Criminal Behavior and Evolution

Glenn Reynolds posts the following:

"EVOLUTION IN ACTION, “Convicted criminal offenders had more children than individuals never convicted of a criminal offense. Criminal offenders also had more reproductive partners, were less often married, more likely to get remarried if ever married, and had more often contracted a sexually transmitted disease than non-offenders. Importantly, the increased reproductive success of criminals was explained by a fertility increase from having children with several different partners. We conclude that criminality appears to be adaptive in a contemporary industrialized country, and that this association can be explained by antisocial behavior being part of an adaptive alternative reproductive strategy.”"

This is hardly new, however. As Napoleon Changnon notes in his book Noble Savages, about a primitive Amazonian tribe:

"The more interesting finding has to do with the comparative reproductive success of unokais and non-unokais. It should be intuitively clear that if unokais are more successful at acquiring wives, they are likely to have more children as well....

...Unokais have three times as many offspring as non-unokais."

Unokais are "killers of men". Chagnon observes:

My article also raised the possibility that human violence had something to do with the evolved nature of Homo sapiens."

Indeed.

"Science Reveals Why Calorie Counts Are All Wrong"

"Digestion is far too messy a process to accurately convey in neat numbers. The counts on food labels can differ wildly from the calories you actually extract, for many reasons."

The errors on the input and output measurements mean that, in practice, attempting to balance your weight by using the Calories-In/Calories-Out formula is impossible.

"Why Aren't Shoes Preventing Running Injuries?"

Good question.

"Barefoot running shoes and shoes with extra cushioning seek to protect runners—but despite all the new technology, running injuries are no less common than they were 30 years ago."

Most runners are still running in the same sort of shoes that they've been wearing for the last 30 years. It shouldn't be surprising that we're seeing the same outcome, if we assume that running shoes can affect injury rates.

"In the past 30 years running has changed from something done by trained runners who competed for sport, to an activity that is enjoyed by the masses."

This is silly. I'm pretty sure that "the masses" have been running for a long, long time. As this account makes clear, foot racing has long been a regular part of recreation:

"The Clary Grove boys, the Island Grove boys, the Sangamon River boys and the Sand Ridge boys, each designated by the part of the country from which they came, would gather there to indulge in horse racing, foot racing, wrestling, jumping, ball playing and shooting at a mark."

So it's a typically weak article on the topic, but he at least gets points for quoting Jay Dicharry and Dan Lieberman, and mentioning Born to Run.

"Confronted with the baffling array of running shoes, the prevailing wisdom seems to be to pick a shoe that fits your running style, not to hope a shoe will change you."

Of course the high-heeled cushioned sneakers that most all wear today were created to do exactly that:

"...Over the next 40 years, we have seen the height as well as the cushion gradually increase. These developments inadvertently made runners adopt a “heel to toe” gait or “heel strike” when running. Bowerman and W.E. Harris authored a primer entitled Jogging: A [Medically Approved] Physical Fitness Program for All Ages in 1967. In this very popular book, they noted the most efficient way to run should be landing or striking on the heel first. The authors specifically stated that forefoot striking is incorrect and not the proper way to land.

"Bowerman and Harris had no scientific basis for this explanation. Several years later, they went on to create a running shoe that contained a cushioned heel...."

That shoe was Nike.

Killian Jornet Autobiography Published.

First we had Born to Run, then Eat & Run, now we have Run or Die. Killian is not only a famed runner, but a famed skier. This review is a by another famed skier, but the book is all about running. Sounds interesting.

"Human Face Evolved to Withstand Punches"

Makes sense. We're uniquely evolved to throw, and I guess that includes punches.

"...The researchers found that bones that suffer the highest rates of fractures in fights are the same parts of the skull that exhibited the greatest increase in sturdiness during the evolution of our early human relatives. These bones are also the parts of the skull that show the greatest difference between males and females in both australopiths and humans today. ""In other words," Carrier said, "male and female faces are different because the parts of the skull that break in fights are bigger in males. Importantly, these facial features appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time that our ancestors evolved hand proportions that allow the formation of a fist."..."

One of the scientists involved, David Carrier, did the original research that led to the Born to Run hypothesis.