In this essay, I will argue that human evolution was primarily the evolution of a new diet. The key traits that set us apart from other great apes (bipedalism, tool use, social organization, and a larger brain) are all linked to diet. Our last common ancestor with chimpanzees lived sometime between 6 and 4 million years ago. It was probably similar to a chimp in appearance and behavior. Like a chimp, it ate mostly plant foods, with some animal foods. Although we are closely related to chimps, the human form has diverged from that ancestral from in many ways. The important differences are:
> I suspect that some of our modern health problems, such as diabetes, are caused by the extreme energy density of the modern diet. Even though our recent ancestors had a very energy-rich diet compared to what a cow, gorilla or wolf eats, they still did some internal work to digest it. Today, our jaws don’t grow big enough to accommodate our wisdom teeth. Perhaps that is because we don’t chew as much as our ancestors did. Instead of worrying so much about the precise mix of nutrients that we ingest, maybe we should be more concerned about the energy density and digestibility of our food. It might be a little too easy to eat.
I guess when other phase-shifts occurred, like agriculture (or control of fire) - there were also some transient problems caused by the overall huge wins. Transient, as in, affecting multiple generations. If we somehow completely stagnated technologically, stuff like diabetes and obesity would also disappear eventually - maybe after a few hundred years? Through evolution.
Ofc it is not a solution for individuals already instantiated. But nah, going backwards - less dense food - is not actually necessary. The problem is already being solved by the civilization, via GLP-1 analogues. We can just patch the misconfigured parameters of the body. Evolution would probably do pretty much the same thing.
Civilization has some dysfunctions at the moment (in the form of weird first-order-safetyist (but ultimately actually decreasing safety, and also wealth) status quo bias, enforced by institutions like FDA), so the process will take a few years from now before obesity is a thing of the past. Maybe a decade. If civilization got somehow unfucked, it'd happen a year or two from now - at least in the first world countries.
In any case, the solution was found, it just needs to propagate.
> I suspect that some of our modern health problems, such as diabetes, are caused by the extreme energy density of the modern diet. Even though our recent ancestors had a very energy-rich diet compared to what a cow, gorilla or wolf eats, they still did some internal work to digest it. Today, our jaws don’t grow big enough to accommodate our wisdom teeth. Perhaps that is because we don’t chew as much as our ancestors did. Instead of worrying so much about the precise mix of nutrients that we ingest, maybe we should be more concerned about the energy density and digestibility of our food. It might be a little too easy to eat.
I guess when other phase-shifts occurred, like agriculture (or control of fire) - there were also some transient problems caused by the overall huge wins. Transient, as in, affecting multiple generations. If we somehow completely stagnated technologically, stuff like diabetes and obesity would also disappear eventually - maybe after a few hundred years? Through evolution.
Ofc it is not a solution for individuals already instantiated. But nah, going backwards - less dense food - is not actually necessary. The problem is already being solved by the civilization, via GLP-1 analogues. We can just patch the misconfigured parameters of the body. Evolution would probably do pretty much the same thing.
Civilization has some dysfunctions at the moment (in the form of weird first-order-safetyist (but ultimately actually decreasing safety, and also wealth) status quo bias, enforced by institutions like FDA), so the process will take a few years from now before obesity is a thing of the past. Maybe a decade. If civilization got somehow unfucked, it'd happen a year or two from now - at least in the first world countries.
In any case, the solution was found, it just needs to propagate.