schauer