In this video Ken Hutchins and I discuss Herman Pontzer’s book Burn, and the roles of exercise, activity, and diet in fat loss and health.
Post-Interview Notes
By Ken Hutchins
I missed making the following points in our interview. For full context on these points, please experience the interview:
1
Already noted in the comments, I mentioned “birds of prey” when I intended “birds of paradise” with regard to the extravagant plumage coloring as sexual attractants.
In the interview, I also then [intentionally] mentioned that with these birds, the coloring, in some cases, was more territorially purposed than sexually.
Additionally, and not mentioned in the interview: Territoriality is a pathway to species propagation; therefore, it is indirectly of sexual influence.
Reference: The Territorial Imperative by Robert Ardrey.
2
With regard to my statements asserting that the human female was the inventor of the family, I failed to mention that Robert Ardrey’s descriptor of her was “the sexual specialist.”
Since the late 1970s, my response to Ardrey’s discussion on this topic is that the human female is “the most sophisticated sex machinery in the history of biology.”
3
In my slamming of the anthropologists for their use of hunter-gatherer, I failed to mention that this term is similar to the use of aerobic exercise and resistance exercise by the exercise physiologists. All of these phrases are lame, ignorant and without distinction. And definitional distinction is prerequisite for science.
All human action and rest involve resistance.
All human action and rest involve aerobic metabolism.
And nearly all mammalian carnivores both hunt and gather (eat plant matter).
[I guess we might say that only the reverse is true—that many herbivores don’t eat meat—hence only they are gatherers and NOT gatherer-hunters. Describing hominids as hunter-gatherers is inane.]Like the polar bear who lives where little or no plant matter survives, those humans, like the Inuit who live on the ice and tundra, are exclusively carnivores or come close to being exclusively carnivorous. But these are the exceptions of the modern day in the midst of our present and likely temporary interglacial.
And as our forebears moved into the northern latitudes and were forced to endure the glaciations, we were denied plant matter for long stretches of time, however we ate anything we could get our hands on when available.
Please do not take my comments on this subject as recommendation for any particular modern diet philosophy.
4
In the interview, I mention my general disrespect for anthropologists. They have a history of being aristocratic and stodgy. They shut out Raymond Dart’s 1924 discovery for decades as they could not admit that our history began in Africa. They clung to their insistence that we descended from the fraudulent Piltdown Man until Robert Oakley exposed it with his radioactive carbon dating. And these were the physical anthropologists.
Things got much worse with the cultural anthropologists that sprang up around Boaz, Mead, and Montague. As Ardrey said about them in his first book, African Genesis, the only significant find made by cultural anthropology was that timid, shy, non-aggressive peoples tend to inhabit unfashionable addresses. [Note that one of my favorite comedians, the late Joan Rivers, studied with Margaret Mead.]
Perhaps this slam is no longer deserved as Ardrey printed this in the 1960s, but I have experience with cultural anthropologists. The women’s health center where we performed the research for the Nautilus-funded Osteoporosis Project was partly sponsored by the University of Florida Department of Sociology and the co-founder of the center was a cultural anthropologist from said department. Also, the husband of one of our nurses employed to monitor the treadmill subjects was working on his masters in cultural anthropology. The others tasked with managing the subjects were all exercise physiologists. I’ve never exposed this particularly detail before: I considered myself trapped within multiple pseudo-sciences.
Several Robert Ardrey afficionados, including me, often recite this eloquent quote from African Genesis:
“The hounds of our anxieties bay at old, cold traces while nature’s foxes watch amused.”
5
I greatly regret omitting sarcopenia with regard to the extreme activity program imposed on the Biggest Loser contestants. I did mention that Herman Pontzer provided almost no discussion of the role of the muscle loss suffered by these people and that he doesn’t seem to see that the big variable under our control is muscle growth and loss—i.e., muscle health.
Also, seemingly missing from his view is that the steady state activity pushed by the exercise physiologists is sarcopenic. They should call themselves sarcopenists.
Books and Articles Mentioned
Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Stay Healthy, and Lose Weight, by Herman Pontzer, Phd
https://amzn.to/3bxrv2s (Amazon affiliate link)
Ken Hutchins’ articles on the definition of exercise and exercise versus recreation are available at https://seriousexercise.com/articles/
Ken Hutchins’ books are available at https://drewbaye.myshopify.com/collections/books-by-ken-hutchins
Destroying the Myth About Testosterone Replacement and Prostate Cancer, by Abraham Morgentaler, MD
https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2008/12/destroying-the-myth-about-testosterone-replacement-prostate-cancer
Testosterone for Life: Recharge Your Vitality, Sex Drive, Muscle Mass, and Overall Health, by Abraham Morgentaler, MD
https://amzn.to/39SbHHb (Amazon affiliate link)
The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man, by Robert Ardrey
https://amzn.to/3NrlkKm (Amazon affiliate link)