At 10:09 AM 2/12/2010, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
That the sickle-cell variation is healthier in Africa does not mean
that it is here and now in the U.S.
Of course not! But large number of people moving from one continent
to another is unnatural. I was referring to natural conditions.
But then, within the language of this discourse, we aren't living in
"natural conditions" and haven't been for a very long time.
Pathology, Jed, can be "natural." Susceptibility to pathology and
pathological responses is a "natural variation" and that does not
make it not pathological.
Information filtering is normal and natural and, in fact, necessary;
however science is designed to bypass certain kinds of information
filtering and allow the accumulation of knowledge, both overall and
within specialization. In principle, the "scientific method" was
established to compensate for the excessive filtering of dogma of all
kinds, to allow a means for information contrary to the expectations
of dogma to accumulate and to be reviewed by at least a few; and then
these few can, as needed, expand examination among all those who
participate in science, overall, by which I mean the application of
the scientific method.
Bodies of knowledge, meaning information that has been organized
according to accepted theory, are inherently dogma. That something is
dogma does not mean that it is wrong, only that it can be repressive
and harmful if allowed to prevent the scientific method from
operating. The blanket rejection of experimental results based on
belief in theory, no matter how well-established the theory is, is
clearly outside of science.
The blanket *ignoring* of experimental results contrary to such dogma
is necessary, it's the normal filtering, the positive function of
dogma, and it is not harmful unless the society moves from simply
ignoring contrary data into active rejection and repression.
*Tolerance* of heresy is essential to science. Most heresy is,
indeed, error. But some is not, and by rejecting it all, the
possibility of growth is rejected, and what cannot grow will
certainly stagnate and may die as it cannot adapt to new circumstances.
Now, back to genetic variations. I *roughly* subscribe to Thom
Hartmann's idea of hunter-gatherer vs. farmer adaptations. That is,
there are developmental patterns that are differentially functional
in the social structures that develop from the two subsistence modes.
These result in different ways of thinking; what has become "normal"
is farmer mode. This mode has made possible the complex and
interdependent sharing of labor that forms the basis of modern
societies; however, this mode tends to be resistant to change, it
depends on settled relationships and activities. (And I might include
nomadic peoples in the hunter-gatherer class, though they could also
be considered "farmers of animals," sometimes.)
Call the hunter-gatherer set of adaptations Type I and the farmer
adaptation Type II. To Type II people, Type I people are erratic,
dangerous, and disturbing. A Type II society, as a pathology, will
reject and suppress and even exile or kill Type I people. I say that
it is a pathology because if they are successful, the society becomes
rigid and unable to adapt to new circumstances. It is not surprising
that the Greek culture which condemned Socrates to death did not
survive long, it was conquered by the Romans.
But a Type I society would not be able to sustain the modern culture,
and could easily descend into chaos. As I've come to understand the
matter, both Type I and Type II people are necessary for a truly
healthy society. Type I people should almost never be in autocratic
charge, unless within a culture that both contains and supports their
behavior, limiting the extremes, applying their ability to think
outside the box without destroying the box. Basically, it becomes
possible to change the box, gradually. The box has doors and windows
in it, and the walls can be moved as needed.
We can see among those who accepted the reality of cold fusion a high
incidence of eccentricity. Most of these people would be Type I, at
least in some ways. There may be some Type II people who were
essentially caught up in personal history that forced them to accept
the reality of CF, they were, perhaps, overwhelmed by sheer force of
what they saw, particularly in the early days. And, please remember,
there is nothing wrong with being Type II, it simply means that the
person will have more tendency toward conforming to social norms and
less tendency to move outside them. We need these people, just as we
need Type I people for early warning and growth. My sense is that
about one-sixth of the population is roughly Type I, though there are
degrees; this is the high end, more or less, of estimates about the
frequency of ADHD.
This is not the place to go into the utility of drugs in managing
ADHD, but very briefly, there are three legs to the treatment of
ADHD: drugs, the education of the "patient," and the education of the
society that the patient lives, works, or studies in. The problem
with the drug approach is not that drugs aren't useful, they are, but
that reliance on drug treatment ignores most of the difficulties that
a person with ADHD faces, and that a society interacting with such a
person faces, and just seeks to reduce disruption, to make the
patient "behave." Short-term, this may work to a degree, but
long-term, it will fail, except to the extent that frequently a
person will "grow out" of ADHD behavior. ADHD is a "developmental
disorder" which means that some kinds of development are delayed. The
patient doesn't "grow up," i.e., become adapted to the settled
relationships of farmer society, but is a "grasshopper" who lives for
the moment. Most will adapt, eventually, to some degree, but
something can be lost in that adaptation.... Better is improved
understanding on all sides of the differences involved, so that round
people aren't squeezed into square boxes....
A problem that is clearly caused by changes in environment should
be fixed by changing the environment back the way it was.
How far back? And how much do we change? And who manages said change?
To fix the obesity problem we move back to foodways circa 1965.
That's not a big deal. See: fast food portion distortion.
Portion control is only a problem because natural appetite control
has disappeared, through the suppression of fat content. Eat enough
fat, a person will normally stop eating. This is not the whole
problem, for sure. But the effort to eliminate fat from the diet
began in the 1970s, largely due to the flawed Keyes study that was
based on cherry-picked data. As Gary Taubes shows very well in Good
Calories, Bad Calories-- he did do something right -- when you move
fat out of the diet, and especially saturated fat, consumption of
carbohydrates will increase, unless major efforts are made to control
calories; and this, then, creates an unstable situation, a person who
is constantly repressing and fighting their own appetite.
Fat is higher in caloric content per gram, so it was assumed that fat
would make you fat. But apparently it does not, generally. That's why
the Atkins diet worked; strictly, it was not a diet, it was what
Atkins called it, a "nutritional approach." Control the
carbohydrates, which is pretty easy except in one way, and the rest
of it more or less takes care of itself. However, people who try to
run an Atkins diet as a low-fat diet, by also avoiding fats, will
tend to end up very dissatisfied, and thirty years of propaganda has
created some serious aversion to fat. This is probably where most
Atkins diet "failures" lie.
The difficulty with Atkins, I found, is that society is now organized
generally around grain and highly processed grain products. Grain is
the original "industrial" product, mass-produced through agriculture.
Definitely, highly-processed grains are more dangerous than whole
grains with their high fiber content. However, with some care and
experience of knowing what to look for and ask for, I can generally
find a satisfying meal in a restaurant or even some foods from a
convenience market that I can eat without overdoing the carbs.
I have special reasons for being more careful than I might have been
before, I have Stage I prostate cancer, and there are reasons to
believe that significant carbohydrate in the diet facilitates the
rapid growth of cancers. Before, I was merely concerned about heart
health due to high cholesterol, and, to some degree, the gradual
weight gain that we have associated with age. I started gaining that
weight, mostly, when I went on a low-fat diet as recommended by my
doctor over twenty years ago....
In my opinion, many social problems such as obesity are easier to
fix than people realize. I realize it is difficult, but the
difficulties are exaggerated in the mass media.
There are plenty of people who have addressed serious obesity and who
have been successful. However, what they claimed was heresy. There
are diabetics who have controlled and have become symptom-free from
their diabetes, through diet. And that, as well, is heresy, and only
recently, after they started getting creamed by the research, did the
American Diabetic Association start to recognize that maybe low-carb
diets were useful for diabetes.
That was known in the 1920s, my doctor showed me a copy of the
classic text on diabetes, written then. But then came insulin, a
"miracle drug," that would supposedly allow diabetics to eat whatever
they wanted. Insulin is a very dangerous drug, in fact, and the
result of this treatment was life-saving for some, I'm sure, but ...
allowing diabetics to eat "whatever they want" was a formula for
long-term damage. My employee has a daughter with Type I diabetes,
developed at about age 14 or so. She was completely shocked to see
that the counseling given did not include information about low-carb
diets. At all. It was all about how to test for blood sugar, how to
administer insulin, how to recognize the symptoms of too little
insulin and too much insulin, and how to treat those conditions.
Nothing about how carbs in the diet cause the blood sugar rises that
then cause a need for insulin to lower them.
And what, exactly, does insulin do? It manages the conversion of
blood sugar into fat. Insulin removes sugar from the blood by storing
the energy as fat. Diabetics can generally process and handle dietary
fat as a fuel, but if they are kept operating in sugar metabolism,
that processing is inhibited. (The body generally runs glucose
metabolism or fat metabolism, and most of us never experience fat
metabolism, it feels very different. And we only use protein for fuel
when we are seriously starved and the body starts to cannibalize
itself to survive.) Diabetes is complex and I'm only pointing out the
effect of an "establishment" on our health. But Type II diabetes can
generally be managed with diet alone, and quite well, if the
complications have not gone too far.
Oh, did I mention that the American Diabetic Association is funded by
the drug companies? Could that have anything to do with their
reluctance to approve of low-carb diets, which they treated as
dangerous fad diets, even though the use of low-carb diets to treat
diabetes was well-established long ago?
The energy crisis is also easier and cheaper to fix than we realize,
even without cold fusion. Mainly we lack gumption.
Sure. We need people who will think out of the box. And we need
social structures that then intelligently filter their thinking and
work and experience.
Global warming will be hard to fix without cold fusion. I distrust
recent proposals for planetary-scale engineering, such as the
project advocated by Russ George to put iron oxide into to the
ocean. Of course we are already engaged in planetary-scale
engineering, pumping megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere, but I
would prefer to stop, rather than pumping something else into the
atmosphere or oceans.
We need to consider all the possible approaches. Yes, I understand
the distrust of mass experiments based on inadequate study. A massive
uncontrolled experiment began in the 1970s aimed at lowering the fat
consumption of the American public. My guess is that it has caused
millions of premature deaths. Those who began this knew that the
science wasn't adequate, but they believed that "it couldn't hurt" to
lower fat content, and the idea that they could reduce heart disease
was very attractive. An example of how the road to Hell is paved with
good intentions, but inadequate science. They did not reduce heart
disease, they increased it. But, of course, for some of them, the
good news is that then there was more of a market for the statin drugs....
