William:
> Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2007 9:45 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Molecular Mimicry
> 
> We were smarter then, so the assumption is, IMHO, warranted.
> 
> William
> 
> 
> On Thu, 22 Feb 2007 16:57:45 -0500, <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
> 
> 
> >
> > Not sure whether it does or not -- and I'm not claiming that Phil's
> > making this point -- but I do want to point out that simply showing
> that
> > some activity preceded agriculture doesn't mean that it's good for
> > humans.  We seem to sometimes make that assumption: We did it before
> the
> > neolithic, therefore it's a natural or healthy activity.

I've never heard someone make the claim that tobacco smoking is natural or
healthy and I agree that just because something was done before the
Neolithic doesn't make it so.

Jim wrote:
> ....  I like very much the idea that our forebears were much, much smarter
than we give them credit for.
> This modern hubris -- that we've conquered the world and that we smarter
than any who have gone before -- is
> dangerous.  A very good argument can be made that we are not better off in
the neolithic.  And if you go back
> a hundred years or so, there is no argument that we were better off before
we ate the apple.

Jared Diamond has argued in *Guns, Germs and Steel* that New Guinea hunter
gatherers are "genetically superior" in "mental ability" to modern folk. It
is a controversial hypothesis, in part because it could be misused to
support racist ideology, but given the effects of modern foods on the brain,
it is plausible (I find Diamond's argument that Europeans were naturally
selected for epidemic survival more than intelligence to be a less plausible
reason, though still a possibility), so William may also be correct that
people were a bit "smarter" during the Paleolithic. That still doesn't mean
smoking makes sense though.