If the basic premise of the book, The Paleolithic Prescription, is to
look at the foods man's body evolved on, what has man been eating for
the last 50,000 years, and asks pivital the question; how is this
different from todays diet? How can this paleolithic diet be
approximated with modern foods? What would the heath benefits be? How
does the modern diet differ in salt content, fat content, carbohydrate
content? What diseases are more prevalent with todays diet? Then maybe
we need a wider Paleolthic Prescription for many other problems that
arise from ancient human biases.
http://www.amazon.com/Paleolithic-Prescription-Program-Exercise-Design/dp/006091...
The Savanna Principle is a theory about the evolutionary roots of the
human brain. ...it asserts that the environment that molded the human
brain through natural selection is drastically different than the
world humans currently live in. This disparity between what man was
designed to do and what he currently can do leads to a host of
societal difficulties
The human brain, and all of its psychological mechanisms, are adapted
to the environment of evolutionary adaptedness and are therefore
biased in favor of viewing and responding to the world as if it were
still the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. The psychological
mechanisms we possess in our brain today are still the same
psychological mechanisms that we possessed in the environment of
evolutionary adaptedness, just as our hand and pancreas are still the
same as they were 10 000 years ago. The human brain may have
difficulty comprehending entities and situations that did not exist in
the ancestral environment;
For example, ancestors who craved sugary and fatty foods lived longer
and were healthier than those who didn't, in a time that such things
were relatively scarce. Today, the abundance of such temptations leads
to obesity and heart disease. ...It is not impossible to overcome this
bias through conscious effort, but it is often difficult. This is why
we still respond to sweets and fats today as if we still lived in the
environment that molded the human brain through natural selection
where such high-calorie foods were rare and malnutrition was an
imminent problem for survival, and we have the strong urge to consume
a large quantity of sweets and fats (even though many of us can
consciously overcome the urge. ...the human brain [probably] has
unconscious difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and
situations that did not exist in the EEA.
For instance, one of the entities that we know for sure did not exist
in the environment that molded the human brain through natural
selection is television. ...humans [probably] have difficulty
recognizing and dealing with TV. This indeed appears to be the case.
People who watch certain types of TV shows are more satisfied with
their friendships, just like they are if they have more friends or
spend more time socializing with them in real life. It appears that
the human brain has difficulty distinguishing between real friends and
imaginary ones they see on TV, because it did not exist in the
environment that molded the human brain through natural selection. It
is this fundamental observation, that our brain and its psychological
mechanisms are strongly biased to view and respond to the environment
as if it were still the environment that molded the human brain
through natural selection, which leads to the Savanna Principle.
...general intelligence evolved in order to handle evolutionarily-
novel problems. The logical convergence of these two separate lines of
research leads to the prediction that the human difficulty in dealing
with evolutionarily-novel stimuli interacts with general intelligence,
such that the Savanna Principle holds stronger among the less
intelligent than among the more intelligent. Further analyses of the
U.S. General Social Survey demonstrate that less intelligent men and
women may have greater difficulty separating TV characters from their
real friends than more intelligent men and women.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savanna_principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savanna_principle
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/MES/pdf/MDE2004.pdf
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/MES/pdf/JCEP2006.pdf
...by appealing to the core principles of neurobiology, evolutionary
theory, and cognitive science, practitioners of a new human science
can reach a deeper understanding of why we feel certain courses of
action to be intrinsically correct. They can help us to understand why
we have moral feelings. For now, though, the scientists can offer no
guidance on whether we are really correct in making certain decisions,
because no way is known to define what is correct without total
reference to the moral feelings under scrutiny. Perhaps this is the
ultimate burden of the free will bequeathed to us by our genes: in the
final analysis, even when we know what we are likely to do and why,
each of us must still choose.
The challenge to science and philosophy to solve this dilemma is very
great—in our opinion, there is none greater. Society, through its laws
and institutions, already regulates behavior. But it does so in
virtual blind ignorance of the deep reaches of human nature. By
relying on moral intuition, on those satisfying visceral feelings of
right and wrong, people remain enslaved by their genes and culture.
Their minds develop along the channels set by the hereditary
epigenetic rules, and while they exercise free will in moment-by-
moment choices, this faculty remains superficial and its value to the
individual is largely illusory. Only by penetrating to the physical
basis of moral thought and considering its evolutionary meaning will
people have the power to control their own lives. They will then be in
a better position to choose ethical precepts and the forms of social
regulation needed to maintain the precepts.
Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson - 1983
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/
...innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and
unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality
evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon
be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human
values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political
practice flow.
Philosophers themselves, most of whom lack an evolutionary
perspective, have not devoted much time to the problem. They examine
the precepts of ethical systems with reference to their consequences
and not their origins. Thus John Rawls opens his influential A Theory
of Justice (1971) with a proposition he regards as beyond dispute: "In
a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as
settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political
bargaining or to the calculus of social interests." Robert Nozick
begins Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) with an equally firm
proposition: "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person
or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong
and far-reaching are these rights they raise the question of what, if
anything, the state and its omcials.may do." These two premises are
somewhat different in content, and they lead to radically different
prescriptions. Rawls would allow rigid social control to secure as
close an approach as possible to the equal distribution of society's
rewards. Nozick sees the ideal society as one governed by a minimal
state, empowered only to protect its citizens from force and fraud,
and with unequal distribution of rewards wholly permissible. Rawls
rejects the meritocracy; Nozick accepts it as desirable except in
those cases where local communities voluntarily decide to experiment
with egalitarianism. Like everyone else, philosophers measure their
personal emotional responses to various alternatives as though
consulting a hidden oracle.
That oracle resides in the deep emotional centers of the brain, most
probably within the limbic system, a complex array of neurons and
hormone-secreting cells located just beneath the "thinking" portion of
the cerebral cortex. Human emotional responses and the more general
ethical practices based on them have been programmed to a substantial
degree by natural selection over thousands of generations. The
challenge to science is to measure the tightness of the constraints
caused by the programming, to find their source in the brain, and to
decode their significance through the reconstruction of the
evolutionary history of the mind. This enterprise will be the logical
complement of the continued study of cultural evolution.
Success will generate the second dilemma, which can be stated as
follows: Which of the censors and motivators should be obeyed and
which ones might better be curtailed or sublimated? These guides are
the very core of our humanity. They and not the belief in spiritual
apartness distinguish us from electronic computers. At some time in
the future we will have to decide how human we wish to remain-in this
ultimate, biological sense-because we must consciously choose among
the alternative emotional guides we have inherited. To chart our
destiny means that we must shift from automatic control based on our
biological properties to precise steering based on biological
knowledge.
Because the guides of human nature must be examined with a complicated
arrangement of mirrors, they are a deceptive subject, always the
philosopher's deadfall. The only way forward is to study human nature
as part of the natural sciences, in an attempt to integrate the
natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities. I can
conceive of no ideological or formalisric shortcut. Neurobiology
cannot be learned at the feer of a guru. The consequences of genetic
history cannot be chosen by legislatures. Above all, for our own
physical well-being if nothing else, ethical philosophy must not be
left in the hands of the merely wise. Although human progress can be
achieved by intuition and force of will, only hard-won empirical
knowledge of our biological nature will allow us to make optimum
choices among the competing criteria of progress.
On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson 1978
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/qid=1036537594/
Sorry about the length of this post am trying to shrink this down to a
few paragraphs...
