History of Food, Population Size & Social Stability, Psychological Pandemics, Health & Civilization

[@MindAndMatter]

All M&M content is available on Substack. Podcast, writing, free weekly newsletter: [mindandmatter.substack.com] If you enjoy M&M content and want to provide further support, read this: [mindandmatter.substack.com/p/how-to-support-mind-and-matter?Fsearch%2Fsupport&] Thanks!

[@krazykkarl]

Are we really getting shorter or has millions of short hispanics coming in for decades lowered the national average?

[@ChipsChallenge95]

They’ve lowered our mean IQ as well

[@toms3664]

​@@ChipsChallenge95 arriba adale

[@toms3664]

​@@ChipsChallenge95not to mention obesity levels and criminal tendencies

[@garycarder4363]

​@@ChipsChallenge95fentynal mixed with dmso and painted on the door handles of your enemies is the best revenge, the dmso makes the Fentynal absorb in to the skin fast and fatal, dmso can be purchased from any horse supply shop or online, happy hunting

[@elasticharmony]

True in Texas it is very noticeable you have none of them over 6'5", whereas there are plenty of whites taller.

[@wmdavidhamilton]

We decided that Fat was evil. Not sugar. The list goes on and on regarding things we got wrong.

[@MarmaladeINFP]

For years, I've been looking for more and better discussion about how diet, drugs, microbes, parasites, and environments influence the psyche and society. Part of the problem is that we take for granted our own social constructs and ideological realism. The changes we have made to the world around us has changed us (agriculture). Changes we don't control also affect us (parasite-stress theory, behavioral immune system). This is where we need to be careful. Most of the discussion of blank slate is rather clueless. It doesn't mean what most think it means. I'd read Daniel Everett's recent defense of the blank slate, "Dark Matter of the Mind." What quickly becomes obvious is how some critics turned the blank slate into a caricature and straw man. A point Everett makes is that even a blank slate has inherent qualities that limits what can be written on it and how. It simply can be written and rewritten on in various ways. This is where the genetic determinists are being disproven. The arguments they've used about inheritance are extremely weak. Heritability rates include not only genetics but also epigenetics and shared environment. Epigenetics is one of those game changers and paradigm revolutions. It simply blows apart the entire dualistic framing of nature vs nurture. Environmental factors can alter epigenetics, and it's epigenetics that determines the expression of genetics. About tribal people being peaceful or violent, that is another complex topic. There are two aspects of this. Until the late Bronze Age, there is no evidence of there ever having been large-scale war or slaughter of humans by other humans. That indicates some new kind of stressor had emerged in human civilization. That is the thing we see with tribal people. They tend to be peaceful when unstressed and violent when stressed. But that is precisely what has changed over the centuries and millennia, the increase of stressors. Even before the Bronze Age, the single greatest stressor that developed was agriculture. Infections increased, maldevelopment worsened, height lowered, and the skull / brain shrank. Modern Westerners have only recently reversed some of that loss, if we have yet to regain skull / brain size. As for rice areas being more collectivist, they are also higher in parasites. All populations with high parasite loads are collectivist (conservative, RWA, low 'openness', etc). As that demonstrates, we have to be careful about correlations. Causation could go many directions, and sometimes an apparent factor is just a proxy. That is where I'd be cautious about concluding meat-eating causes aggression. Herding needs large, open grasslands. Farmers makes herding difficult by dominating land and blocking pathways, as it makes the hunter-gatherer lifestyle also difficult. Since agriculture came later, it could be argued that it's agriculture that is causing the conflict and adding to stress. Between starving and fighting, maybe it's unsurprising that herders and hunter-gatherers will fight for survival. But on average, they haven't won those conflicts. Large-scale agricultural societies, as seen emerging in the late Bronze Age with it's mass violence, made possible standing armies and long distance warfare, along with a high-carb diet allowed precocious sexuality, early pregnancy, and larger populations. This put a lot of pressure on the non-agricultural people. There is another point. In this video, it was stated that no society exists without religion or art. Well, arguably, the Piraha lack both, as well as lacking linguistic recursion. They have no mythology, no afterlife theology, no rituals, no storytelling tradition, and no artistic practice. Their clothing and housing is simple and practical. Daniel Everett studied them, and his son Caleb Everett went on to become an expert in linguistic relativity. Linguistic relativity is further evidence for non-genetic influences, specifically that of culture. We can also hook the Piraha back into the other main issue. They are a peaceful and pacifist society, with a strong element of egalitarianism. They don't use corporal punishment, with a laissez-faire lifestyle. Rather than rules and authority figures, they have a tight-knit identity. To their mind, Piraha don't kill. And on the rare occasion, when someone kills another, then by definition they're not Piraha. Effectively, they experience social death and banish themselves from the tribe. Only one known recent incident like this occurred. Yet as perfect contrast, in a nearby region are the Yanomami. They are infamous for being one of the most violent of tribes, and seemingly authoritarian. Unusrprisingly, where the Piraha live in a peaceful area of low stress, the Yanomami live in a borderland between two countries that has long been an area of conflict. These two tribes live in the same ecosystems with similar diets. But possibly these other environmental factors are pushing them in opposite directions (kungic vs regal). To demonstrate this same kind of divergence, look at bonobos and chimpanzees. They are genetically close with only a river separating the two species and keeping them from interbreeding. The peaceful, egalitarian bonobos live in an area of low stress, conflict, and violence. But the violent, authoritarian chimpanzees live in an area of human encroachment, poaching, and civil war. Genetic determinists have used chimpanzees as proof of a dark view of human nature, but this evidence actually points to a different conclusion. There is another reason to compare these two comparisons. One could argue that the Piraha and Yanomami represent two different genetic populations. Some of the Piraha are related to no other known genetic or linguistic population. But the bonobos and chimpanzees are genetically close, particularly to each other but also to humans. Interestingly, humans have slightly closer genetics to bonobos, as I recall. It's not to say genetics doesn't play a role, as it certainly does. It's just obviously environmental factors are powerful in determining how genetics is expressed. An interesting twist is that the Piraha aren't a single population. It appears that other populations at some point assimilated into their culture. There is one Piraha tribe that has a more African appearance. But to get to the point of environmental influence, all of the different looking Piraha have the exact same body type. That indicates that diet, microbiome, parasitism, or something is likely determining physical development. There could even be an effect of sunlight being filtered by jungle rather than direct exposure. This is where you could look for evidence of your meat intake causes aggression, an old belief within Galenic humoralism as Christianized in the Middle Ages (i.e., red meat increases heat, raises the blood). The Piraha eat a mostly fish-based diet. This does seem to not lend itself to massive growth as seen with people eating lots of ruminant meat. But you could argue that fish is less likely to increse violence rates. It's an interesting hypothesis. Certainly, under Medieval food laws, that was why fish was eaten when abstaining from 'meat'. One suspects there is truth to this. The Medieval elites instituted food laws because they feared red meat got people's blood up, inciting unruliness and violence. Maybe there was some fear that the peasants, if they ate like the Mongols, might become as strong and irrepressible as the Mongols. But keep in mind the Mongols weren't only eating meat but also tons of dairy. They were getting massive nutrient-density. Maybe cutting out meat in the diet is often a proxy for malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies, which of course would lower energy, libido, and strength. Besides, to look at the other side of the equation, there are the fish-eating Polynesians who were a warrior people. They were eating fish, while not being deprived of nutrition. But that sometimes aggressive culture could've been caused by other factors: limited land availability, scarcity of resources, travelers and/or invaders from other islands, etc. Still, it is difficult to make conclusive generalizations when one can come up with endless exceptions from the records of history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, etc. The additional problem, with such vast and diverse evidence to choose from, one can so easily cherrypick according to confirmation bias.

[@josephdonovan7886]

Disagree with your take on no pre- bronze age violence... this is a romantic version at best. There is probably a very good reason the closest thing to us is apes. This is strange especially for a new species. All of life is tooth and claw at its base.

[@MarmaladeINFP]

"Disagree with your take on no pre- bronze age violence... this is a romantic version at best." No matter one's beliefs or lack of knowledge, it remains true that there is no evidence of large-scale violence until the late Bronze. There is nothing romantic about pointing out basic facts in a field of study.

[@garycarder4363]

Fentynal mixed with dmso and painted on the door handles of your enemies is the best revenge, the dmso makes the Fentynal absorb in to the skin fast and fatal, dmso can be purchased from any horse supply shop or online, happy hunting

[@insaneweasel1]

It's kind of depends on what you consider and define as large scale, but it seems like the increase in size and complexity of violence was due to increased populations and political control.

[@sunnyday6465]

I am largely in agreement with you. Eating meat helps you to be healthy and strong and less likely to accept oppression. Make the people weak so they can be controlled.

[@whattodoinanemergency1203]

What a cool channel I'm songlad I found it

[@josephdonovan7886]

You know... I read alot, over 10,000 books, and i must say, you could just read the dune series,1984 and a few other fictional books that would encompass most of these ideas.

[@ChrisAthanas]

True, human nature, as much as we would like it to be, is simply not that complex. People like stuff. People like power. People will do CRAZY SHIT to gain both, and usually at their own folly. There's human nature is 3 sentences.

[@MarmaladeINFP]

Let me respond to several comments in all one fell swoop. There seems to be a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding, or at least the assertions are less certain than presented. Three different people wrote: 1) "Are we really getting shorter or has millions of short hispanics coming in for decades lowered the national average?" 2) "They’ve lowered our mean IQ as well" 3) "not to mention obesity levels and criminal tendencies" Are these claims true? I'd contest that some of them are clearly false, and it's often easily confirmed by looking at the available data, but other aspects are more complex. Immigrants to the U.S. come from all over the world. They represent a great diversity. Some are poorer than Americans, but many others are above the American average. The latter is because of the brain drain of people escaping countries with problems or less opportunities. I'm not sure about average height of immigrants or the variance in height among different immigrant groups. But I do know that, on average, immigrants have higher IQ, higher education attainment, and lower crime rate than the average American. That is an indicator of healthy brain development from a nutritious diet, less toxicity exposure, etc; but it also shows what Weston A. Price called 'moral health' (i.e., pro-social behavior). That tends to go hand in hand with greater physical development in general, including height. Although being tall is not necessarily a sign of health. Sally Fallon Morrell writes: "High protein, lowfat diets in children induce rapid growth along with depletion of vitamin A supplies. The results -tall, myopic, lanky individuals with crowded teeth, and poor bone structure -are a fixture in America." She calls it the Ichabod Crane syndrome. The excess and imbalanced growth of younger generations of Americans actually can be a further sign of sickliness, as it's extremely imbalanced. Though we modern Westerners have caught up with the height of Paleolithic humans, our bone structure remains thin, stunted, and malformed; as Weston A. Price noted a century ago (and it's probably worse now). We Americans don't need immigrants to suppress our overall measures of health. In many ways, a constant influx of immigrants helps moderate the worst indicators of sickliness in the U.S. population, as a larger part of these immigrants were raised on traditional diets. Plus, there being a self-selected group is significant, as it's the most healthy and wealthy who are in the best position to be able to immigrate at all, with the worst off left behind. It does no one any benefit to scapegoat immigrants for our own failures as a society. But such attitudes are predictable. Studies show that xenophobia, as an expression of socio-political conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism, increases with a stressed or sickly population (regality theory, mean world syndrome, parasite-stress theory, behavioral immune system, etc). This is why regions with higher rates of parasite load have higher rates of collectivism and lower rates of the liberal-minded trait of 'openness to experience' (Southeast Asia, American Deep South, etc). High inequality combined with segregation also contributes to xenophobia and worse 'moral health'. This is why public health is so important. We are affected not only by our own health but also by the health of others, in shaping the entire society.

[@MikeJ0nes-e1m]

mice and whale, but short people (medium) live longer than giant 7 ft people.

[@MarmaladeINFP]

That is true in modern urban populations eating an agricultural diet that is industrialized and hyper-processed. But it doesn't seem as clear that the tall hunter-gatherers like the Plains Indians were living less long than short tribal people eating less ruminant meat. It would be interesting to do a comparison between meat-eating tribes and fish-eating tribes. The short Amazonian Piraha get 90% of their diet from fish. Are they living longer than the African Hadza and Masai who eat more meat? I haven't a clue, as I don't know the data. But I'd love to see an analysis and discussion about that. And even better, I'd love to see a study where at least some confounders were controlled for.

[@wadedavies3924]

Yes Darwin showed up after Marx but they complimented each other as materialists and appear to have had the same sponsors.

[@calebcase80]

I was watching you the other day, and I didn't see you using your loom at all