The man who invented exercise - epidemiologist Jerry Morris
ft.com
ft.com
Alas, she was the only one of my four grandparents who didn't live into my lifetime. She died about twenty-five years later while driving across Minnesota in the winter to pick up my dad from the same college. Before she arrived at her destination, her car slipped on the icy highway and crashed head-on with another car, killing both drivers. Epidemiologically, there is no doubt that exercise is beneficial for health. But of course it is not a cure-all. My dad was paralyzed for six years before he died when he slipped and fell on the ice on a different Minnesota winter day while going out shopping for a condolence card for a friend's funeral. That kind of concern is what keeps some people in their cars.
After edit:
I agree with the other person who just commented that this is a particularly striking paragraph in the submitted article:
"And yet Morris sat on his data for years. If there were flaws in his theory, he was determined to find them before anyone else could. 'We set about destroying this observation,' he says. 'We brought in outside people with no blood in their veins, no interest, to destroy it.' But they couldn’t."
That, of course, is just what Richard Feynman recommended that a true scientist should do. "But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated."
With "hide the decline" and "trick".
http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?as_q=trick&num=10...
This intentional misreading is as misguided as assuming that we are all "hackers".
Do you really want to argue that the "trick" in this case is benign?
Where's the skepticism among the AGW folks?
They were rewarded for finding "confirmation"....
Here's the original text: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=154&filen...
Even if "hide the decline" was considered to be referring to something dubious, the use of "trick" would still clearly mean "technique".
It would be like if a student was breaking into a school computer (i.e. "hacking") and used a tool in an ingenious manner (i.e. a "hack"). Someone could say "That's a cool hack" and it would be clear from the context that they're not complimenting the lawbreaking, but on the creative use of a tool.
Maybe if you were later prosecuting that student in court then you'd take that "cool hack" phrase and try your best to sell it to the jury as referring to breaking the law to bolster your case, and maybe they'd buy it, but it would still be obvious to someone who understood the context and culture that it didn't mean what it was being purported to say.
Yes, read the link. The "technique" was concatenating two dissimilar datasets in a way that suggested a trend that simply wasn't there.
They had tree data for a certain period of time and then both tree and temp data. They used a model to generate temp data from the tree data. They then concatenated the temp from tree data for the time when they didn't have temp data with the temp data that they did have.
They didn't show that applying the same procedure to the tree data when they had temp data did not produce the actual temp data....
Do you really want to argue that the model was good only when they didn't have a way to check it?
Yes, it's "creative". The problem is that it's deceptive, or if you like, intended to trick.
And the fact that it's deceptive has nothing to do with them calling it a "trick". They could have called it a banana.
If you feel you have a good argument with the tree ring stuff then concentrate on that then and don't ruin it by throwing in the irrelevant fact that they used the word "trick" in an entirely different sense from what you imply.
Just like the lawyer intentionally misrepresenting "hack", it might help make a case to people without strong English skills, but it also makes your case seem weaker for anyone who knows how to use the word properly.
Except, as I've shown, it wasn't a misreading of the word trick. They accurately characterized their technique.
> by throwing in the irrelevant fact that they used the word "trick" in an entirely different sense from what you imply.
Huh? I "implied" that they intended to deceive and they did.
Er, maybe he might have been the first to demonstrate scientifically the link between lack of exercise and specific illnesses. However, the ancient Greeks already knew that physical exercise leads to good health.
Exactly. One can go even further back to the Chinese, etc:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius
are somewhat in dispute, but the dates of Thales, ca. 624 BC to ca. 546 BC,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales
are actually earlier. The source you link to doesn't get transcription spelling of Chinese words correct, either, so you can be sure the author is not familiar with Chinese history.
Actually, I was relying on early Taoist exercises for life extension predating comments on exercise I could find from Epictetus and other Greeks demonstrating their awareness of the beneficial effects of exercise. Whether or not Thales predates Confucius is irrelevant, unless either addressed the question of exercise (a quick Google search fails to uncover such a possibility).
Mention should also be made of India: yoga is estimated to go back at least 5000 years, though I have not the energy or interest to go digging for evidence that they realized the connection between exercise and life extension.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi
who may not even be a historical person) unless we can find mention of "Tao" and mention of that thing associated in a historical source.
If you can provide historical sources for exercise from Greece that predates yoga, I would be much obliged. Considering that:
"Traditionally, the Ancient Greek period was taken to begin with the date of the first Olympic Games in 776 BC, but most historians now extend the term back to about 1000 BC." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greece
and that the earliest known text addressing yoga (the Rig Veda) can be traced back to at least 1700–1100 BC (with some sources putting it closer to 3000 BC), you will have your work cut out for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/aryan-harappan-my... http://mindbodyfitness.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_old_is_y...
After edit: remember, as the thread is structured, you were the first to claim that peoples more ancient than those of ancient Greece "already knew that physical exercise leads to good health." That was your statement. You linked to pages that people can Google up, but you haven't yet pointed to any primary source for that proposition of undisputed date and provenance. On the one hand, I can accept as a general proposition that human beings for as long as Homo sapiens has been around had an intuition based on anecdotal experience that keeping moving preserves health (and helps catch tasty animals to eat), but on the other hand the epidemiologist mentioned in the article opening this thread really did discover a NEW, more detailed, epidemiological observation, which has been confirmed through multiple channels through physiological experiments in both animal and human subjects.
Not for me. I've got 160Km to go before I've marched, run & hiked my way through 1000Miles in just under 15 months.
(Otherwise it might just be a correlation. A study can only support one explanation over another; it can't generate an explanation.)
So if you have trouble getting excited about exercise, try to change other lifestyle factors at the same time.
Edit: (This doesn't mean that exercise isn't helpful on its own, just that it may not be the easiest/best "health solution" to start with.)