27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Human Progress Confounds -isms
It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the major -isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on mile-high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infinitely malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of individuals.43 A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex netw...28 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Shorter People Live Longer
The study was conducted to evaluate one aspect of the entropy theory of aging, which hypothesizes that aging is the result of increasing disorder within the body, and which predicts that increasing mass lowers life span. The first evaluation of the impact of human size on longevity or life span in 1978, which was based on data for decreased groups of athletes and famous people in the USA, suggested that shorter, lighter men live longer than their taller, heavier counterparts. In 1990, a study...5 years on average. Suggesting the medical community's focus on encouraging parents to grow big children is misguided as it may be shortening their lifespans.
18 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Intelligence and Nutrition
Ann Druyan and I come from families that knew grinding
poverty. But our parents were passionate readers. One of our
grandmothers learned to read because her father, a subsistence
farmer, traded a sack of onions to an itinerant teacher. She read
for the next hundred years. Our parents had personal hygiene and
the germ theory of disease drummed into them by the New York
Public Schools. They followed prescriptions on childhood nutrition
recommended by the US Department of Agriculture as if they ...When confronted with malnutrition, the body deprives the brain of development.