Everything You Know About Nutrition is Wrong

(Well not “everything,” but muchos de the conventional wisdom is probably ass-backwards.)

I get bored with political economy at times… largely because convincing people to adopt correct ideas is hard and probably won’t have much benefit for a while. However, with nutrition, determining correct ideas and refuting incorrect ones can have benefits quickly.

So, a brief and simplified overview of the science on human health:

0. Biologically modern humans have been living on Earth for at least 100,000 years. Our larger family of humans have been living on Earth for millions of years. For the vast majority of that time, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Evidence from anthropology, archaeology, and epidemiology strongly indicates that people in hunter-gatherer societies almost never experience:

• obesity
• diabetes
• heart disease
• high blood pressure
• cancer
• Alzheimer’s
• acne
• tooth decay
• poor vision

and many other health problems associated with metabolic syndrome. Indeed, hunter-gatherers are usually lean, healthy, and have long lifespans without modern medicine.

It was not until the first Agricultural Revolution, when we began to eat a lot of grass seeds (a.k.a. “grains”), that we began to experience these health problems at high rates. And it only got worse from there (until the advent of modern medicine around 100 years ago when it started getting better—on the treatment side).

1. A logical starting point for determining what is healthy, therefore, is to look at what we typically ate as hunter-gatherers vs. what we didn’t typically eat. This logic gives some clear answers which have been further confirmed by biological science and clinical trials.

2. It makes no sense whatsoever to avoid meat for health reasons. (Especially not beef, lamb, game, or fish.) Meat is the most healthy food. Meat, including offal, contains bioavailable amounts of all the nutrients necessary for optimal human life and no significant anti-nutrients. Unlike vegetables, you can live well on meat alone. Our bodies evolved adaptations to eating significant quantities of meat, and significant amounts of saturated fat. Hell, we likely hunted big game almost to extinction on some continents. Being efficient hunters and eating more meat allowed us to grow more powerful brains and thus become the smart modern humans we all are and love.

3. Neither cholesterol nor saturated fat cause heart disease or any other significant health problems. The myth that consuming saturated fat causes heart disease has been thoroughly debunked by the last 50 years of clinical trials, scientific advances in physiology, and epidemiology. It persists only thanks to inertia and politics.

Cholesterol is a bit more complicated, but the evidence is unambiguous that neither dietary cholesterol nor total blood cholesterol cause heart disease or any other significant health problems. Cholesterol is a vital nutrient, necessary in significant quantities for good health. The only potentially “bad cholesterol” is that contained in small, very low-density lipoproteins (VLDL). And what increases VLDL? Not fat or cholesterol in the diet, but rather carbs in the diet. Want to reduce this so-called potentially “bad cholesterol” in your blood? Eat more animal products, more saturated fat, more complete protein, less carbs. All that crap (Cheerios, Quaker Oats, Cocoa Puffs, granola, low-fat yoghurt, etc.) government-approved as “heart-healthy” is exactly the opposite.

4. Refined carbs are unhealthy and fattening. That means bread, pasta, cereal, etc.—anything made with flour or sugar. To simplify things a lot, refined carbs sustain raised blood sugar and, eaten regularly, keep you more hungry and your insulin+ high and thus keep your bodyfat cells full, growing, and reproducing.

5. To understand this, you have to understand that the conventional “it’s all about calories in vs. calories out” approach to bodyfat is backwards. If you get fatter, it’s not because you’re eating too many calories. You eat more calories because you’re getting fatter. And you’re getting fatter due to dysregulation of the bio-chemicals (like insulin) which control your bodyfat tissue, in turn driving bodyfat accumulation, bodyfat retention, and hunger.

6. Fat is not fattening. Eat more fat if you want to be lean and healthy. Okay… so you can get energy from eating either carbs or fat. Your bodyfat is a buffer meant to be continuously consumed for energy when you’re not consuming food. However, if you’re eating carbs rather than fat, and thus have a defect in your fat metabolism, your body will be burning carbs for energy and not fat—including bodyfat. To lose bodyfat, you need to get your body burning fat for energy instead of snacking on refined carbs all day. There are two ways to do this:

1. semi-starve yourself (calorie restriction) or
2. eat fat and protein instead of carbs

The latter is healthier… and it is the only method consistently demonstrated in clinical trials that actually works for statistically significant weight loss. If you want to lose body fat, eat more saturated fat.

7. Wheat is especially unhealthy and fattening. Not only are wheat products made up of mostly fattening refined carbs, but they also contain the dangerous protein gluten and other anti-nutrients that inflame and penetrate your gut. An inflamed gut can’t absorb other nutrients properly, and allows toxic substances to leak into your system. Furthermore, there are molecules in wheat that bind to minerals in other foods and prevent them from being absorbed. Finally, certain wheat proteins can stimulate the immune system in a bad way, so that it begins attacking your own tissues (“autoimmune disorders”), making you sick not just in your gut but everywhere (like people with celiac disease but subclinical). And there is nothing good in wheat that you can’t get more efficiently from animal products, vegetables, or tubers. If there is one thing you should completely avoid eating, it is wheat.

8. Sugar is especially unhealthy and fattening. Fructose, found largely in table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup (and fruit juice), is seriously bad shit when consumed anywhere near the levels of the standard American diet. Fructose is very likely a trigger that causes the bodyfat tissue defect mentioned in point #5. If you want to lose weight or improve your health, and you’re drinking a lot of soda pop, that’s the first thing you should cut out. Now, thanks to government subsidies, high-fructose corn syrup is currently found in virtually all processed and sweetened food… including those “heart-healthy” cereals and “low-fat” yoghurts and all that other nasty stuff.

9. Vegetable oils are unhealthy due to high levels of omega-6 fats, which block omega-3; so use heart-healthy butter instead (or coconut oil or ghee). Also, for similar reasons, avoid nuts and legumes. Especially soy.

10. So for optimal health and weight management, based on good science and quality clinical studies, what should people avoid eating? What should people eat?

Eat to satisfaction:

• meat
• fish
• shellfish
• eggs
• butter
• vegetables
• coconut products
• heavy cream
• hard cheeses
• cocoa
• herbs, spices

In moderation (can eat more of these if you’re not trying to lose bodyfat):

• fruit
• tubers
• good nuts (almond, macadamia, cashew)
• whole milk
• soft cheeses
• full-fat greek yoghurt
• rice

Minimize:

• sugar
• legumes, especially soy
• vegetable oils
• “low-fat” dairy
• corn
• oats

Avoid completely:

• wheat and other gluten grains

Wittgenstein on Logic and Contradiction 

If you’ve had to study analytic philosophy, you’re probably aware of the special status “contradiction” has in the academic field of logic. 

Classical logicians treated contradictions with the principle of explosion: from a contradiction, anything and/or everything follows: If a contradiction is true, then you can say anything is true. And that would ruin everything. Human society would fall into chaos. The philosophers had to do something.

To this end, philosophers in a capacity labeled “logician” spent many hours laboring over supposedly difficult contradictions to resolve like the Liar Paradox (is “this sentence is a lie” a true statement?1??). They found this task hard and and thus constructed elaborate systems of mathematical-looking symbols in attempts to get around the problem.

Some decided they had succeeded. Others that they had failed and embraced a “truth” in pure, actual contradictions and they thus fell into trivialism (‘all propositions of all kinds are true!’), strong paraconsistency (‘contradictions may be true!’), dialetheism (‘some contradictions are true!’), polylogism (‘truth is relative to race, culture, nationality, or class!’) and similarly silly ideas that still amazingly persist in current academic philosophy.

Wittgenstein answers this supposedly difficult “Liar Paradox” and at the same time shows the pointless nature of classical logician’s projects, their obsession with contradictions, and their failed principle of explosion. I’ll let him speak for himself:

Think of the case of the Liar. It is very queer in a way that this should have puzzled anyone — much more extraordinary than you might think… Because the thing works like this: if a man says ‘I am lying’ we say that it follows that he is not lying, from which it follows that he is lying and so on. Well, so what? You can go on like that until you are black in the face. Why not? It doesn’t matter. It is just a useless language-game, and why should anyone be excited? … Suppose I convince Rhees of the paradox of the Liar, and he says, ‘I lie, therefore I do not lie, therefore I lie and I do not lie, therefore we have a contradiction, therefore 2 x 2 = 369.’ Well, we should not call this ‘multiplication,’ that is all.

LFM 21-22

We exclude contradictions from language; we have no clear-cut use for them, and we don’t want to use them.

RPP II §290

To understand how Wittgenstein can see clearly to dismiss these supposed problems, we must recall the central theme of almost all Wittgenstein’s work: natural language and its relation to human thought.

In order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.

TLP Pref.

Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically. … It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. – The truth is that we could not say what an ‘illogical’ world would look like. … It is as impossible to represent in language anything that ‘contradicts logic’ as it is in geometry to represent by its coordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space or to give the coordinates of a point that does not exist.

TLP 3.03-3.032

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. … Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, ‘The world has this in it, and this, but not that.’ For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.

TLP 5.6-5.61

In giving explanations I have already to use language full-blown … but then how can these explanations satisfy us? - Well, your very questions were framed in this language; they had to be expressed in this language, if there was anything to ask! One might think: if philosophy speaks of the use of the word “philosophy” there must be a second-order philosophy. But it is not so: it is, rather, like the case of orthography, which deals with the word “orthography” among others without then being second-order.

PI I 120-121

It is the use outside mathematics, and so the meaning of the signs, that makes the sign-game into mathematics.

RFM 5.2

As the Wittgensteinian linguist Noam Chomsky put it:

Factual beliefs and common-sense expectations also play a role in determining that a thing is categorizable and hence namable. Consider Wittgenstein’s disappearing chair. In his terms, we have no “rules saying whether one may use the word ‘chair’ to include this kind of thing” (PI, p.38). Or to put it differently, we keep certain factual assumptions about the behavior of objects fixed when we categorize them and thus take them as eligible for naming or description.

Chomsky. Reflections on Language (1975)

An actual, literal contradiction as such violates the presuppositions—the factual assumptions about the behavior of objects—of any language meant to be taken literally. If a language game does not presuppose non-contradiction, it is useless if meant to be taken literally. That is all one really needs to say. The claim that “some pure contradictions are literally true” is nonsense. It is itself a performative contradiction. It is nonsense. One does not need to construct elaborate systems of mathematical symbols to figure this out (and doing so doesn’t really help). 

Of course, contradictions can be useful in poetry, as literary devices, in mysticism, in religion or what have you. Furthermore, in programming and mathematics, the principle of explosion is often an impractical way to deal with contradictions (thus weak paraconsistency is sometimes useful). But this is not the issue at hand.

Human beings are unique. You are not mere animals. People are special.

True…

We tend to (correctly) identify

• “intellect”
• “ethics” 
• “planning” 
• “second-order desires” 
• “complex written language” 
• “art” 
• “theory of mind” 

and other characteristics as categorically distinguishing homo sapiens from all other species.

Those things make us human.

True, but that obscures the fact that we humans are also incredible animals by non-human animal standards. We are natural superpredators. In contemporary societies populated more and more by overweight, sedentary, aging dullards… it’s especially easy to miss this. So let’s quickly go over how badass we are.

Man: No other animal can swim a mile, walk twenty miles, and then climb forty feet up a tree. Many civilized men can do this without much difficulty.

J.B.S. Haldane (evolutionary biologist). In “The Argument from Animals to Men,” Journal of the Royal Institute of Anthropology, 1956.

Picture elite athletes. They are closer to what we humans have been physically like for most of our existence as a species - hunters living off big game in the wild. No other species exhibits the range of physical ability that we do. Think marathon runners, sprinters, power lifters, gymnasts, acrobats, swimmers, etc. Endurance, agility, strength, precision. Native Americans, for example, used to hunt deer simply by outpacing the animal and tackling it to the ground.

Add to this picture our unique ability to coordinate ourselves as a team, to learn and communicate complex information about the future, and to fashion tools. Now hopefully you get an impression of what we really are. Hell, we likely hunted megafauna to extinction on three continents with just spears and rocks.

Surrounded by suburbs and sedentism, don’t forget this: deep down, fundamentally, naturally, you are a highly-evolved predator.

We are superior animals. Us, fuck yeah.

A brief history of society. This is an historical account of social institutions. We have many names for these institutions – law, rights, customs, norms, morality, tradition, culture, language, etc. I am going to be focusing on two institutions: property rights and the State.

Understanding these institutions is absolutely necessary for understanding politics.

Biologically modern humans have been living on Earth for at least 100,000 years. For almost the entirety those many millennia, human society consisted only of small bands living together as hunter-gatherers. Men hunted and women gathered.

In these hunter-gatherer bands, early forms of customary law (norms and rules for human interaction) emerged across generations in an evolutionary process we call “group selection.” This unwritten law usually had content along these lines:

1. Men hunt as a team and help each other prepare weapons.
2. At least some meat is shared amongst the whole hunt-gatherer band.
3. Better individual hunters have first dibs on the best meat or any extra meat.
4. Better individual hunters get more sex (with the women) and/or more wives.
5. Individuals or households own any ornaments, trinkets, dishes, clothing, stones, tools or other items they make themselves, find, or receive as gifts.

That last law (#5) is the key one here, because the point being made is private property rights existed in pre-agricultural society. [Leave mouse pointer over links to see citations.]

Furthermore, the criteria for ownership was roughly first possession – whoever acquires the item first (including making it) is the owner. First possession as the basis for ownership has been shown in evolutionary theory and history and empirical psychology to be near-universal among humans on an interpersonal basis. Most interestingly, in child psychology, babies and young children have been shown definitively to infer ownership from first personal possession.

Hence private ownership based on first possession is called “the property instinct.” It has become largely instinctual, hardwired into the modern human brain, with cultural norms acting complementarily to this reinforce and nuance this instinct. Hunter-gatherers had such private ownership in certain items (including, in a sense, owning themselves i.e. having rights to their own body). However – with the exception of sedentary hunter-gatherers – private property did not extend to land.

Land was not privately owned. Modern economics explains why: nobody stood to gain from developing private property rights in land. Land was abundant and people were relatively scattered. Hunter-gatherers were mostly nomads who were always on the move. They did not have crops or houses or domesticated animals. In the terminology of institutional economists Coase and Demsetz, the transaction costs of internalization were greater than any perceived benefits. Therefore no property rights emerged for land in their customary law. Hunter-gatherers did have private property in other individual items because the reverse was true for those items.

So how did customary law actually work?

White circles = people and the lines are direct interaction between people. All the 5 individuals here directly interact with each of the other individuals in the group. This was how social institutions were defined and enforced within hunter-gatherer bands – through direct, personal interaction among all participants:

Customary law was not designed or enforced top-down by any centralized body. Rather, customary law was created gradually, arising from the bottom-up as individuals imitated the repeated interactions of other individuals who were successful at whatever they were trying to do.

Successful norms became part of the intergenerational culture of the band, and in some cases they even became instinctual (e.g. first possession as private property). The bands that were sustained and successful were the bands whose individuals followed customary laws that made the group more reproductively efficient. Groups that did not adopt as efficient laws would not be as successful, and could even potentially die out completely. Hence “group selection.”

Thus customary law evolved.

Customary law was enforced reciprocally by most everyone else in your band, primarily through threat of ostracism. If you stole something or took more than your agreed-upon share of the group-hunted meat or whatever, other people would scold you, you would face social pressure, and in the extreme case you would be completely ostracized from the band.

This worked because these hunter-gatherer bands were small – something around 150 people or less – and you practically had to personally interact with all the other individuals all the time. You personally, individually knew most all the other people in your band.

Now, again, hunter-gatherer bands were mostly nomadic. (Note however that the few hunter-gatherers who were not nomadic, like the ones who lived off fishing, did have private property rights in land.) Hunter-gatherers moved around all the time. Arrows represent migration:

However with the onset of the Neolithic Revolution around 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers began to store food, to farm agricultural crops, and to domesticate animals. Some of these early farmers engaged in swidden agriculture, which is where the groups were still small and moved around but individual families would periodically clear small plots, plant crops, and then let the plot regrow.

Staying consistent with the first personal possession criterion, a plot remained perpetual private property of the household that first cleared it and the same farmers would return to that plot. This is perhaps the first known instance of absentee ownership in land. Households and bands mutually recognized this private property:

Other hunter-gatherers eventually settled down permanently and built the first villages:

In these settlements, the foundation of human civilization rapidly developed – that is, division of labor. Technology emerged which allowed some individuals to specialize in doing things beyond hunting and gathering and then beyond farming and fishing. Labor was divided amongst individuals according to specialties.

We became toolmakers, miners, sculptors, carpenters, builders. We began to trade, to realize the incredible mutually beneficial gains from trade, and compete for these economic gains rather than merely for meat or status or women. We got better and better at our specialties.

For our whole existence as a species, up until this point, we’d been limited to small-group forms of social organization. We finally began to move beyond that. We went from small bands comprising only direct interaction with people we personally knew:

To ever-growing networks of indirect interaction comprising many more individuals than any one person could possibly know:

Mass indirect interaction meant long-distance trade. Trade triggered and co-evolved with other institutions: money, marketplaces, complex written language, arithmetic, commercial arbitration and multilateral contracting, common law with mutually-respected judges, and the extension of property rights to land and other capital.

This social order was (and still is) emergent or spontaneous, meaning it came about indirectly, arising bottom-up from the interactions of individuals acting on their own self-perceived interests and information. It was not designed or imposed top-down. To understand this, think of a flock of starlings in flight:

These birds have no leader, no single starling with special privileges to order the others. Yet we can clearly see some order in their organization—and it works: none of the birds run into each other. Order here is emergent from the interactions of individual starlings acting on their own simple information and incentives, not imposed top-down by any individual starling or subgroup of starlings. Complex order spontaneously emerges from the individual as basic unit:

Individual humans following the Neolithic Revolution were incentivized by self-perceived interest to interact, and thereby create and maintain the developing social institutions of civilization. Thus order in human society is emergent, a feedback loop which begins and ends with individual interaction and individual incentives.

Humans care primarily about themselves and the people they are personally aware of—as we have evolved to do. Participating in the newly expanding market presented enormous potential gains for defining property rights, trading, and so on. Motivated, we produced goods and services that other players in the market would consider valuable so we could sell and profit. These services included those of judges and other legal producers who discovered/created common law and adjudicated disputes.

Everyone was made better off by the growth of mutually beneficial market activity. Division of labor spread ever wider. We continued to specialize, to further improve our means of production. Resultant technological innovation and population increases spurred more growth. Market prices gave us real-time information about the relative supply and demand of different products, information we could use to optimally calculate, coordinate, and plan our own economic lives.

And all of this development was built on that age-old social institution of property rights.

As is the case for all human property rights, land ownership was broadly based on the human property instinct – first personal possession – that is, homesteading. Homesteading meant that individual(s) owned land if they, for example, built a house on it, grew crops on it, raised cattle on it, or were given the land by the person who did. Precise quantitative details differed as to how much property one was entitled to based on any such activity (and other factors) but the general principle was and is still today virtually universal on an interpersonal level.

We must limit this principle’s practice to the interpersonal level because of a new institution that emerged long after property rights and human civilization. That institution is the State.

The State is what most people today call “the government.” Today, almost all such governments are Nation-States. The standard empirical definition of the State in social science is given by Weber “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Sometimes, this is shortened to “a monopoly on violence,” for instance by Barack Obama.

A more detailed empirical definition is provided in The Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology (1996):

The State is an independent, centralized socio-political organization in a complex, stratified society living in a specific territory, and consisting of two basic strata, the rulers and the ruled, whose relations are characterized by political dominance of the former and tax obligations of the latter, legitimized by an at least partly shared ideology.

Key to understanding the State is an understanding of the central role of ideology in state formation and state power. Unlike property rights, the State emerged from an ideology projected upwards onto a single, centralized leader(s). Almost all States began as what we would today call religious cults. Cult leaders claimed to be gods or speaking for the gods and people voluntarily gave the leader some of their income.

Cult ideologies grew. The to-be State is the big circle at the top. The white lines going from other people to the State are projection of divine legitimacy and giving of funds:

Now at this last point in the early State’s formation, nobody is being physically forced to fund it. However the two dots in the upper right represent people who refuse to voluntarily give any of what they own to the cult leader. Perhaps they don’t believe that the cult leader actually is a god.

Those two resisters will be physically forced to fund the leader. Thus a State emerges. Because most other people do believe in the divine legitimacy of the leader, they will stand by and fund the proactive use of physical force against the two dissenters even if they find the coercion personally distasteful:

Any single individual knows that if she doesn’t pay the tax, the same will ultimately happen to her. Furthermore, the people who control the State use the funds they receive to build monuments, promote symbols, employ armies, and throw festivals in honor of the leaders. The State is now a positive feedback loop of proactive coercion and mass ideology; ideology enables the collection of funds by coercion, which in turn reinforces the ideology.

This is the essence of the State.

Over time, the State has become an intergenerational institution. The State’s legitimate ability to collect funds by proactive force is assumed by default without conscious consideration and reinforced by the State’s relatively recent top down monopoly on “law”-making. The vast majority of people today, throughout their entire lives, have never even thought of the question of legitimacy or morality or logic of the State as an institution. If anyone is interested in this question, I recommend The Machinery of Freedom by UC economist David Friedman or this youtube presentation on the subject by economics student Ryan Faulk.

Addendum: The State versus Property Rights

The State violates the emergent, common law property rights of individual human beings. We humans use “theft” and “extortion” and similar terms to refer to a violation of these “rights.” State legislation, conscription, and taxation are examples of violations, though many people aren’t consciously aware of them as such or else believe them to be an inevitable or necessary evil (“death and taxes” etc.). State actions are feasible precisely because of this mass cognitive dissonance.

Territorial claims by States are not at all logically or empirically analogous to private property rights. This argument is not frequently made because it is uncontroversially incorrect. One should be able to tell the difference after having read this post. See the last stick-dot figure. Just in case…

Individual property rights

• property rights are ideologically interpersonal
• property rights are assigned to specific people qua people based on standards applied to everyone else as well
• property rights function as mutually recognized commitment strategies to those standards
• property rights emerge from individual actions based on mutual benefit to self-perceived interests
• property rights are necessarily logically presupposed by legal/moral concepts like theft and are implied by fundamental human rights
• property rights are defined and reciprocally enforced by the real-time, indirect interactions of everyone around you
• property rights in land are acquired almost universally by something akin to the homestead principle or “first personal possession” (and the evidence indicates this is instinctual: the “property instinct”)

vs.

The territorial claims of States

• State territorial claims are ideologically suprapersonal
• State territories are assigned only to a centralized subgroup institution (via mass ideological projection onto a single suprapersonal entity) which thus has a static monopoly
• State territorial claims are second-order to property rights—private property still exists and functions within State territories and private property predates State territories
• States emerge bottom-up from mass ideological projection of legitimacy onto a single, centralized, subgroup institution which is then controlled by a few humans who imposes legislation and taxation top-down, denying the emergent order in human society… I.E. States are emergent (like everything), but not emergent from the relevant system of individual interaction based on self-perceived interests
• State territorial claims necessarily involve taxation by the subgroup of private property holders by empirical definition, private property obviously does not
• State territories are acquired by whatever means anyone can use to gain control of the mass ideologically created centralized State
• State territories cover masses of already-privately owned land and unowned land that the humans controlling the State at any given have never possessed

The State is the unspoken subject of almost all political debate.

Whenever someone makes a political argument for more government intervention in human society, they are advocating replacing the bottom-up emergent order of individual human interaction with more top-down impositions by the State. This is problematic. The State is not in fact superhuman and the humans who control the State at any given time do not have the incentives or the knowledge required to order the rest of society efficiently.

In historical epochs when the State has succeeded in usurping significant property rights - under communism, for example - it has thus meant mass human suffering. But not even ideologically communist States like the Soviet Union, Maoist China, or North Korea which explicitly wished to “abolish private property” actually succeeded in abolishing property rights. Property rights emerged underground despite the State. And fortunately for us, they always will.

One of the most pernicious misconceptions in cognitive science is the belief in a dichotomy between nature and nurture.

Many psychologists, linguists and social scientists, along with the popular press, continue to treat nature and nurture as combatting ideologies, rather than complementary perspectives. For such people, the idea that something is both “innate” and “learned”, or both “biological” and “cultural”, is an absurdity. Yet most biologists today recognize that understanding behavior requires that we understand the interaction between inborn cognitive processes (e.g. learning and memory) and individual experience. This is particularly true in human behaviour, since the capacities for language and culture are some of the key adaptations of our species, and involve irreducible elements of both biology and environment, of both nature and nurture.

The antidote to “nature versus nurture” thinking is to recognize the existence, and importance, of “instincts to learn”.

This phrase was introduced by Peter Marler, one of the fathers of birdsong research. A young songbird, while still in the nest, eagerly listens to adults of its own species sing. Months later, having fledged, it begins singing itself, and shapes its own initial sonic gropings to the template provided by those stored memories. During this period of “subsong” the bird gradually refines and perfects its own song, until by adulthood it is ready to defend a territory and attract mates with its own, perhaps unique, species-typical song.

Songbird vocal learning is the classic example of an instinct to learn. The songbird’s drive to listen, and to sing, and to shape its song to that which it heard, is all instinctive. The bird needs no tutelage, nor feedback from its parents, to go through these stages. Nonetheless, the actual song that it sings is learned, passed culturally from generation to generation. Birds have local dialects, varying randomly from region to region. If the young bird hears no song, it will produce only an impoverished squawking, not a typical song.

Importantly, this capacity for vocal learning is only true of some birds, like songbirds and parrots. Other bird species, like seagulls, chickens or owls, do not learn their vocalizations: rather, their calls develop reliably in the absence of any acoustic input. The calls of such birds are truly instinctive, rather than learned. But for those birds capable of vocal learning, the song that an adult bird sings is the result of a complex interplay between instinct (to listen, to rehearse, and to perfect) and learning (matching the songs of adults of its species).

It is interesting, and perhaps surprising, to realize that most mammals do not have a capacity for complex vocal learning of this sort. Current research suggests that, aside from humans, only marine mammals (whales, dolphins, seals…), bats, and elephants have this ability. Among primates, humans appear to be the only species that can hear new sounds in the environment, and then reproduce them. Our ability to do this seems to depend on a babbling stage during infancy, a period of vocal playfulness that is as instinctual as the young bird’s subsong. During this stage, we appear to fine tune our vocal control so that, as children, we can hear and reproduce the words and phrases of our adult caregivers.

So is human language an instinct, or learned? The question, presupposing a dichotomy, is intrinsically misleading. Every word that any human speaks, in any of our species’ 6000 languages, has been learned. And yet the capacity to learn that language is a human instinct, something that every normal human child is born with, and that no chimpanzee or gorilla possesses.

The instinct to learn language is, indeed, innate (meaning simply that it reliably develops in our species), even though every language is learned. As Darwin put it in Descent of Man, “language is an art, like brewing or baking; but … certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt. It differs, however, widely from all ordinary arts, for man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; whilst no child has an instinctive tendency to brew, bake, or write.”

And what of culture? For many, human culture seems the very antithesis of “instinct”. And yet it must be true that language plays a key role in every human culture. Language is the primary medium for the passing on of historically-accumulated knowledge, tastes, biases and styles that makes each of our human tribes and nations its own unique and precious entity. And if human language is best conceived of as an instinct to learn, why not culture itself?

The past decade has seen a remarkable unveiling of our human genetic and neural makeup, and the coming decade promises even more remarkable breakthroughs. Each of us six billion humans is genetically unique (with the fascinating exception of identical twins). For each of us, our unique genetic makeup influences, but does not determine, what we are.

If we are to grapple earnestly and effectively with the reality of human biology and genetics, we will need to jettison outmoded dichotomies like the traditional distinction between nature and nurture. In their place, we will need to embrace the reality of the many instincts to learn (language, music, dance, culture…) that make us human.

~ W. Tecumseh Fitch, “An Insinct to Learn” (Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna)

Answer: It depends on wether we’re talking in absolute or marginal terms!

A little economics lesson:

…so bbcity asked me this in regards to Ryan Faulk’s post about Marx’s value theory:

“I actually don’t see the connection between the diamond and the capitalist. Diamonds serve no substantive purpose whatever, apart from sating people’s vain desire for them, and thusly society wouldn’t collapse if they somehow vanished… People would just start valuing something else that’s rare, of course, and the freedom to be vain wouldn’t be confiscated from them—no worries. But the value-rarity trajectory is a manmade idea. A dumb rare thing has no bearing whatever on the way value is allocated—people do. People create these valuations; which are congruently inane. Maybe find a new analogy?”

I’ll explain why we’re using a “diamond vs. water” analogy in the first place. The reason has to do with historical context:

So in the 1600s-1800s, classical economists were trying to build an understanding of causal relationships in the economy…

Part of this required an explanation for why people value different things differently (as expressed via differentiations in market prices i.e. voluntary willingness to pay). Adam Smith and others theorized that a thing’s value was dependent on the amount of labor that went into it. So X is more expensive than Y on a market because X requires more labor than Y. This is the labor theory of value and it is what Marx based his political economy on (unlike Smith or Ricardo). 

However there was a problem with all of these theories of value. They could not explain many empirical facts, like why a diamond attained a price on a market 1000 times more than a container of water, despite the fact that a diamond could require less labor to produce and (unlike water) was not at all physiologically necessary for human life. This was known as the Diamond-Water Paradox.

It was solved by three economists - Jevons, Walras, and Menger (above) - in what is now called the Marginalist Revolution. They pointed out that value is epistemologically subjective and only revealed marginally by human action. When a human reveals their values through action, the revelation is ordinal and relative to everything else they could be doing and have already done. Humans are not expressing absolute value through their choices unless the options are absolute (i.e. one diamond and no water vs. no diamond and some water forever).

So when I buy a diamond for $10,000 instead of another bottle of water for $1, I am expressing my subjective value marginally, meaning the value of one more diamond to me vs. one more bottle of water to me relative to everything else I already have done and could do. Given that I already have water or can get it cheaply (given it is nowhere near as scarce and the supply-demand equilibrium price is thus much lower despite the extremely high absolute value of water) its marginal value under normal circumstances is quite low. 

Understanding value this way (subjective theory of value | revealed marginal utility | market supply-demand) gave rise to modern economic method - marginalism. It’s now the undisputed standard in econ and most relevant social science because it explains the facts.

To your objections, diamonds do serve a ‘substantive purpose’ - they evidently satisfy the voluntarily, marginally revealed values of human beings. You may not like the valuations of these human beings (“they’re just vain!”) or feel that they are ontologically socially generated and affected by environment (what’s not?) or whatever, but that’s all quite beside the point. We are talking about value-neutral social science and marginalism usefully explains the empirical facts, unlike the Marxist or Smithian labor theory of value. And this is also the case for the value of janitor vs. the entrepreneurial “capitalist.” The entrepreneur’s labor is marginally much much more valuable than the janitor’s even though on a desert island the janitor’s labor may have greater absolute value (for similar reasons to why the diamond’s marginal value is much greater than water’s).

I agree with your other objection, however. If all diamonds disappeared, it would likely be much less detrimental to most people’s lives than if all “capitalists” disappeared. Entrepreneurial capitalists are probably more akin to all goods used for indirect communication or something like that. So in that sense the analogy doesn’t express the operational function of capitalists (though I don’t think it’s meant to). We use the Diamond-Water Paradox because that’s historically important and a clear, extreme example to demonstrate the point.

size fixed. brief explanation here.

Science as a practice has been enormously beneficial to human beings. So has art in different but significant ways. Here I compare free markets (here defined as all voluntary exchange) and nation-states (the ideologically legitimated “Governments”) to scientific practice (“Science”) and art broadly defined. This is an exercise to see which comes closer to scientific practice and, by implication, potentially closer to the level of progress in science and art.

Mostly for the hell of it.

Hi-res