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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

I'm not in this space, on either the athlete or the biomedical side - but it sounds like a "more is better" running mindset and mythos is colliding with the biological realities of human bodies which either (1) Were not carefully designed for this kind of duty cycle, or (2) Have accumulated quite a few deleterious mutations in the generations since that design, resulting in frequent operational failures at well below the hoped-for spec.

Might anyone know if indigenous groups such as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rar%C3%A1muri - where extreme distance running seems part of their traditional culture - have been studied in this regard?

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> biological realities of human bodies which either (1) Were not carefully designed for this kind of duty cycle, or (2) Have accumulated quite a few deleterious mutations in the generations since that design

Is this speculation on your side, or do you have a source for this "biological reality"?

(1) The "endurance running hypothesis" suggests we may be exactly made for this. However, what's certainly unaccounted for is pushing limits by sidestepping physical and mental safeguards. Just fueling a run with highly available carbs is a situation "nature" couldn't possibly account for, since even most plants we eat today didn't even exist, much less highly caloric gels. Mindset is another dysregulated thing. Grave difference between hunting prey and records. You have to disregard feelings like exhaustion or lack of motivation to chase records. Not to mention, for most of history humans had way more leisure time to rest. Hunting was their job, not the hobby on top of demanding job. It was also a collective endeavor not a competitive one. So, the way it's done is certainly a perversion, but the ballpark of physical load may be within specification.

(2) I think the relevant time frame is too short to expect any pronounced evolutionary effect from civilizational slack. Endurance running may be a defining feature of our species and sedentism is a very, very recent development in evolutionary timescales. I believe, lactase persistence is a rare outlier of rapid adaptations within that time frame. And that's really a consequential but minuscule genetic change, compared to systemic degeneration of our evolutionary legacy.

On a side-note, I want to add, your understanding of "biological realities" regarding (2) has some history and is somewhat in line with prior thinking that ended in social darwinism and eugenics AFAIK.

> Might anyone know if indigenous groups such as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rar%C3%A1muri - where extreme distance running seems part of their traditional culture - have been studied in this regard?

I have a hard time believing you made this connection, without knowing about the book Born to Run and the endurance running hypothesis, but anyway, I believe that's where the anthropological discourse is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis

> Is this speculation ... ?

More of a generic engineering quip - if a gadget can't meet a spec, then either it wasn't designed to that spec, or it degraded after it passed QC.

I'm vaguely aware of the endurance running hypothesis. But a quick Google suggests that most humans had decent stone-age atlatls, bows & arrows, snares, and spears by ~50k years ago. That's >2k generations of selection where endurance running is not the highest-value skill for catching dinner.

> ... lactase persistence is a rare outlier of rapid adaptations within that time frame ...

Look at parts of the immune system which are needed to fight high-mortality diseases. The classic is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease#Genetics

> On a side-note ...

Humans have been concocting excuses to proclaim their own ancestry and blood "superior" for well over 7 millennia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh#Divinity. Ditto ways to rationalize ruling class control over reproduction (and everything else) in the "lower" social classes. My own interest is more on esoterics, such as this unfortunate mutation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#Synthesis - and things humanity may desperately need soon, like another 10 °C of heat tolerance.

(FWIW, my immediate association with Born to Run is musical - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_to_Run )

> I'm vaguely aware of the endurance running hypothesis. But a quick Google suggests that most humans had decent stone-age atlatls, bows & arrows, snares, and spears by ~50k years ago. That's >2k generations of selection where endurance running is not the highest-value skill for catching dinner.

Endurance running in hunting and scavenging does not conflict with the usage of hunting tools and weapons. I am not sure how you got to 50k years, since tools usage predates homo spec. and goes back a few million years, but 50k years is relatively little time on the evolutionary time scale anyway. As I said before, the important relevant innovation isn't tool usage, but sedentism/agriculture, which is far more recent. It's also important to keep in mind how few humans lived on Earth back then, arguing about generations. 10,000BC (emergence of agriculture) there where about 1-15 million humans on all Earth. 70,000BC there may have been a bottleneck event which may have reduced human population to as low as 1,000 individuals. This would have greatly reduced genetic diversity necessary for any rapid changes. There is little genetic variation in humans across the globe. For comparison, the Rarámuri descended from humans arriving in the Americas about 15,000-10,000BC. All very recent.

> Look at parts of the immune system which are needed to fight high-mortality diseases. The classic is ...

I am not sure what you are getting at. Do you suggest eradication of malaria and consequently the frequency normalization due to loss of selective advantage for exclusively heterozygous carriers of a fatal genetic disease is a good example of adaptive timescales? I mean yeah, obviously evolution can happen faster with huge selective pressure. Selective breeding is evidence of that. But that's very different than the suggested degeneration due to mere irrelevance, unless you make the case running adaptations are disadvantageous to modern humans. I mean, failing to push world records is hardly evidence that we, as a species, suck at endurance running. If anything, we suck at not running.

> Humans have been concocting excuses to proclaim their own ancestry and blood "superior" for well over 7 millennia

So? Humans suck? They didn't use biologisms and I was talking about the pseudoscientific idea of human evolutionary degeneration specifically.

> humanity may desperately need soon, like another 10 °C of heat tolerance.

Well, good luck. Timing-wise, I wouldn't count on evolution there :D

> They are renowned for their form of prayer that involves running for extended periods of time.

Mark me as atheist!

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