Review of Exercized by Daniel Lieberman By Max More
Exercized: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, by Daniel Lieberman. Pantheon. Exercise (noun): voluntary physical activity that is planned, structured, repetitive, and undertaken to sustain or improve health and fitness. Exercized (adjective): to be vexed, anxious, worried, harassed.
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ryonics is not guaranteed to work. The vast majority of Alcor members know and accept that. Cryonics is best seen as an extension of emergency medicine. No one wants to have to make use of medicine, especially emergency medicine. Any sensible cryonicist is interested in ways to live longer in good health. Since the outcome of cryonics in general and your own cryopreservation in particular is uncertain, you want to delay being cryopreserved as long as possible. More time means more life and better cryonics methods and practices. Living longer by living more healthily also helps get you cryopreserved in better condition by reducing the risk of sudden cardiovascular events, strokes, and aneurysms. But challenges arise in going from “I know I should do this” to “I’m going to do this’” to “I’m doing this.” One of the core themes of Excercized is that high levels of inactivity are normal for humans as we evolved. It is deliberate exercise for the purpose of health that is strange for our species. We didn’t evolve to exercise. And yet exercise is good for us. Hence the book’s subtitle: “Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding”. Lieberman is professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and a researcher on the evolution of human physical activity. Using his own research and relating some interesting experiences in the field, Lieberman explains how and why humans evolved to walk, run, dig, and do other necessary and rewarding physical activities while avoiding needless exertion. His approach, strongly informed by evolutionary biology and anthropology, yields insights sometimes familiar and sometimes fresh and stimulating. In the main part of the book, Lieberman tackles what he sees as ten myths: Myth #1: We evolved to exercise Myth #2: It is unnatural to be indolent
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Myth #3: Sitting is intrinsically unhealthy Myth #4: You need 8 hours of sleep every night Myth #5: Normal humans trade off speed for endurance Myth #6: We evolved to be extremely strong Myth #7: Sports = exercise Myth #8: You can’t lose weight by walking Myth #9: Running is bad for your knees Myth #10: It’s normal to be less active as we age Exercise is WEIRD We are aware that modern Western countries have lower levels of physical activity than other cultures or our culture as it was decades and centuries ago. So, what is a normal amount of activity or exercise? Lieberman points out that you can’t determine what is normal by looking only at the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) countries. Until a few hundred generations ago, all human beings were hunter-gatherers, so that’s a good place to start. Among all the hunter-gatherer groups, the most deeply studied is the Hadza from a dry, hot woodland region of Tanzania. When Lieberman first visited the Hadza in 2013, he was struck by how “everyone was apparently doing nothing.” Challenging commonly held notions of the degree of physical industriousness of hunter-gatherer groups, Lieberman relates how groups like the Hadza spend their day, and notes that their work is not backbreaking. Using the PAL (Physical Activity Level), we find that, among the Hadza hunter-gatherers, PAL is 1.9 for men and 1.8 for women. That’s a little below PAL scores of subsistence farmers, and “about the same as those of factory workers and farmers in the developed world, and about 15 percent higher than PALs of people with desk jobs in
Cryonics / 1st Quarter 2021
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