For more research on the effect on people who definitely do not have cows, I can recommend this interview with Jeff Leach, who lived with hunter-gatherers and studied how their lifestyle influenced their microbiome:
He had an interesting point about us actually being part of our surroundings. As in, our microbiome is shaped by the environment we are in. If we live in a high biodiversity environment, we will also have a high diversity microbiome. So us working hard to separate ourselves from our surroundings, and in general reducing the biodiversity around us, also makes us a lot more vulnerable.
Jeff Leach has written a few books, but I have not read them, so can't give my opinion on them, but I found the interview deeply interesting. It really gave a perspective on how much our modern lifestyle depletes us from the diversity we need both inside and outside ourselves.
And yes, the interviewer is the guy who wrote Sex at Dawn. It is still a really good interview ;). On a separate note, Even if you didn't like Sex at Dawn", Chris Ryan also wrote a another book called "Civilized to Death". I actually think you would find that really interesting. It explores a lot of the same themes as you are covering.
Well, yes, the message of "Civilized to Death" seem to align a lot with what I'm thinking. But I don't... trust that guy anymore. Sex at Dawn was one of the first books I read in evolutionary psychology and I kind of liked it. There were just a few points I thougt the book left unanswered. Then I read Sex at Dusk and other books in anthropology and evolutionary psychology and felt kind of deceived - like, how could I believe in that? Before I open a book by Chris Ryan again I will have to bring myself into my best fact-checking mode.
I initially felt the same, but then I went to the primary sources (the actual papers referenced) and they did seem to largely corroborate the message in Sex at Dawn (at least he didn't seem to have misrepresented them), and Sex at Dusk seemed an even more suspect and agenda driven work.
No, I didn't read it, I'm not very good at reading papers in general. I also didn't read any papers Sex at Dawn referred to. But the book taught me about the existence of Sarah Hrdy, so I started reading her books and I became a fan. Largely I have adopted Hrdy's views on gender relations. I thought Sarah Hrdy was much more in line with Lynn Saxon that with Chris Ryan. Also other primatologists I have read warned against for example believing our ancestors were like the bonobo.
In general I think that extraordinary claims require extraordinary data. Chris Ryan launched an extraordinary claim, but wasn't especially careful with his data. Next time someone takes up that hypothesis, if it ever happens, I hope they do so with a very careful approach to existing knowledge.
I like going back to the original papers to check what was actually written. All authors are arguing for their own viewpoint, and even with the best of intentions, they will be cherrypicking the examples that fit their thesis best. Going back to the original references and seeing both that it was not being misrepresenting, and also reading up on the context that led to the quote, seems to be the only way to seriously factcheck.
> Largely I have adopted Hrdy's views on gender relations. I thought Sarah Hrdy was much more in line with Lynn Saxon that with Chris Ryan.
Interesting, I found the opposite. Like on the topic of whether tribal women rely on the paternal fathers for support, in "Mothers and Others" Hrdy writes:
> "From the outset, they (evolutionists) assumed that (the) provider must have been her (the wife's) mate, as Darwin himself opined in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Indeed, it was the hunter's need to finance slow-maturing children, Darwin thought, that provided the main catalyst for the evolution of our big brains: "the most able men succeeded best in defending and providing for themselves and their wives and offspring", he wrote. it was the offspring of hunters with "greater intellectual vigour and power of invention" who were most like to survive". According to this logic, males with bigger brains would have been more successful hunters, better providers, and more able to obtain mates and thereby pass their genes to children whose survival was underwritten by a better diet. Meat would subsidize the long childhoods needed to develop larger brains, leading eventually to the expansion of brains from the size of an australopithecine's to the size of Darwin's own. Thus did the 'hunting hypothesis' morph into one of the most long-standing and influential models in anthropology. at the heart of the model lay a pact between a hunter who provided for his mate and a mate who repaid him with sexual fidelity so the provider could be certain that children he invested in carried at least half of his genes. This 'sex contract' assumed pride of place as the "prodigious adaptation central to the success of early hominids". (However) as it became apparent that among foragers (like the !Kung) plant foods accounted for slightly more calories than meat, researchers started paying more attention to female contributions (also). when Frank Marlowe interviewed Hazda still living by hunting and gathering, he learned that only 36% of children had fathers living in the same group. a hemisphere away, among Yanomano tribespeople in remote regions of Venezuela and Brazil, the chance of a 10-year-old child having both a father and a mother living in the same group was 1/3, while the chance that a Central African Aka youngster between the ages of 11 and 15 was living with both natural parents was closer to 58%. pity the Ongee foragers living on the Andaman Islands: none of the 11- to 15-years-olds in that ethnographic sample still lived with either natural parent."
In the same passage, Hrdy further notes: "when anthropologists reviewed a sample of 15 traditional societies, in 8 of them the presence or absence of the father had no apparent effect on the survival of children to age 5, provided other caregivers in addition to the mother were on hand in a position of help".
This seems very aligned with the key point in Sex at Dawn, that paternity was less important when living in a tribal context where there was plenty of other caregivers.
> Also other primatologists I have read warned against for example believing our ancestors were like the bonobo.
I don't think that anyone, not even Chris Ryan, is arguing that we were "like" the bonobo. More that it was likely that we were somewhat in between bonobos and chimps, given that both are equidistant to us in evolutionary terms.
When it comes to primatologists, I know that Frans de Waal has become good friends with Chris Ryan after the book came out (he has appeared several times on his podcast), and he definitely does not think that his work was misrepresented. When it comes to primatologists with knowledge of bonobos, I don't know who should be a better source?
> In general I think that extraordinary claims require extraordinary data.
I totally agree. This is why I am such a stickler for going back to the original sources and checking the that facts line up. I don't agree with all the conclusions in Sex at Dawn, but in all the references I have followed so far, I have not seen them misrepresent facts.
I sure hope dirt helps. My baby shoved a bunch of it in his mouth last week during a picnic. And sand. And a rock.
We definitely get outside in the dirt more than most parents + toddlers in our neighborhood. Sometimes we get out twice a day, even if it's just in our own yard or the common area by the houses. I see other kids in the common areas a couple of times a year. I know they prefer the big park nearby, but that's further away and honestly I don't see that many toddlers there, either. Little kids are all either indoors, at daycare (which is also mostly indoors), or in organized activities like soccer. (On soccer days, suddenly the park is packed, so I know these kids exist!)
It makes me sad. I feel like the world has just shuttered itself indoors and out of sight.
Different experiences in different places maybe? Whenever we take our kids to the park or the lake, it's always full. Granted, the roads where I live are a bit empty of foot traffic, which is too bad - but as everyone knows, the streets belong to the machines now:
Also here, in the Scandinavian countryside, people spend strange amounts of time indoors. A few years ago my mother had an old, orange-colored cat that probably had dementia. Sometimes the cat disappeared into the neighborhood and got lost. Once it did so on 20th of July. My mother and I went to every house within a radius of two kilometers and gave people a picture of the cat. Many people were home: 20th of July is in the middle of vacation season in Scandinavia. The weather was human-friendly: Mild, cloudy, with only very little moist in the air. Still, almost no one was outdoors. Only a group of three siblings and a young woman on a farmlet. She later called and said she had found the cat.
Really? In New England, everybody can't wait to get out when the weather's warm; we all go out picking blueberries and what-have-you in the summer. I would have thought Scandinavia would be the same as the northeastern US, where winter is the vacation season. People around here can be so desperate to avoid the snow that they'll go all the way to Florida for a month or two.
There we have the explanation why Scandinavians have vacation season in summer: We have almost no snow to escape. Where we live we have three weeks of snow every year, on average. Instead people who can afford it travel to skiing resorts in the mountains in the north.
Some decades ago it was normal behavior to get out in the forest and pick blueberries (or bilberries I think Americans would call them). But most people stopped doing that once they could afford to buy them instead. But people pick mushrooms.
Well... most of New England also doesn't have much snow, although it must be granted that we probably experience the winters as more of a shock than Scandinavians do. Not only have many of us moved here from balmy states in the south or west, but also the climate here is quite continental - Boston is colder in January than Stockholm, and gets 25% more snow, but July in Boston is 4 C warmer.
The New England climate seems indeed shocking. I once watched a movie, Manchester by the Sea, where a man died in the winter and they needed to keep his body in a freezer for several months because they couldn't dig a grave because of the frost (yes, I believe in everything I see in American movies). And once I read half a gardening book from New England and the writer claimed that sometimes there is frost in June.
That's the continental climate for you! Oceanic climates are way better. Wind blowing in from the oceans tends to be temperate because of the physical properties of water, and in the midlatitudes the wind blows primarily from the west. So in Western Europe or Canada you can go quite far north and still have mild (Oceanic) seasons, but go far enough to the East - Northern China or Eastern US - and the (Continental) winds can blow anything in at any time. If you look at the largest city in Northern Maine (Presque Isle), its latitude is only 46.7 degrees N, but it gets 2.5m of snow:
The next to last word should be "they," I think.
Yes, it should. Thank you! Should be fixed now.
For more research on the effect on people who definitely do not have cows, I can recommend this interview with Jeff Leach, who lived with hunter-gatherers and studied how their lifestyle influenced their microbiome:
https://chrisryan.substack.com/p/307-jeff-leach-microbiome-expert-a76
He had an interesting point about us actually being part of our surroundings. As in, our microbiome is shaped by the environment we are in. If we live in a high biodiversity environment, we will also have a high diversity microbiome. So us working hard to separate ourselves from our surroundings, and in general reducing the biodiversity around us, also makes us a lot more vulnerable.
Oh no, it's HIM? The Sex at Dawn guy!
Sounds interesting, anyway. I will try to find some text-based information about him. I mean, about Jeff Leach.
Jeff Leach has written a few books, but I have not read them, so can't give my opinion on them, but I found the interview deeply interesting. It really gave a perspective on how much our modern lifestyle depletes us from the diversity we need both inside and outside ourselves.
And yes, the interviewer is the guy who wrote Sex at Dawn. It is still a really good interview ;). On a separate note, Even if you didn't like Sex at Dawn", Chris Ryan also wrote a another book called "Civilized to Death". I actually think you would find that really interesting. It explores a lot of the same themes as you are covering.
Well, yes, the message of "Civilized to Death" seem to align a lot with what I'm thinking. But I don't... trust that guy anymore. Sex at Dawn was one of the first books I read in evolutionary psychology and I kind of liked it. There were just a few points I thougt the book left unanswered. Then I read Sex at Dusk and other books in anthropology and evolutionary psychology and felt kind of deceived - like, how could I believe in that? Before I open a book by Chris Ryan again I will have to bring myself into my best fact-checking mode.
I initially felt the same, but then I went to the primary sources (the actual papers referenced) and they did seem to largely corroborate the message in Sex at Dawn (at least he didn't seem to have misrepresented them), and Sex at Dusk seemed an even more suspect and agenda driven work.
Did you read the "debunk of the debunk"?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335676223_Sex_at_Dusk_Sex_at_Dawn_Selfish_Genes_How_Old-Dated_Evolutionary_Ideas_Are_Used_to_Defend_Fallacious_Misogynistic_Views_on_Sex_Evolution
No, I didn't read it, I'm not very good at reading papers in general. I also didn't read any papers Sex at Dawn referred to. But the book taught me about the existence of Sarah Hrdy, so I started reading her books and I became a fan. Largely I have adopted Hrdy's views on gender relations. I thought Sarah Hrdy was much more in line with Lynn Saxon that with Chris Ryan. Also other primatologists I have read warned against for example believing our ancestors were like the bonobo.
In general I think that extraordinary claims require extraordinary data. Chris Ryan launched an extraordinary claim, but wasn't especially careful with his data. Next time someone takes up that hypothesis, if it ever happens, I hope they do so with a very careful approach to existing knowledge.
I like going back to the original papers to check what was actually written. All authors are arguing for their own viewpoint, and even with the best of intentions, they will be cherrypicking the examples that fit their thesis best. Going back to the original references and seeing both that it was not being misrepresenting, and also reading up on the context that led to the quote, seems to be the only way to seriously factcheck.
> Largely I have adopted Hrdy's views on gender relations. I thought Sarah Hrdy was much more in line with Lynn Saxon that with Chris Ryan.
Interesting, I found the opposite. Like on the topic of whether tribal women rely on the paternal fathers for support, in "Mothers and Others" Hrdy writes:
> "From the outset, they (evolutionists) assumed that (the) provider must have been her (the wife's) mate, as Darwin himself opined in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Indeed, it was the hunter's need to finance slow-maturing children, Darwin thought, that provided the main catalyst for the evolution of our big brains: "the most able men succeeded best in defending and providing for themselves and their wives and offspring", he wrote. it was the offspring of hunters with "greater intellectual vigour and power of invention" who were most like to survive". According to this logic, males with bigger brains would have been more successful hunters, better providers, and more able to obtain mates and thereby pass their genes to children whose survival was underwritten by a better diet. Meat would subsidize the long childhoods needed to develop larger brains, leading eventually to the expansion of brains from the size of an australopithecine's to the size of Darwin's own. Thus did the 'hunting hypothesis' morph into one of the most long-standing and influential models in anthropology. at the heart of the model lay a pact between a hunter who provided for his mate and a mate who repaid him with sexual fidelity so the provider could be certain that children he invested in carried at least half of his genes. This 'sex contract' assumed pride of place as the "prodigious adaptation central to the success of early hominids". (However) as it became apparent that among foragers (like the !Kung) plant foods accounted for slightly more calories than meat, researchers started paying more attention to female contributions (also). when Frank Marlowe interviewed Hazda still living by hunting and gathering, he learned that only 36% of children had fathers living in the same group. a hemisphere away, among Yanomano tribespeople in remote regions of Venezuela and Brazil, the chance of a 10-year-old child having both a father and a mother living in the same group was 1/3, while the chance that a Central African Aka youngster between the ages of 11 and 15 was living with both natural parents was closer to 58%. pity the Ongee foragers living on the Andaman Islands: none of the 11- to 15-years-olds in that ethnographic sample still lived with either natural parent."
In the same passage, Hrdy further notes: "when anthropologists reviewed a sample of 15 traditional societies, in 8 of them the presence or absence of the father had no apparent effect on the survival of children to age 5, provided other caregivers in addition to the mother were on hand in a position of help".
This seems very aligned with the key point in Sex at Dawn, that paternity was less important when living in a tribal context where there was plenty of other caregivers.
> Also other primatologists I have read warned against for example believing our ancestors were like the bonobo.
I don't think that anyone, not even Chris Ryan, is arguing that we were "like" the bonobo. More that it was likely that we were somewhat in between bonobos and chimps, given that both are equidistant to us in evolutionary terms.
When it comes to primatologists, I know that Frans de Waal has become good friends with Chris Ryan after the book came out (he has appeared several times on his podcast), and he definitely does not think that his work was misrepresented. When it comes to primatologists with knowledge of bonobos, I don't know who should be a better source?
> In general I think that extraordinary claims require extraordinary data.
I totally agree. This is why I am such a stickler for going back to the original sources and checking the that facts line up. I don't agree with all the conclusions in Sex at Dawn, but in all the references I have followed so far, I have not seen them misrepresent facts.
I sure hope dirt helps. My baby shoved a bunch of it in his mouth last week during a picnic. And sand. And a rock.
We definitely get outside in the dirt more than most parents + toddlers in our neighborhood. Sometimes we get out twice a day, even if it's just in our own yard or the common area by the houses. I see other kids in the common areas a couple of times a year. I know they prefer the big park nearby, but that's further away and honestly I don't see that many toddlers there, either. Little kids are all either indoors, at daycare (which is also mostly indoors), or in organized activities like soccer. (On soccer days, suddenly the park is packed, so I know these kids exist!)
It makes me sad. I feel like the world has just shuttered itself indoors and out of sight.
Different experiences in different places maybe? Whenever we take our kids to the park or the lake, it's always full. Granted, the roads where I live are a bit empty of foot traffic, which is too bad - but as everyone knows, the streets belong to the machines now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AFn7MiJz_s
Congratulations!
Also here, in the Scandinavian countryside, people spend strange amounts of time indoors. A few years ago my mother had an old, orange-colored cat that probably had dementia. Sometimes the cat disappeared into the neighborhood and got lost. Once it did so on 20th of July. My mother and I went to every house within a radius of two kilometers and gave people a picture of the cat. Many people were home: 20th of July is in the middle of vacation season in Scandinavia. The weather was human-friendly: Mild, cloudy, with only very little moist in the air. Still, almost no one was outdoors. Only a group of three siblings and a young woman on a farmlet. She later called and said she had found the cat.
Really? In New England, everybody can't wait to get out when the weather's warm; we all go out picking blueberries and what-have-you in the summer. I would have thought Scandinavia would be the same as the northeastern US, where winter is the vacation season. People around here can be so desperate to avoid the snow that they'll go all the way to Florida for a month or two.
There we have the explanation why Scandinavians have vacation season in summer: We have almost no snow to escape. Where we live we have three weeks of snow every year, on average. Instead people who can afford it travel to skiing resorts in the mountains in the north.
Some decades ago it was normal behavior to get out in the forest and pick blueberries (or bilberries I think Americans would call them). But most people stopped doing that once they could afford to buy them instead. But people pick mushrooms.
Well... most of New England also doesn't have much snow, although it must be granted that we probably experience the winters as more of a shock than Scandinavians do. Not only have many of us moved here from balmy states in the south or west, but also the climate here is quite continental - Boston is colder in January than Stockholm, and gets 25% more snow, but July in Boston is 4 C warmer.
The New England climate seems indeed shocking. I once watched a movie, Manchester by the Sea, where a man died in the winter and they needed to keep his body in a freezer for several months because they couldn't dig a grave because of the frost (yes, I believe in everything I see in American movies). And once I read half a gardening book from New England and the writer claimed that sometimes there is frost in June.
That's the continental climate for you! Oceanic climates are way better. Wind blowing in from the oceans tends to be temperate because of the physical properties of water, and in the midlatitudes the wind blows primarily from the west. So in Western Europe or Canada you can go quite far north and still have mild (Oceanic) seasons, but go far enough to the East - Northern China or Eastern US - and the (Continental) winds can blow anything in at any time. If you look at the largest city in Northern Maine (Presque Isle), its latitude is only 46.7 degrees N, but it gets 2.5m of snow:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presque_Isle,_Maine#Geography_and_climate