Here are some topics I’d like to explore:
1. The increase in serious age related diseases, cardiovascular and degenerative looks like an epidemic. Among these are cardiovascular diseases, obesity related disease such as diabetes and Alzheimer’s and related degenerations. Today we treat these conditions and complications unleashing invasive and expensive high technology long after presentation and in an advanced state. These interventions are marginally effective and very expensive. They do not prevent most of the suffering or significantly alter outcomes. A lot of us wonder about more efficient low tech alternatives.
2. There is a growing realization that most medical disorders are products of civilization. Most of us in affluent societies are living under conditions that are unhealthful. Hans Zinsser’s classic, “Rats, Lice, and History” was an eye opener for me.  When I read it I’d had recently graduated from medical school I had no idea that common infectious diseases would never have happened except that post agricultural communities were living together, people in proximity to people and animals. I had no idea about mutability and communicability of all manner of infectious disease spread between men and animals in close proximity even though I had just been in medical school!  That meant the establishment of farms and cities, between 5 and 10 thousands of years ago, recently the lineage of humankind, was instrumental in the spread of infectious disease. I got to thinking that I loved cities, was excited about the newest technology, but many aspects of all this might not be good for people in the long run.

3.  Later I began to read more about how humankind evolved, anthropology and history, subjects I neglected in my education, which was science science science  which i do love. The first thing I discovered, actually I really didn’t understand this at first, but later figured it out, was that lacking modern conveniences and indoor plumbing and memory devices like hard drives, our ancestors, I mean from many thousands of years ago, were a least as smart as we are, maybe smarter, and they felt every bit as penetratingly as we do. What convinced me of this was many things.  Seeing pictures of Lascaux Caves from tens of thousands of years ago was one, a feast for the eyes and soul situated deep inside caverns where no one, no thing almost could get to them, with magnificent panoramas of life and nature as it was then.  It teaches you that there are hidden things. Really reading sections of the Hebrew Bible was another, something which like the Iliad, had been passed by word of mouth for maybe a thousand years then finally set down in alphabetic Hebrew script some 2800 years ago when such writing was first available. With the help of interpreters who preserved meaning, I found many thoughts that were amazingly subtle, discoveries about human nature, and what a lot of people say about the Hebrew Bible with its angry jealous god simply isn’t true, He is too complex for human comprehension is all Whom we fail to comprehend because of our own inadequacies.  I say, re-read it and weep. When you begin to read, critically as an adult, there are surpassingly profound ideas. As far as I can discern,  we modern sophisticates do not think at a deeper level than the ancients. Lacking the comparisons and experience that comes with age, there are so many conclusions reached in childhood that need to be revisited and reworked in order to fully apprehend.  At least I find that is true for myself. If you read Hamlet or Macbeth in school and come back to it when you’re older, it’s the same thing.

As a neurologist and amateur biologist I know our forebears for tens of thousands of years possessed the  very same anatomical equipment as we do.  Their lives were on average as had been said, brutish and short so which they needed to make the most of them and had the youthful enthusiasms and passions, but exceptional persons survived into our current old age. In their own time, those that survived would have had to be unusually   robust. so these were not a random sample of humanity but perhaps the survivors were what would be champions of unusual mental and physical attributes.

What we know from our books and computers is amazing, but our forebears had the earth and sky. We moderns are bathed in unnatural light. Their light was the Temple of the Sky which we do not know or see at all, and few of us appreciate at all, the panoply of the Stars. Our forebears were intimately familiar with the animals and plants their environs (their drawings show a much wider variety than exist today,  their very survival depended on it), and the evidence is from studying modern tribes that some of them have names in their heads of hundreds of living things. At best most of us by comparison can name few living things.

The point is to be humble. While we educate our kids thinking to fill them  with knowledge there is every reason to suspect the heads of our ancestors were just as full.  We are not as advanced as we have been lead to believe.  And we are no smarter than the smartest people of the past, though we have a longer average lifespan, a better life,  and a lot more tools.

More later…