Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Maybe you should be asking the opposite question like why should evolution reward sedentary life? If you can live a sedentary lifestyle and still produce children, then evolution doesn't care. In fact, an indoors lifestyle is much more fit in the longterm than a life of hard labor. Evolution isn't trying to create the Platonic Ideal of a human. It just is a thoughtless mechanism to efficiently reproduce DNA.
> If you can live a sedentary lifestyle and still produce children, then evolution doesn't care. Hunter/gatherer humanity did not have the luxury of a sedentary lifestyle, so it did have a negative impact on your ability to produce children for a long time. > In fact, an indoors lifestyle is much more fit in the longterm than a life of hard labor. I think "hard labor" is a bit extreme, but even so, working a physical…
Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Protein
141–150 of 186 posts
Re: Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Protein
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Endurance exercise displays an inverted U curve in terms of longevity. Strength is highly correlated with reduced all cause mortality. Which direction the relationship goes is debatable, but being strong is pretty sweet in and of itself.
Source? Anyways I've run marathons in the past, but I mostly do strength training now, actually mostly callisthenics. It's less dedication, gives me more of an adrenaline rush and easier to do than endurance training. I don't deny, though, that most of what I've read says that cardio is better if you just simply want to live as long as possible.
If you only watch TV or read while walking at an incline on the treadmill, it's easy to rack up the miles without inconveniencing yourself. I probably hit about 24 miles a week doing this.
Re: Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Protein
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or piss them off. Exercise is tiring and painful and time-consuming (especially if you count in after-exercise showers). Also, I don't like the whole culture around exercising and fitness. Gimme a damn pill or something. More seriously though, I really find no pleasure in exercise and would like to approach it in the most cost-effective way (i.e. maximum benefit for minimum time used). Any hints on exercise regime op…
Wondering if you might have an undiagnosed medical condition. I've been very a active exerciser my whole adult life. It's part of my identity. Last year I started suffering from chronic fatigue. Exercise began to hurt. It hurt when I did it. It hurt afterward. I was tired all the time. I was gaining weight. I stopped exercising. It brought me no relief. Only resting did. I knew something was wrong. Went to Doctor. Tr…
How did you find out this is what you needed?
Re: Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Protein
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are assuming Hunter/Gatherers expend more energy than modern humans, which is not true ( http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... ) Physical activity levels were also within a standard deviation of one another (between western and h/g populations). The brain evolved in similar conditions to modern man. I would argue current conditions are far better for the brain in terms of good nutrition…
The person you are replying to didn't say "expend more energy", they said "exercise more", and the link you gave comfirms that: As expected, physical activity level, PAL, was greater among Hadza foragers than among Westerners.
Within a standard deviation. Higher on average, but not much, and not significantly.
No where near enough to exert selection pressure.
Re: Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Protein
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
You two are wildly speculating. The fact is that none of this greatly influences reproductive fitness, so it is unlikely to be acted on by evolution. The effect is likely just biochemical coincidence. Repair enzymes in one part of the body effecting another.
I agree that it is speculation, but the evolutionary advantage is pretty clear there: getting extra learning during fights increases your chances of survival in the next fight.
2. You are assuming fights exert the same effect as exercise.
3. You are assuming the selection pressure is great enough to effect allele frequency.
4. You are assuming humans fight alone.
5. You are assuming humans have extra knowledge to be gained in a split second of a fight.
6. You are assuming said extra knowledge would be overwhelmingly adaptive in a physical fight.
Breaking down adaptation is all about understanding your assumptions. It is easy to speculate, but it is hard measure evolution. However, given rigorous study we can measure adaptation mathematically and quantify it's impacts.
Re: Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Protein
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
>during those releases the brain also had to work hardest That is speculation, and is unintuitive. Why would the brain "work hardest" when running? Why would modern humans not exert the same forces during sport? Why would humans, the top group-oriented predator, run from a lion? The data linked above shows that observed Physical Activity Levels and caloric use are comparable to modern day. Stop inserting your own ass…
> Why would humans, the top group-oriented predator, run from a lion? I'd sure run from a lion if it was coming at me.
Re: Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Protein
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
As usual, evolution means there might just be no reason, certainly not one that is reasonable .
I was going to say this as well. Unless it's explicitly linked to surviving natural selection before reproduction, it's more likely that this finding is just a pointless by-product of another biomolecular pathway, even though it may have some discernible benefits. It's like trying to puzzle out why there are nipples on male mammals - it usually devolves to some creative stories and hand waving.
That is, they're useful for the female and not particularly harmful for the male, so they live on.
It's also an instance of DRY (don't repeat yourself) "coding" in our DNA: basically males and females carry the same instructions, with a bunch of randomly interspersed if/else conditions that hinge on the presence of testosterone (coded for in the small Y chromosome)
Re: Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Protein
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you can live a sedentary lifestyle and still produce children, then evolution doesn't care. Hunter/gatherer humanity did not have the luxury of a sedentary lifestyle, so it did have a negative impact on your ability to produce children for a long time. > In fact, an indoors lifestyle is much more fit in the longterm than a life of hard labor. I think "hard labor" is a bit extreme, but even so, working a physical…
> better for your overall health Again, evolution does not care. As long as you can survive to about 40 (long enough to raise children), it makes no difference.
Re: Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Protein
#149There is a strange dichotomy here... I do believe that exercise helps thinking, but when I was growing up, very few of the smarter people were involved in sports, either formally or informally. Perhaps 1 in 20 was on a team, and few were that active otherwise. The link to drama and music was much bigger.
Probably because you're talking about academic success which is only loosely correlated to intelligence, and almost entirely not correlated to "brain health." "Brain health," as it's used in this article, would also contribute to coordination, muscle control, and various other things that would benefit athletes in ways that are totally opaque to you or me. The article doesn't say exercise makes you smarter , and even…
Re: Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Protein
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
well I would argue that other benefits of exercise cannot be simply ingested.
a lot of people cant exercise though