On Sun, 24 Feb 2002, Automatic digest processor wrote:

Keith wrote
> Art de Vany has done a lot of work on a book and I recall that he was
> trying to get a mainstream publisher interested in it some years go.

You may well know more facts about this but the impression that I got was
that he'd done work on developing his theory and analyses and worked up a
draft outline before trying to get various publishers interested. As far
as his few posts to the list about the matter seemed to suggest he didn't
get anyone to actually comission the book, and so I'd assume that he
didn't actually get to writing it. (My recollection is that before
dropping off the list he said he was going to start working on it more
after his 2001 class.) And as anyone who's not a full-time writer will
atest, even when you know pretty much precisely what you want to put down
actually writing it takes a lot of work.

> I cannot speak for Art, but this is what may be happening: while Art has
> been doing that, the evolutionary fitness field has been expanding and
> there is a lot of recent research which would probably have caused Art to
> want to incorporate those developments in his manuscript.  He also taught a
> course on evolutionary fitness in 2001.  He may have been modifying his
> presentation in the light of that experience.  Another factor is to
> consider what a mainstream publisher did with Professor Loren Cordain's
> book The Paleo Diet - turned it into just another diet book.  I'd quite
> understand it if Art decided th
> at he'd not <throw pearls before swine> and
> just continue with his research.  And with living evolutionary fitness.

Perhaps this is a comment that reflects my personal feeling, but I'd
suspect that as someone with an academic reputation he's going to be very
careful that anything he writes with as big an audience as a
(semi-)mainstream book definitely doesn't contain any major mistakes, and
contains as few minor mistakes as possible, particularly since he may
well encounter `outsider antagonism'. (It's one thing to make
passing references to ideas and evidence in e-mail whereas in `book-form'
any big gaps in his reasoning will be much more visible and open to
criticism.)

Whilst this possibility of a long wiat is an understandable human
reaction, in some ways it'll be a double pity for me: I'd like to know
both from a personal health point of view and from the point of view of
seeing how someone in a (relatively) hard science approaches evidence and
argument in the realm of long term human dietary/exercise health (where
most of the experiments which would decide matters clearly can't be done
on ethical grounds) :-( .

> The notions of evolutionary fitness are well set out at
> www.evolutionaryfitness.com and, while a book would be great, this compact
> but powerful statement sent me off on the most stimulating year of my life:
> I have learnt _so_ much about evolution, human evolution, fitness, diet,
> complexity, human physiology, paleoanthopology, paleoecology and science
> itself.  I have been able to apply evolutionary fitness to my own exercise
> routines, diet and life generally.  The results are incredible and the
> journey continues!  I could never have done this without
> www.evolutionaryfitness.com.

I can see that this exploration has been great for you and that's
excellent. However personally I have so much I want to do and so little
free time to do it in that I'm happy to be spoon-fed information and
conclusions in an area where I'm not (and don't particularly want to
be) an expert.

___cheers,_dave_________________________________________________________
www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/|`...heat generated by its microprocessors will
email:[log in to unmask] upward exponentially, reaching the power
work tel:(0117) 954-5250 |density of a nuclear reactor before 2010'-Intel

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