Adarq.org
Performance Area => Article & Video Discussion => Topic started by: Mikey on February 10, 2012, 03:16:32 pm
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http://us.macmillan.com/BookCustomPage_New.aspx?isbn=9780312555436
Basically the author proposes that modern men are weak and physically inferior to our ancestors of the past. It's a long read but it's good. Some of the author's claims are questionable (e.g apparently there were australian aboriginals who had the potential to be faster than usain bolt) but overall it seems to make sense.
This is the part about australian aboriginals.
It’s hard to see, though, what benefits came with our next trophy in the masculine Hall of Shame, for, as it turns out, we’re not only weaker than just about any male human who ever walked the earth, we’re also slower.
The evidence this time is written into the earth itself. In 2003 archaeologists from Bond University discovered a series of human footprint trackways preserved in a fossilized claypan lake bed in the Willandra Lakes region of New South Wales, Australia. The twenty-three trackways date back twenty thousand years and feature almost seven hundred individual footprints. The most interesting are those of six adult men, probably hunters, who seem to have been running to outflank a prey animal. An analysis of the men’s speed (calculated from their stride length) shows that all were running fast, but that the outside individual, the 6'5" “T8,” was achieving incredible speeds. The record of his athleticism, written into the dried hardpan of an Ice Age Australian lake bed, raises serious doubts that any modern sprinter can honorably claim the title “Fastest Man on Earth.”
Take Usain Bolt, currently the world’s fastest man. Bolt set the 100-meter world record of 9.69 seconds at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. His top speed, measured at peak acceleration near the 60-to 70-meter mark, is approximately 27 miles per hour. He achieved it by running at maximum effort on a prepared track with the aid of spiked shoes and strict training backed by decades of scientific research into how to crank the maximum speed from the human body. He is also an elite competitor selected from a pool of many millions of men alive today, and has the lure of glory and a lucrative career to drive him.
T8, on the other hand, was sprinting barefoot through a shallow, soft, muddy lake edge, with nothing but a possible meal of kangaroo or waterbird to spur him on, and he still managed to clock 23 miles per hour. Since the energy cost of running through mud or sand is 1 to 2 times that of running on a solid surface (let alone a rubberized track) this implies T8’s real speed was around 27.6 mph. Given that this may not have been his top speed (his lengthening strides show he was accelerating) and that he was just one of possibly 150,000 Aboriginal men alive at that time (and probably not even the fastest), it seems likely there were many prehistoric Australian males who could, if they trained, have regularly clocked 28 miles per hour and taken out every Olympic sprint in which they competed.
How was T8 able to run so fast? Australian Aboriginal men and women have many enviable sporting achievements today, but nothing to equal this. It is tempting, given how far back in the distant past T8 and his comrades lived, to put it down to genetics, like the superior strength of the Neandertals. But T8 was essentially the same feeble species of man as today’s Homo sapiens.
Modern studies have found that increasing aerobic endurance training generally only raises performance in already-trained athletes by around 4 percent. Was the secret behind the incredible aerobic capacity of the trireme rowers, then, also genetic? Again, this is an appealing explanation, but one difficult to believe given that just three thousand years separates the heroic Athenians from their sluggish modern counterparts. Evolutionary change, via natural selection, generally works on much longer timescales than that. The answer probably lies more in our modern-day bone idleness. To find it we need to actually look at those bones, for it is there that the full story of our feeble sloth is written.this is an appealing explanation, but one difficult to believe given that just three thousand years separates the heroic Athenians from their sluggish modern counterparts. Evolutionary change, via natural selection, generally works on much longer timescales than that. The answer probably lies more in our modern-day bone idleness. To find it we need to actually look at those bones, for it is there that the full story of our feeble sloth is written.
Studies comparing our bones to those of fossil humans reveal that we have lost about 40 percent of our bone mass and strength over the past 2 million years. This, too, could be chalked up to genetic causes, except for one telltale sign: the articular heads of our bones (the bulbous ends that form joints such as the knee, hip, and elbow), whose growth definitely is genetically controlled, are still almost exactly the same size as those of Homo erectus, who lived from approximately 2,000,000 BCE to 1,000,000 BCE. Our loss of bone mass has mostly been from the shafts of our long bones—the femur, humerus, tibia, fibula, radius, and ulna—the components known to be those most responsive to Wolff’s law. The cause is the declining levels of muscular load placed on them over the past 2 million years. Proof of this can be seen in modern athletes’ bones, which grow thicker in response to repeated muscular stress. Some modern tennis players, for example, display a cortical thickness in their upper-arm bones almost equal to that of Homo erectus.13
This then is the real secret of the Ice Age Australian runners and the Athenian trireme rowers: their incredible athleticism was not genetic, but ontogenetic. Ontogeny is the process by which an organism grows by interaction with its environment. While genes might fix the limits of its potential development, whether or not it reaches them is governed by the environmental stresses placed upon it. Effectively, therefore, those historic and prehistoric men were superb athletes because of the working toughness they had developed over harsh and demanding lives. Not only was the Athenian trireme rowers’ training drastically tougher than that of modern oarsmen, their work as shepherds and farmers formed a grueling, lifelong program of bone, muscle, and tendon toughening. Ice Age Australian runners, similarly, probably trekked and ran substantial distances daily. (Studies of a comparable hunting population, the Kalahari Desert Kung, have found that male Kung hunters run an average of 18.6 miles on every antelope hunt.) Importantly, both groups probably also began this constant exercise from a very early age, a crucial help in developing bodily toughness. Those scientific studies documenting bone thickening in modern tennis players, for example, found that the greatest expansion took place between the ages of eight and fourteen
So i think the author is saying the average male today is weaker than the past because of a mix of genetics and laziness. Than he proposes that part of the reason why the general genetic pool throughout the world is weakening is because of how the modern day world is run.
Sexual selection by modern women really might, therefore, be acting to remove male muscularity from the human gene pool. But what then of the second selective agent, death?
In this case the muscularity genotype may be in trouble from an unlikelier source—its owners. Muscular men are frequently more aggressive than less-muscular men. Interestingly, this is not because of their high testosterone levels; in fact attempts to link testosterone directly to aggression have largely failed. In pre-agricultural societies, where survival depended on individual strength, this aggression tended to spread genes for muscularity, since their aggression both won them female partners and eliminated male sexual rivals. One study of the hyperaggressive medieval Viking berserkers, for example (see BATTLE chapter), found that these violent warriors left more children and grandchildren than their less aggressive compatriots.18 Now, however, in urbanized societies governed by the rule of law, that aggression has turned back on its owners. Highly aggressive men are significantly more likely to die through violence in their youth, thereby removing themselves from the gene pool. They are similarly likely to be imprisoned while young, and to then commit further crimes incurring even longer sentences—again tying up their prime reproductive years. In the United States they even possibly (thanks to the end of the leveling effect of the draft in 1973) enlist for military service in greater numbers, making them statistically more likely to die through war.
Locked up in prisons, dying on foreign battlefields, or on urban back lots in gang turf fights, the genetic muscular legacy of Homo masculinus modernus might well be slowly disappearing. It will be up to those of us left behind—the weak who’ve inherited the earth—to face the indignities of our coming decline bravely.
Thoughts about the article?
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This was one of the best books I read this year. 10,000 Year Explosion is another good one if you want to depress yourself with how pathetic of a race we've become.
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I actually read the article but I have no comments.
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They are just crazy claims to flog a book. The findings are not exactly scientific in any way so it's hard to say it's anything more than an interesting idea. The whole article is mostly based on anecdotes and inferences. Take the footprint thing for example. There are a whole bunch of assumptions in that measurement: they could have been taking longer strides or bounding at that particular time, or the hunter could have been taller than 6'5'' (there is always an error associated with estimating physical dimensions from fossils). Any of which would throw the estimations way out, so it's hard to take his claim that they'd beat Bolt seriously on such little evidence. The historical anecdotes about the rowers could have been wildly exaggerated, there's no way of knowing how fast they really went.
It annoys me too when anthropologists think they are also evolutionary biologists as well and make stupid statements like the one about "highly aggressive men" go to jail or get killed earlier and exclude themselves from the gene pool. That's not an example of a selective pressure. A selective pressure would be if the majority of "highly aggressive men" were wiped out before reaching reproductive age. Then you would definitely see a noticeable change in the gene pool. But I doubt it's the case that the majority of "highly aggressive men" are being killed in gang wars or in Iraq. It's just a vague hypothesis with no evidence to back it up.
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They are just crazy claims to flog a book. The findings are not exactly scientific in any way so it's hard to say it's anything more than an interesting idea. The whole article is mostly based on anecdotes and inferences. Take the footprint thing for example. There are a whole bunch of assumptions in that measurement: they could have been taking longer strides or bounding at that particular time, or the hunter could have been taller than 6'5'' (there is always an error associated with estimating physical dimensions from fossils). Any of which would throw the estimations way out, so it's hard to take his claim that they'd beat Bolt seriously on such little evidence. The historical anecdotes about the rowers could have been wildly exaggerated, there's no way of knowing how fast they really went.
It annoys me too when anthropologists think they are also evolutionary biologists as well and make stupid statements like the one about "highly aggressive men" go to jail or get killed earlier and exclude themselves from the gene pool. That's not an example of a selective pressure. A selective pressure would be if the majority of "highly aggressive men" were wiped out before reaching reproductive age. Then you would definitely see a noticeable change in the gene pool. But I doubt it's the case that the majority of "highly aggressive men" are being killed in gang wars or in Iraq. It's just a vague hypothesis with no evidence to back it up.
amen.
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i never believed the argumet that there were people sprinting faster barefoot than anyone does today with spikes on a track. would have to study the footpsrints myself to come to a conclusion
however, there is definitely truth to some ideas. It is true that sperm counts are decreasing, and fertility is lower and lower. The male standards for fertility set by the WHO have also decreased since so many fail to meet the standards. here's a very short documentary on it. linking this entirely to BPA and other endocrine disruptors, it's probably a combinatin of things not all chemicals
http://vimeo.com/15346778
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I guess they didn't have porn back then
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i never believed the argumet that there were people sprinting faster barefoot than anyone does today with spikes on a track. would have to study the footpsrints myself to come to a conclusion
however, there is definitely truth to some ideas. It is true that sperm counts are decreasing, and fertility is lower and lower. The male standards for fertility set by the WHO have also decreased since so many fail to meet the standards. here's a very short documentary on it. linking this entirely to BPA and other endocrine disruptors, it's probably a combinatin of things not all chemicals
http://vimeo.com/15346778
That's why the world population continues to increase at the highest rate ever (Highest was technically in 1963 but they project it to be higher)
Please go
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i never believed the argumet that there were people sprinting faster barefoot than anyone does today with spikes on a track. would have to study the footpsrints myself to come to a conclusion
however, there is definitely truth to some ideas. It is true that sperm counts are decreasing, and fertility is lower and lower. The male standards for fertility set by the WHO have also decreased since so many fail to meet the standards. here's a very short documentary on it. linking this entirely to BPA and other endocrine disruptors, it's probably a combinatin of things not all chemicals
http://vimeo.com/15346778
That's why the world population continues to increase at the highest rate ever (Highest was technically in 1963 but they project it to be higher)
Please go
Haha, as if that proves anything. got any links? Also this fertility problem is mostly restricted to industrialized nations. Statistics of the whole world do not apply.
ALso the math could get pretty confusing. Even with a decreased fertility rate, you could have an increasing rate of population growth if more people are conceiving even if at lower rates. So what you said does not show anything at all.
Fertility rates are lower than they were in 1960 http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&idim=country:USA&dl=en&hl=en&q=fertility+rates
That doesn't indicate lower sperm counts per se, but it's pretty much a fact that sperm counts are decreasing. Most of you probably have lower sperm counts now than your father tdid at the same age.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/out-for-the-count-why-levels-of-sperm-in-men-are-falling-1954149.html
edit:
" Professor Niels Skakkebaek of the University of Copenhagen presented data indicating sperm counts had fallen by about a half over the past 50 years. Sperm counts in the 1940s were typically well above 100m sperm cells per millilitre, but Professor Skakkebaek found they have dropped to an average of about 60m per ml. Other studies found that between 15 and 20 per cent of young men now find themselves with sperm counts of less than 20m per ml, which is technically defined as abnormal."
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http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/04/man-up-boost-your-testosterone-level-for-health-power-and-confidence.html
"The Finnish results suggested the change was happening among younger men, too. A man born in 1970 had about 20 percent less testosterone at age 35 than a man of his father’s generation at the same age."