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Comment by awolf | Hacker News Reader

Zuk is attacking a straw man here. Thinking about our diets from an evolutionary perspective gives us a framework in which to form educated hypotheses. The way an intelligent person applies paleo-based thinking is by forming theories, not by creating an absolutist belief system. Zuk does nothing to invalidate the application data we have about the past in a logical fashion.

If Zuk's point is that some people are applying evolutionary concepts blindly without verifying results or considering evidence, then her book title should have been: "Some People Are Stupid" and left it at that. If she wants to launch a counter to the paleo movement then I think she's fallen flat on her face.

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To repeat myself from earlier: If you object to people rebutting this 'straw man', then perhaps you should try and stop people from proposing it. You can't call something a straw man simply because it's not what you personally mean by the word.

Right, let me go do that. While I'm at it I'll make sure everyone who Googles "healthy diet" or for that matter "republican", all come away learning exactly the same meanings for those terms.

My point in the above post was: Zuk is positioning herself as if she were attacking Paleo as a concept, but all she's really attacking is the mis-application of information by some members in a larger group. I call that a straw man.

It's not a straw man if the views being ascribed to the movement at large are the views being conveyed by the movement at large. If you were to try to learn about the paleo diet from the perspective of someone who had never heard of it, you would find views that align quite closely with the views that Zuk is critiquing. Look at the Google results. The fact that your interpretation of the paleo "concept" does not square with those views does not make her critique a straw man.

I haven't read the book, but the review made it sound like Zuk was both attacking Paleo as a concept by pointing out that evolution can actually happen on pretty short timescales and so the idea that we need to eat what paleolithic people ate is logically flawed, and also attacking Paleo as practiced by pointing out its practitioners' misconceptions regarding the diet of paleolithic humans.

Just because evolution of certain details can happen on short timescales does not therefore mean that evolution can or does make any old change in a short timeframe.

Evolution tends to operate as a hill-climbing strategy (not to say it cant clear away exising design details) so it often produce (non-fatal) 'bugs' in its designs that never get fixed.

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