I hope that below I'm making a point that a reasonable number of people
don't find to be irrelevant.

On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, Automatic digest processor wrote:
>
> 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.

I entirely agree Diane was being impolite in her first email (and
deliberately rude and disingenuous in her second email) but I would have
said it was in the tone of her `Nonsense...' remark, rather than the later
stuff about Turkey, etc, which was merely incompletely thought out and
badly described. Why I'm mentioning this is that I think there is an
important point there that I'd be sad to see become taboo just because it
was raised by someone who was also very rude.

Although I'm very impressed by what I've been able to read about Art's
thinking, I _don't_ consider him to be strong evidence for convincing me
of the correctness of his theories. This is because he's one individual
who seems to be physically an extreme outlier (for example, in the both
mail archives whenever he discusses a sporting activity he either always
wins or is a very very strong contender) that I'm not certain that he may
not have a significant genetic advantage. The evidence that I _do_ find
more convincing is the larger number of people on the list who talk about
having made appropriate changes and experience a certain degree of
benefit, and those who adopted part of the ideas and seem to have obtained
some of the benefits. This is because it's coming from a larger population
and that they seem closer to the `mean' of the genetic distribution.
However, the other piece of evidence that doesn't seem to fit with the
theory is the way that there seems to an strong general trend towards
growing more obese as you get older all over the world, with only a very
weak dependence on processed/unprocessed/ev-fit-acceptable food or the
degree of physical exertion required by the lifestyle. It would be nice,
and convincing about evfit, if there were some statistically
valid (i.e., epidemiological) evidence that the principles expounded by ev
fit do correlate with improved health and energy.

(The reason that I keep banging on about evidence to convince me is that,
at the moment at least, although follow them about 75% I don't really
enjoy living in accordance with the ev fit principles, so if they don't
really correspond to something that works then I want to know so I can go
back to my old lifestyle :-) )

___cheers,_dave________________________________________________________
www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~tweed/pi.htm|tweed's law:  however many computers
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