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"But humans also “evolved with a very large stick: if you didn’t exercise, you had nothing to eat.” Exercise was mandatory. For many humans today, he points out

"But humans also “evolved with a very large stick: if you didn’t exercise, you had nothing to eat.” Exercise was mandatory. For many humans today, he points out, there are very few incentives and no penalties." Not entirely true - in fact further down in the article: "Furthermore, says HUHS director Paul Barreira, the same surveys show that students’ own sense of health and well-being tracks the amount of exercise they report getting. Those with the most depression and anxiety also get the least exercise. The happiest students get the most." So the penalties include depression, anxiety, and in future, propensity for heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, etc., etc. So either we haven't evolved enough to consider the penalty of dying young and having a more miserable existence while alive, or is it just that evolution optimizes to the point of reproduction and then doesn't care about much after successfully handing down genes to the next generation? (Edit: I might also ask, without putting forth a theory or guess, what statistics say about obesity and likelihood of reproduction? If health is poorer than non-obese humans, is there a lesser chance of successful reproduction? If so, shouldn't that be considered the ultimate penalty?)

Jtsummers 10y ago
Those penalties are less direct, however. It makes it harder for people to draw the immediate correlation between the two. Hunger drove a sufficient level of fitness to obtain food to satisfy hunger (not in the sense of encouraging the person to do push-ups, but it encouraged them to literally move and obtain sustenance, ideally before they were too weak to do so). Unhappiness doesn't lead to movement until thought and reason are applied to recognize the causal or correlative nature of unfitness and poor mental health.
mmanfrin 10y ago
Sedentary lifestyles were a very small minority up until a generation or two ago. Two generations is not at all enough to see evolutionary yields.
tetrep 10y ago
>...or is it just that evolution optimizes to the point of reproduction and then doesn't care about much after successfully handing down genes to the next generation? I think this is more or less accurate. The optimization wouldn't be just for reproduction but also for the N years of rearing required before offspring are relatively self-sufficient, so reproduction + time to mature seems to be the rough target of evolution.
nxc18 10y ago
Getting up and going to the gym sucks right now. It sucks in the 10 minutes it takes me to get to the gym. It may suck for some time while I'm there. It sucks after when I think about the time I could have spent playing videogames or doing work ( I'm a notorious workaholic so this is big for me). It feels great in 20 years if I do it consistently enough. Eating crap feels great right now (endorphin release and whatnot). Sleeping in feels great right now. I know what exercising feels like, I know what being lazy feels like. I don't know what diabetes and hypertension feel like. Getting the will to overcome that and make the right choices consistently takes diligent practice and sometimes a little coercion. As someone whose parents never forced me to play sports, exercise is a particularly bad struggle. I stepped into the gym for the first time in college. I've never really experienced being skinny (I would love to someday and am working towards that). Motivation is slightly more complicated than people like to acknowledge, especially when you consider that the environment we experience now is so drastically different from the environment we evolved in. Also, in a social species, reproduction is a less acute need for individuals. See: why condoms exist. Personally, I hate the idea of having children. My act of "reproduction" will be making the world a better and more survivable place for the other children of the world whose DNA is 99.99% similar to mine.

Jtsummers 10y ago

Those penalties are less direct, however. It makes it harder for people to draw the immediate correlation between the two. Hunger drove a sufficient level of fitness to obtain food to satisfy hunger (not in the sense of encouraging the person to do push-ups, but it encouraged them to literally move and obtain sustenance, ideally before they were too weak to do so). Unhappiness doesn't lead to movement until thought and reason are applied to recognize the causal or correlative nature of unfitness and poor mental health.

mmanfrin 10y ago

Sedentary lifestyles were a very small minority up until a generation or two ago. Two generations is not at all enough to see evolutionary yields.

tetrep 10y ago

>...or is it just that evolution optimizes to the point of reproduction and then doesn't care about much after successfully handing down genes to the next generation? I think this is more or less accurate. The optimization wouldn't be just for reproduction but also for the N years of rearing required before offspring are relatively self-sufficient, so reproduction + time to mature seems to be the rough target of evolution.

nxc18 10y ago

Getting up and going to the gym sucks right now. It sucks in the 10 minutes it takes me to get to the gym. It may suck for some time while I'm there. It sucks after when I think about the time I could have spent playing videogames or doing work ( I'm a notorious workaholic so this is big for me). It feels great in 20 years if I do it consistently enough. Eating crap feels great right now (endorphin release and whatnot). Sleeping in feels great right now. I know what exercising feels like, I know what being lazy feels like. I don't know what diabetes and hypertension feel like. Getting the will to overcome that and make the right choices consistently takes diligent practice and sometimes a little coercion. As someone whose parents never forced me to play sports, exercise is a particularly bad struggle. I stepped into the gym for the first time in college. I've never really experienced being skinny (I would love to someday and am working towards that). Motivation is slightly more complicated than people like to acknowledge, especially when you consider that the environment we experience now is so drastically different from the environment we evolved in. Also, in a social species, reproduction is a less acute need for individuals. See: why condoms exist. Personally, I hate the idea of having children. My act of "reproduction" will be making the world a better and more survivable place for the other children of the world whose DNA is 99.99% similar to mine.