Comment by IKantRead | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IKantRead | Hacker News Reader

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It's strange to me that "what Nature intended" is a concept entertained by rational, educated, adults. It's one of those carry overs from a time when we had widespread belief in divine providence that doesn't really hold up under inspection.

To be clear on my point: "Nature" is not a rational agent with a plan. No creature evolved a certain way for a reason, they just evolved that way and happened to not die when some others that didn't evolve that way did die.

Nature doesn't even "intend" for you to pass on your genes, it's just that that's how the system happens to work such that things that pass on their genetic information still stick around.

The very premise that there is some "natural" thing that we would be better off doing, silently assumes a pretty major, border line theological, premise that there is any reason that living things should continue to a path that allowed them to survive to a point. If evolution has any "lesson" teach at all it's closer to "be flexible".

I don't think one needs to take it so literally.

"What nature intended" in this context is just another way of saying "optimal given the history of how humans evolved"

"optimal given the history of how humans evolved" but this contains the same false logic.

The premise that there is something optimal about the state we evolved in has no basis in what we understand about evolutionary processes. Those are just the conditions that we happened to not die in, not the conditions that are in any way "best" or "optimal" for us. It's like sleeping in late and missing a flight that ends up crashing and assuming that the optimal strategy is to always sleep in late.

Further, in an ever changing environment, which is what make evolution so important, "history" in a genetic sense is completely uninteresting. Things that cause one species to not die in one era can easily be the source of it's extinction in a future one. Megafauna probably had many benefits, pre-human existence, from being very large. But being large and reproducing slowly is what ultimately let to their extinction once the environment changed.

It's not that the Paleolithic environment was optimal for humans, but humans were optimized to survive in that environment. You can somewhat expect that the human body will do a decent job at surviving anything in that environment.

Now there are undoubtedly environments that are better for humans than the Paleolithic one. However, it's hard to say for sure what they are specifically. Every chemical that enters your body has some effect, and if your body was never optimized to handle it, it may have negative effects, even if on the surface it seems better. Trans fats are a great example of this. If we had been eating them for 10,000 years, our bodies would have adapted to make them non-harmful.

> The premise that there is something optimal about the state we evolved in

Nobody said that.

> Things that cause one species to not die in one era can easily be the source of it's extinction in a future one.

That's exactly why the history is useful. We carry a long long list of traits, many of which wouldn't be there based on the recent environment, and may actually be counterproductive in it. And all of those are important to know about.

I take your points but some of this is just semantic. Absolutely , nature does not have intentions. That’s clearly misunderstood given the wording. But what do people mean when they say this?

Clearly its generally better to eat more whole, fresh foods and less processed, preserved foods or things with insane amounts of sugar not found in nature. We can argue if this is truly natural vs unnatural but its a valid guideline nonetheless. Our bodies have adapted to certain types of food and certain “unnatural” foods do have negative effects which are contributing to widespread issues like obesity, diabetes, and probably cancer.

You can call it survivorship bias, however we are genetically suited for some tasks because of evolution. These predispositions are what nature, implicitly, intended.

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