On May 06, 2004, at 6:26 pm, Wally Day wrote:

> I find this fascinating. If true, does it not contradict assumptions
> made
> by the raw foodists and the "Lights Out" crowd? I think three quarter
> of a
> millions years would be plenty of time for humans to adapt to cooked
> foods
> and staying up late.....

I was thinking along these lines too.  I've always worked on the
assumption that food that tastes nice to us is food that is good for us
(or more to the point, food that increases your chances of survival).
So we like sweet foods because it attracts us to fruit, fatty foods
because it attracts us to a rich source of energy, and cooked foods
because they are more hygienic.  Now I'm also assuming that we had to
*evolve* these instinctive "likes" (I may well be wrong), which means
we must have been eating cooked food for a long time to evolve a taste
for it.

Along a similar line, humans have an exaggerated sense of smell for
fish.  We could easily have evolved to be unable to smell fish (I did
this thing at school once where we were showed a chemical about 25% of
the class couldn't taste).  So is our sensitivity to fish strong enough
evidence to say that we probably evolved eating large amounts of it
(aquatic ape theory)?  I haven't read any books along these lines so
maybe the idea has already been thought through hundreds of times
already.

The same applies to our taste for salt, but apparently this point has
been thrashed to death on this list, before I joined.

And as for the "Lights Out" idea - which I'm guessing is the idea we
should go to bed when it goes dark - well, humans presumably spread out
of Africa across the rest of the world relatively quickly.  This would
have exposed them to different periods of daylight in quite a short
time, and since we've had no problem with this, I don't see how an
extra hour here or there could make much difference.  It seems to me
inconceivable that the body knows what time it is without reference to
light anyway.  Speaking of which, it's 11pm here - bedtime for me since
I'm up at 6.30.  And I do leave the curtains open so the daylight helps
me wake up