Coterminous with Loren Cordain's appearance on Dateline NBC will be an
article on Evolutionary Fitness and Diet to appear in Women's Health and
Fitness (this month's issue I am told).  In addition, one episode of a PBS
TV series called Closer to the Truth will feature Roy Walford (the UCLA
scientist who exposes under eating) and myself, along with geneticists and
doctors discussing diet and fitness.  The Closer to the Truth series will
air in the top 25 PBS markets starting next fall.

Walford eats a near-Paleo diet, nutrient dense, low calorie food and does
body building to retain muscle mass.  This is similar to Evolutionary
Fitness, except that in Evolutionary Fitness dietary restriction is episodic
rather than uniform.  And, overall there is only moderate restriction in an
evolutionary eating pattern.

Dr. Walford did not answer my question to my satisfaction.  It is that too
few of the caloric restriction studies have considered episodic
restrictions, such as a paleolithic hg might have experienced, and all that
I am aware of have an ad libitum-fed control.  Comparing a rat that is
pigging out with one whose diet is restricted may demonstrate that
overeating is poor health practice (which it is).

On the age of ancestors; it is well-known that the incidence of extreme
events, such as living to very old age, is a function of the size of the
sample.  Modern humans comprise a large sample and, hence the upper tail
probabilities reasonably well match the theoretical distribution.  But, for
paleo ancestors, the samples are extremely small.  As sample size grows, so
too will the upper tail frequencies.  Current estimates of age distributions
among ancestors are plagued with the small sample problem and such estimates
will continue to reach upward as the size of the sample grows.

There is no unitary cause of death and the age of the oldest (modern and
paleolithic) human will continue to creep up as we record more data, and
this independent of advances in health or any other changes.  The upper tail
of the theoretical Gompertz curve (log survival rate, linear age) of
survival is unbounded, implying there is no finite limit to age and that the
variance of the distribution and the extreme events in the upper tail will
drift upward with sample size.  That is exactly what is seen in animal
populations as the number of subjects correctly age dated expands.


--
Arthur De Vany
Department of Economics and Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences
University of California
Irvine, CA 92697-5100
http://www.socsci.uci.edu/econ/personnel/devany/devany.html
949-824-5269