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SteveJohnson:
What would this principle say when applied to humans? Clearly the environment that humans have created for themselves in the last 5,000 years is vastly different from the environment that is encoded in humans by the evolutionary process that created us. Exactly-- Our behavioral choices and options are radically
different from what our models encode. Interestingly, some of the changes
are clearly beneficial (basic hygiene, for example). Although even there, we
have seen an epidemic of asthma which has recently been suggested to be due to
humanity's penchant for being TOO clean with our infants, as their bodies
are setting all their setpoints.
In any case, no matter how much we are able to give ourselves new
choices, the basic aspects encoded into our organization are
unchanged: Gravitational pull, Diurnal (Earth's rotation) cycles, lunar cycles,
seasonal cycles, density of atmosphere, etc... Why do humans require sleep, for
example? I suspect it is because we evolved on a planet that rotates as it
orbits the (single) sun in our solar system. This causes an
alternating light phase and dark phase in most locations on the planet
surface. Would life which evolved in a multi-sun solar system have the same
cycles incorporated as biorhythms, etc? I don't think so. The reason we have the
cycles we have is directly related to the fact that these are incorporated
aspects of our evolutionary environment. Why is our blood the same salinity as
sea water? Perhaps because we originally evolved in the sea. That's a much older
piece of evolutionary information, though. Yet, it is still part of us, and the
effect is a critical requirement for certain amounts of both water and
salt.
There are many nutritionists who view the current epidemic of
health problems (like type 2 diabetes) as a symptom that we have gotten too far
away from the type of diet we evolved to eat. From the perspective of my
father's work, we have certain nutritional requirements based on
evolutionary diet and the modern world's switch
to a diet containing so much refined carbohydrates
is being interpreted by our internal models which are, of
course, based on a very different diet.
Another example of this phenomenon may be the connection between
food sensitivities and blood type. It is known that there are differences in
nutritional requirements/tolerances based on blood type, which suggests that the
evolutionary changes which are associated with those differences in blood
type are also associated with different food availability in the respective
evolutionary habitats.
One reason these internal models need to be studied is to figure
out how the information is encoded, in the first place. If we could figure out
ways to tweak our internal models, it would be a whole new world.
Judith
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