Hi everybody,

When I found Art's website last year and learned that his book was still
forthcoming, I desperately wanted to hear more of Art's thinking.  With the
help of Art, JD Weaver, Rick Boulin, and others, I was able to piece together
the discussions on the earlier list, and with the generosity of St John's
University, find a good home for the restarted the discussion list.  Online
discussion forums are a great gift of the modern age: it allows anybody,
anywhere with a net connection and a command of the shared language to have
meaningful discourse with kindred spirits; it grants one access to people and
ideas one might not otherwise have.  The gift is also a privilege that is
easily not recognized as such and taken for granted.

Art's participation, in particular, is also a gift.  He is living a healthy,
robust life and has been willing to freely share the theories and practices
he's developed over the decades to help us achieve the same.  The value to me
from hearing Art is greater than the value to Art of speaking to me.  Since he
is not being paid, the difference in value is his generosity.  While I have
not for a moment taken this gift for granted, others have, and further, have
openly devalued him.

Think for a moment about how difficult it is otherwise in the real world to
get the attention of someone with great ideas.  Normally, you would have pay
him great sums of money, have connections, provide him with the prestige of
knowing you, or barter your own great ideas or something else of equal value.
When someone is willing to teach you something great for nothing, you should
really appreciate him.  That doesn't require you to worship him; you merely
need to try to understand his teaching and show respect.  If you don't
understand something, ask him; if you don't agree, disagree with logic and
civility.  If you really can't stand him, go somewhere else.

I was naive in thinking that everybody else on this list felt as and would
behave the same way as I do.  At least one other person didn't.  In the
future, I will not be so naive.

Art is a highly rational person, and he has told me in private communication
that with the flames he's received on the list and through direct email, the
cost to him of participating on list now outweighs the benefits, so he has
formally "dropped" the list.  I will continue to run and administer the list,
but clearly the value of it is much less without him.

Art said in his last post that he wants to put the episode behind us.  At the
risk of encouraging further needless discussion of it, I will briefly why the
post was so nasty, so that we can understand why Art is justified in being
angry and that others may avoid throwing the same type of abuse in the future.
My first inclination was to simply ignore the post, but then it wasn't
directed at me, and hence easy for me to do.

This list is for thinking people.  Evolutionary Fitness is about optimizing
our lives through the application of scientific theory, in particular Art's
understanding of Nature through his work with dynamic systems.  Clearly, when
he commented on the ease with which one can avoid getting fat, he was
referring to the application of his system.  The context is implicit from your
participation on this list, and a basic understanding of his writings.  Art's
statements betray no ignorance of--or lack of sympathy for--women easily
getting fat in Turkey or anywhere else in the world.  It's not clear that
those people cared to avoid fat; surely, they haven't applied Art's EvFit
principles.  The poster goes on to suggest, weakly so she can disavow it, yet
sufficiently strong enough to plant the idea, that genetics determines our
state of fatness, despite whatever we may do.  A logical extension of these
assertions is that Art owes his leanness to genetics.  Then the poster
concludes by suggesting that by looking at our Paleolithic art that 1) perhaps
it's natural for women to be fat or 2) fat women should be considered
beautiful.  One logical conclusion is that perhaps it is ideal for women to be
fat after all.

The poster was welcome to discuss these issues clearly and logically; instead
she hurled these incomplete assertions as spit in Art's face.

Anyway, the future of this list remains to be seen.  Please respect Art's time
and don't bombard him with private emails.  Let's salvage what we have left
and move on.

Ming