4 ms·

He had inadvertently (...) stumbled on a great truth about health: exercise helps you live longer. Er, maybe he might have been the first to demonstrate scient

by nandemo 17y ago

He had inadvertently (...) stumbled on a great truth about health: exercise helps you live longer. Er, maybe he might have been the first to demonstrate scientifically the link between lack of exercise and specific illnesses. However, the ancient Greeks already knew that physical exercise leads to good health.

miles 17y ago
the ancient Greeks already knew that physical exercise leads to good health. Exactly. One can go even further back to the Chinese, etc: http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/history.html http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/history.html
- tokenadult 17y ago
  The dates are incorrect for China (said the Chinese major). Actually, most of the widely known writers from China are no more ancient than the widely known writers from Greece, so "even further back," which I suppose you typed relying on the source you kindly linked to, is incorrect. Confucius's dates of traditionally September 28, 551 B.C.E. to 479 B.C.E. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius are somewhat in dispute, but the dates of Thales, ca. 624 BC to ca. 546 BC, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales are actually earlier. The source you link to doesn't get transcription spelling of Chinese words correct, either, so you can be sure the author is not familiar with Chinese history.
  - miles 17y ago
    most of the widely known writers from China are no more ancient than the widely known writers from Greece, so "even further back," which I suppose you typed relying on the source you kindly linked to, is incorrect. Actually, I was relying on early Taoist exercises for life extension predating comments on exercise I could find from Epictetus and other Greeks demonstrating their awareness of the beneficial effects of exercise. Whether or not Thales predates Confucius is irrelevant, unless either addressed the question of exercise (a quick Google search fails to uncover such a possibility). Mention should also be made of India: yoga is estimated to go back at least 5000 years, though I have not the energy or interest to go digging for evidence that they realized the connection between exercise and life extension.
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      If you want to talk about history, you have to refer to historical sources, and those sources don't show that people in what is now called China or what is now called India thought about these issues any earlier than people in what is now called Greece. We have no idea whether or not there even were "early Taoist exercises" (and it would be debatable to call anything "Taoist" before the life of Lao Tzu, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi who may not even be a historical person) unless we can find mention of "Tao" and mention of that thing associated in a historical source.
      - miles 17y ago
        sources don't show that people in what is now called China or what is now called India thought about these issues any earlier than people in what is now called Greece. If you can provide historical sources for exercise from Greece that predates yoga, I would be much obliged. Considering that: "Traditionally, the Ancient Greek period was taken to begin with the date of the first Olympic Games in 776 BC, but most historians now extend the term back to about 1000 BC." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greece http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greece and that the earliest known text addressing yoga (the Rig Veda) can be traced back to at least 1700–1100 BC (with some sources putting it closer to 3000 BC), you will have your work cut out for you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/aryan-harappan-myth.html http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/aryan-harappan-my... http://mindbodyfitness.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_old_is_yoga_fascinating_new_information http://mindbodyfitness.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_old_is_y...
        tokenadult 17y ago
        I had not heard before how much nationalist myths (recently very influential in politics in India) had influenced entries in English-language publications such as Wikipedia. Suffice it to say that there is utterly no manuscript or epigraphic evidence for what you have said in your comment. The method of history is to work from written records. (Archeology wouldn't support what you said either.) But thanks for letting me know, by pointing to examples, that currently quick Google searches for facts on the history of India are even less reliable than searches for facts on the history of China. After edit: remember, as the thread is structured, you were the first to claim that peoples more ancient than those of ancient Greece "already knew that physical exercise leads to good health." That was your statement. You linked to pages that people can Google up, but you haven't yet pointed to any primary source for that proposition of undisputed date and provenance. On the one hand, I can accept as a general proposition that human beings for as long as Homo sapiens has been around had an intuition based on anecdotal experience that keeping moving preserves health (and helps catch tasty animals to eat), but on the other hand the epidemiologist mentioned in the article opening this thread really did discover a NEW, more detailed, epidemiological observation, which has been confirmed through multiple channels through physiological experiments in both animal and human subjects.

by nandemo 17y ago

miles 17y ago

the ancient Greeks already knew that physical exercise leads to good health. Exactly. One can go even further back to the Chinese, etc: http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/history.html http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/history.html

tokenadult 17y ago
The dates are incorrect for China (said the Chinese major). Actually, most of the widely known writers from China are no more ancient than the widely known writers from Greece, so "even further back," which I suppose you typed relying on the source you kindly linked to, is incorrect. Confucius's dates of traditionally September 28, 551 B.C.E. to 479 B.C.E. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius are somewhat in dispute, but the dates of Thales, ca. 624 BC to ca. 546 BC, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales are actually earlier. The source you link to doesn't get transcription spelling of Chinese words correct, either, so you can be sure the author is not familiar with Chinese history.
- miles 17y ago
  most of the widely known writers from China are no more ancient than the widely known writers from Greece, so "even further back," which I suppose you typed relying on the source you kindly linked to, is incorrect. Actually, I was relying on early Taoist exercises for life extension predating comments on exercise I could find from Epictetus and other Greeks demonstrating their awareness of the beneficial effects of exercise. Whether or not Thales predates Confucius is irrelevant, unless either addressed the question of exercise (a quick Google search fails to uncover such a possibility). Mention should also be made of India: yoga is estimated to go back at least 5000 years, though I have not the energy or interest to go digging for evidence that they realized the connection between exercise and life extension.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    If you want to talk about history, you have to refer to historical sources, and those sources don't show that people in what is now called China or what is now called India thought about these issues any earlier than people in what is now called Greece. We have no idea whether or not there even were "early Taoist exercises" (and it would be debatable to call anything "Taoist" before the life of Lao Tzu, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi who may not even be a historical person) unless we can find mention of "Tao" and mention of that thing associated in a historical source.
    - miles 17y ago
      sources don't show that people in what is now called China or what is now called India thought about these issues any earlier than people in what is now called Greece. If you can provide historical sources for exercise from Greece that predates yoga, I would be much obliged. Considering that: "Traditionally, the Ancient Greek period was taken to begin with the date of the first Olympic Games in 776 BC, but most historians now extend the term back to about 1000 BC." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greece http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greece and that the earliest known text addressing yoga (the Rig Veda) can be traced back to at least 1700–1100 BC (with some sources putting it closer to 3000 BC), you will have your work cut out for you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/aryan-harappan-myth.html http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/aryan-harappan-my... http://mindbodyfitness.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_old_is_yoga_fascinating_new_information http://mindbodyfitness.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_old_is_y...
      - tokenadult 17y ago
        I had not heard before how much nationalist myths (recently very influential in politics in India) had influenced entries in English-language publications such as Wikipedia. Suffice it to say that there is utterly no manuscript or epigraphic evidence for what you have said in your comment. The method of history is to work from written records. (Archeology wouldn't support what you said either.) But thanks for letting me know, by pointing to examples, that currently quick Google searches for facts on the history of India are even less reliable than searches for facts on the history of China. After edit: remember, as the thread is structured, you were the first to claim that peoples more ancient than those of ancient Greece "already knew that physical exercise leads to good health." That was your statement. You linked to pages that people can Google up, but you haven't yet pointed to any primary source for that proposition of undisputed date and provenance. On the one hand, I can accept as a general proposition that human beings for as long as Homo sapiens has been around had an intuition based on anecdotal experience that keeping moving preserves health (and helps catch tasty animals to eat), but on the other hand the epidemiologist mentioned in the article opening this thread really did discover a NEW, more detailed, epidemiological observation, which has been confirmed through multiple channels through physiological experiments in both animal and human subjects.