If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.

[mgb_phys]

Interesting hypothesis: why are asians alcohol intolerant? When water was unsafe to drink they had the habit of boiling water to make tea, while the westerners were drinking beer in order to have a safe source of water (and thus there was a selection against alcohol intolerance). You seem to know quite a bit about history, have you heard of that hypothesis before?

Not quite authoritative but a good read.
http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/why-europeans-drank-beer-and-asians-drank-tea/

 

[Proton Soup]

I don't see Evo ever making the claim that sports drinks are junk food. As well no, the best thing to drink during a 3 hour run happens to be sports drinks... Or if you run outside in hot weather you can shorten the amount of time before you should consider drinking sports drinks due to more water lost. The average person who goes for low intensity/short intervals doesn't need to drink sports drinks they can hydrate perfectly fine while maintaining optimal conditions for training with water.

When I did my study on this I found a lot of atheletes make their own sports drinks which revolve around similar nutritional information, mostly the difference came from taste preference.

I even made my own sports drink and tested it on myself. I was able to run harder and longer drinking a sports drink compared to regular water. Only after long periods of exercise. One downside to drinking sports drinks is that it has a caloric value and will therefore give your body a more readily availible energy source, which is good if you are an athelete (gives you extra energy) but bad if you are attempting to lose weight...

ya, i don't do competitive sports. i have no doubt you are right that it would give you an edge.

normally, when i did my long hikes (bit out of shape for that now), i'd pre-hydrate with a liter or so of water, then hike hilly terrain in the heat and humidity for up to 4 hours or so before coming back and re-hydrating. but when i lift weights, i tend to sip on water continuously between sets to try to keep cool and maintain blood pressure for maximum performance.

 

[27Thousand]

I have. I did have an excellent article about it saved on my other computer, which met an untimely death. In the US, in the old west, they turned to alcohol also. I can probably find it. But it is interesting.

Something I found quite interesting, some biologists say humans have evolved quite a bit in the last 10,000 years, or that the belief we stopped evolving 10,000 years ago is a myth. In different parts of the world, various races have genes that allow them to be more tolerant to certain types of foods than other places. What if that also partially applies to the Asian vs. European tolerance, and why the old west of European descent were like that?

"Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years."

Bones in China from 10,000 years ago are different than current day races, European bones for the most part are like that too http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/science/07evolve.html

There's a debate whether evolution mostly ended 10,000 years ago http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/science/11gene.html

 

[mgb_phys]

Something I found quite interesting, some biologists say humans have evolved quite a bit in the last 10,000 years, or that the belief we stopped evolving 10,000 years ago is a myth. In different parts of the world, various races have genes that allow them to be more tolerant to certain types of foods than other places.

Nobody thinks we stopped evolving 10,000 years ago.
Certainly we aren't very different from people 10,000 (or 100,000) years ago, we arent any cleverer than the people who built the pyramids.

10,000 years ago was when the first cities started and farming became the major occupation - so there was a big selection pressure for people who could eat wheat, drink milk and live in groups larger than a tribe without dying of infectious diseases.
Depending on what kind of stuff your ancestors grew 10-20,000 years ago has an effect on your genes today - wether you are lactose or gluten tolerant for instance.

 

[Monique]

Any event that has a major impact on population size will affect gene diversity. The black plague was one of such recent bottleneck events.

 

[27Thousand]

Nobody thinks we stopped evolving 10,000 years ago.
Certainly we aren't very different from people 10,000 (or 100,000) years ago, we arent any cleverer than the people who built the pyramids.

10,000 years ago was when the first cities started and farming became the major occupation - so there was a big selection pressure for people who could eat wheat, drink milk and live in groups larger than a tribe without dying of infectious diseases.
Depending on what kind of stuff your ancestors grew 10-20,000 years ago has an effect on your genes today - wether you are lactose or gluten tolerant for instance.

Although I think the evidence says we are evolving more than ever now, something interesting is I actually have found that a lot of evolutionary psychologists say we stopped evolving 10,000 years ago. They say that a lot of our problems with depression are because our biological evolution stopped while our cultural evolution kept going, and thus we're in an environment we're not evolved for (electricity, etc). Although you can say the cultural evolution evolved faster than biological, many still do say biologically we stopped 10,000 years ago.

One of those articles says:

"The finding CONTRADICTS a widely held assumption that human evolution came to a halt 10,000 years ago or even 50,000 years ago. Some evolutionary psychologists, for example, assume that the mind has not evolved since the Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/science/11gene.html?_r=1

Then it even points out how some are skeptical about the studies that we kept evolving after 10,000 years ago.

However, looking at the evidence in those two links I posted I think it's quite reasonable to believe we are still evolving quite a bit.

 

[NeoDevin]

As long as there is a difference based on genetics, however slight, in the chances of an individual reproducing, evolution continues.