Quickthink

Professor William Miller’s great contribution was his scholarship about the US slavery debate. It was one of the most divisive political debates in the country’s history that stretched over decades. This quote caught my eye. It is about the day that John Quincy Adams — who struggled for years to undo the “gag rule” that blocked discussion of slavery in the House of Representatives — died on the House floor

 “It is altogether fitting and proper, for the purposes of the inner history and collective memory of the American people,” Professor Miller wrote, “that on the day that Adams fell there was seated, in a not very good seat in the back row of the House chamber, a Whig congressman from Illinois serving his first and only term.”

That was, of course, Abraham Lincoln, the subject of Professor’s Miller’s intense scrutiny. Professor Miller just passed on at age 86 and here is the NYT obit.

Lisa Stone offers an interesting thought about making founder groups more cohesive. In her case, one of the keys was an equal stock split between the three founders. No one dominating person or group. This is not a universal cure all, but it is an interesting position to take in order to strengthen loyalty in the group. BTW, it presumes a shared sense of purpose among the founders as well. Something that I find is unusual.

Frank Jacobs offers a nice synopsis of the controversial idea of Austrian thinker Leopold Kohr. As an Estonian, I am sympathetic to the core … excuse the pun … idea. Smaller states that have a long historical sense of internal cohesion tend to govern themselves better than larger unwieldy ones.

Boris Johnson (Lord Mayor of London) is an odd duck. And I don’t refer to his disheveled hair or appearance. He is odd by modern standards because of his infectious enthusiasms. Public figures tend not to be this way. You get a sense of his style from his new book about London, “Johnson’s Life of London“.

He is criticized for lack of seriousness. Well, time will tell whether Johnson is serious enough. But in the meantime, I do admire his pluck and sense of fun.

Well, I have to admit that I say that I love salt after I have restricted my purchases of smoked salmon to the less salty varieties. But seriously, I find that I am using a lot more salt in flavoring my food than I am supposed to. And I feel fine. Am I courting death?

In fact, it could be that this is healthy. Gary Taubes, writing for NYT, argues that conventional wisdom about the danger of salt is not supported by experimental data. In other words, the hypothesis that more salt is harmful is just that — jut a hypothesis. Here it is

Eat more salt and your body retains water to maintain a stable concentration of sodium in your blood. This is why eating salty food tends to make us thirsty: we drink more; we retain water. The result can be a temporary increase in blood pressure, which will persist until our kidneys eliminate both salt and water.

But while this has some intuitive plausibility, there is no conclusive evidence that blood pressure stays elevated. And there is a counter hypothesis

A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.

So I will continue with my higher salt diet, comforted by the thought that my renin levels are probably under control.

FOLLOW -  So what about sugar? Mayor Bloomberg argues that the case against sugar is stronger, and therefore there is a reason to ban super sized containers of sugary beverages. Mark Bittman thinks this is spot on. And to the extent that the evidence that links heightened sugar consumption to obesity grows, I am with them. BTW, The Daily Meal reports on a recent study that heightened levels of sugar intake can interfere with thinking. Gulp!

2d FOLLOW -  Mark Hyman weighs in with a rather broad based assault on the food industry. I was especially interested in his comments about MSG

It was only a few years ago that I started thinking more about myself in evolutionary terms. My first exposure was from Matt Ridley, who offered an explanation why humans thrived and neanderthals did not. I began to appreciate this perspective more when I watched Bruce Schneier talk about how our understanding of risks and models are affected by our hunter gatherer background. So by now, I feel pretty comfortable with Dan Lieberman’s article in NYT about our inherited craving for sugar and the role it plays in generating fat.

The core message is profound.  For most of our time on this planet (perhaps 99%), humans lived in very different circumstances than we do now. And there was very little change back then.  But around 5,000 years ago there suddenly came a stunning increase in capacity to evolve new social structures. And the rate of change has been accelerating ever since. Now with internet and its enhancement of exchange possibilities, it is expected that the acceleration will increase further.  But if this were a two hour movie, all of what we think of as normal would appear in the very last seconds of the film. Most of the film would appear to us like a monotonous struggle by thousands of generations of humans for survival in the wild.

So it is not too surprising that our genetic inheritances offer us a mixed blessing with respect to modern life styles. Realizing this enhances our sense of the miracles that our discoveries have given us — from the discovery of writing and mathematics 5,000 years ago to quantum mechanics and beyond just recently. It also enhances our appreciation of the limits of who we are as physical entities.