Also only one citation, and that is to back up the claim that there are 200 primates.
Nice pictures though - I feel happy that I can sit (relatively) comfortably in the squatting position (as an European).
I really regret listening to that piece of advice. As I observe my baby daughter, I realize how natural that squatting position is, and how much knee and hip mobility we really have.
It's why weightlifters have elevated heels, and why great squatters tend to have short femurs (and/or be short in general).
Now walking barefeet in the city is not recommended because of glass and dogshit everywhere, but through a path in the forest and over rocks it is much more fun (and healthy for my joints) without shoes. That is, if you relearned how to do it. You cannot walk barefeet, like you do with shoes. Also, if you started walking barefeet over 20, your skeleton and muscles in the feet will never really adopt again, like they would if you do it as a child. So if you have childs, let them go barefeet wherever and whenever possible (also in the snow for a short time).
"Figure Figure11 shows a mountain gorilla lying on the ground on his side without a pillow" - Of course it is without a pillow, it's a mountain gorilla! What is this clarification?
"To start with, some Westerners have to hold on to a doorframe." - Would it not be better to say "you may have to hold on" or "newbies"? It is not like Westerners have some special physiological feature that makes them do it, it's about lack of practice.
Tribes people don't live instinctually. They have culture, like us. The critique here is our culture could benefit from observing how their culture does it.
You can look at the COVID pandemic for an example of how body positioning has helped change how well people can breathe. Proning of severely sick patients substantially improved outcomes. That's literally just rolling the patient from their back to their stomach. So there might be something interesting there that we can learn if we pay attention. And he's trying to say "we can learn something from these people if only we pay attention."
Nevertheless, after reading the article I have seen that the clarification about the gorilla sleeping without a pillow made perfect sense in its context, because it has not been added to provide any additional information, but it was added for emphasis, in a context where the sleeping positions in modern environments were contrasted with their correspondents that are common both in non-modernized environments and for similar primates.
Moreover, I interpret his phrase "To start with" as having the same meaning as your suggestion "newbies".
Using a door frame in the beginning is indeed good practical advice for achieving the full squat position for those who are not used to it.
So, gorila sleeping position implies exactly nothing for my sleeping position.
Funny old world.
That doesn't follow at all. Gorillas are well known for their habit of making nests. Making pillows isn't difficult.
(I don't use any of these positions, but I most commonly nap on a heated wooden floor in an insect-free environment. Oddly enough, I also support my temple on the dorsal surface of a wrist; it had never occurred to me that in addition to comfort, it keeps both ears free?)
Lack of practice causes a "special physiological feature": ankle inflexibility. For some people it would take a significant amount of time stretching the ankles every day to recover enough ankle flexibility to squat, and that could perhaps still be insufficient, as joint mobility is established based on the range of motion used in childhood.
So at which point/age do some of us stop doing that type of squat before "use it or lose it" kicks in?
That's how science works. Show sources/data/experiments or gtfo
It is fine, indeed should be encouraged, to put some papers in the system that don't have formal data but do record common-sense observations. If people don't like them, then they can trump opinion with data in the scientific process.
If that's the only thing you want to consider, sure. As a layman it's probably a good principle, and more so in engineering. But you'll have to shave off some significant works of science from history if you do that.
You can read more about those steps at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
A theory is also a contribution to a field as long as it tested (not necessarily in the same publication).
Even an observation to a field can be a contribution if it helps people generate new theories and then test them.
Next, the acceptability of journal papers without conclusive experiments varies across fields. In some fields, such as observational sciences (e.g., astronomy, ecology, sociology), observational studies are common and valuable contributions to the literature. These studies often involve collecting and analyzing data from real-world observations, surveys, or existing datasets without the need for controlled experiments. In such cases, it is perfectly acceptable to publish papers based solely on observational data.
When you say, "is not enough," the question I respond with is "enough for what?" It's fully acceptable to publish a paper with observations in order to stimulate interest and encourage further research in the area. It's not necessary for a journal to require final results.
Finally, consider some of these famous and important papers which were published as observations without conclusive results. Should they have held back and waited until conclusive results were available?
1. Edwin Hubble's "A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae"
2. Albert Einstein's "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity"
3. Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species"
> This observation must be recorded to allow further research in this direction
This is just one person noting in public what could be a correlation, and then all the rest (confirming correlation, establishing causation) is up to someone else!
From my perspective, the way I see your comment is this: give me scientific evidence that walking is beneficial to my health.
We lose our identity when we disconnect from Nature. I even read a post recently here in HN where it was said that "Urban humans have lost much of their ability to digest plants": https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/03/human-gut-bacteria-t...
That's where we are.
Well, yes, but that's a standard quality of B.S. It's plausible, and intuitive. When you actually start trying to prove it out, though, you discover it's wrong.
True, there is a category of "no duh" scientific findings, like walking is beneficial to one's health, that do align with our intuition. But where science really shines is when the evidence points to something counterintuitive.
I mean, what is "walking". What distance? What pace? There are negative health effects from walking too much. The general idea is that moderate exercise is the best, too little is bad, too much is also bad. But where is the peak? It seems that walking is beneficial to the average city dweller, which aligns with our intuition, but what about foot soldiers?
And where does the intuition that walking is beneficial comes from? Walking is tiring, it is not something we do naturally if we can avoid it, not very "intuitive". That's the problem by the way, because we can avoid it in modern society. I think the intuition comes from the fact that we get told over and over than walking is beneficial, so much that we made these thought our own, i.e. that's conditioning. And the reason we are told that is because it is backed by observation and science.
This story is interesting, but doesn't shock me a whole lot from the perspective of losing our touch with nature, because we now have an understanding that our ancestors fluctuated between carnivory and herbivory quite a lot. If these population changes in gut bacteria can be caused in such a short span of time, it seems likely that it can also be reversed.