I agree that woo is bad. And microbiome is of course irrelevant wrt boosting IQ. But a good part of the post was about improving health, and microbes do have serious downsides on that front. If you don't have the good ones you are at a much greater risk of being colonized by the bad ones. And disease still has a non-zero negative effect on people's brain development and cognition.

Removing bad behaviour from microbiome would be quite a bit more effective and easier than fixing genes, for fighting disease. And many of the diseases with a significant genomic risk scores mentioned in the post probably have an unknown necessary pathogenic cause.

Here's a paper (Cochran&Ewald) with simple powerful arguments, I always try to push it to any doctors I meet.

So this is why if you read the CNV studies and you look at the hits they identify, and how many subjects are covered by the identified hits, you find that like, maybe 2% of the cohort will have one of those specific identified hits and lose 2 IQ points or gain 2 kg of fat etc. So you can see how that would work out in embryo selection: you'd be able to avoid that loss, which is meaningful! ...in a tiny fraction of all embryos. On average, you'd just sequence them all, find no known pathogenic variant, and shrug, and use the SNP PGS like usual, having gained nothing.

Also, of course, WGS is substantially more expensive than SNP genotyping and more difficult to do on embryos.

That is relevant in pre-implantation diagnosis for parents and gene therapy at the population level. But for Qwisatz Haderach breeding purposes those costs are immaterial. There the main bottleneck is the iteration of selection, or making synthetic genomes. Going for the most typical genome with the least amount of originality is not a technical challenge in itself, right? We would not be interested in the effect of the ugliness, only in getting it out.

I would advice you and others to be more blunt when advancing your case.

No one – not even you – remembers if we were good or bad, why we fought and why we died...No! All that matters is that two stood against many, that is what's important.

There are objective measures for fitness and quality of individuals, too. But it would be insulting and also kind of weak and evasive to refer to your superior figures of merit in your personal business and contentions. If it is about your personal survival or physical safety, appealing to your goodness, your usefulness, is pretty much the definition of slavishness. (I have never read Nietzsche, just seen some Western movies.)

I'm sure you can see how my point applies to cultures and ethnicities. I understand very well how one gets to the arguments in your comment when dealing with the usual pro-immigration arguments from economists.

Myself, I think it's nice to have a nation of one's own and a homeland for that nation, a country and state owned by that people. Why should we get to have it? Just because.

OP: To me it looks like Hanson is saying the lack of cultural variation and lack of selection pressure on cultures will – to continue with the biological metaphor – lead to accumulation of mutations and loss of function. Whatever your culture values, it will be worse at getting it. Maybe he accidentally introduces his own values to the objective disinterested frame, but it's hard to believe Hanson would make any such mistakes big enough to cause twisting physical reactions of empathetic shame.

Hanson's argument above sounds somewhat plausible to me. What I don't understand is his theory that population bust will lead to stagnation in innovation. Maybe he makes the standard economist assumption of technological progress being a linear function of population (with given level of wealth and tech), which is obviously untrue. Maybe he gives too much weight to innovation in highly specialized fields in comparison to innovations that have more general and generalist applications.

I am glad to see oat foods taking new forms and gaining popularity with new audiences. I welcome all enthusiasts sharing what they have learned.

But you have to acknowledge the existing traditions and their expertise. It would be a tragedy, if, instead of seeds of civilization, you were spreading some meaningless imitations that have no roots. Your post has many layers of sophistication, but I believe you have omitted the true kernel of the matter.

I don't know what guava tastes like, but I strongly suspect it does not belong in an authentic oatmeal porridge. The canonical additions are apple or apple jam with cinnamon, or blueberry. It is ok to experiment (e.g. bananas and coconut are great with blueberries), but some things just don't belong there. Cherries (too astringent) and cloudberries come to mind. But I will not judge your condiments until I have tried them out.

As other commenters have noted, it is not absolutely necessary to sweat the cooking. In Spartan conditions rolled oats can be eaten straight with some fluid, though you need to be aware it is going to swell in the stomach. A traditional way to cook unrolled oats is to put them overnight in oven. With rolled and steamed oats I use microwave on full power until the porridge almost boils over, about 3 minutes. It's not as good as long simmered porridge (the gel is thinner and not as creamy), but it's fast and good enough. If I get rich I will definitely get an inverter microwave, I did not know they existed.

Whole grain oat is said to moderate blood sugar spikes in comparison to other cereals. That suggests it contains higher amounts of anti-feedants or mildly poisonous substances. This is nothing to be alarmed about, it's a very common theme with "healthy" plant foods. It could be the fiber that slows the digestion, too.

Some people claim to have a problem with the slimy consistency of the porridge or gruel. I have met people who said they hated it since they were small children. I don't believe anyone really is so impaired: they were probably just finding more rationalizations for some anti-breakfast meme diet.

In Finland we have a style of flat 100% oat bread that is very succulent and so slick and chunky it won't stick to teeth nearly as much as other breads. I believe it is some kind of baked aerated porridge.

The other major question I'm grappling with is why there is an obesity-elevation gradient.

A guy is going alone through the wilderness, with a solar powered icebox on his back. He crosses a raging river by swimming. He slashes his way through a jungle. He is blasted by sun on an endless desert. It's been weeks and he has no company at all, save the bleached bones (and ice boxes) of those who did not make it. He climbs a mountain until he finally comes to a cave in the snow. Inside is a man with beard like silvery horsehair, eyes like fire. Very old but fit as a mountain goat.

"O wise sensei, I brought your pizza and ice cream with me. Now tell me the secret of perfect health!"

"It is vely simple", says the old man while greedily unwrapping a stick of icecream. "Only meet with people who have made a journey such as you youlself just did."

More prosaically: "It" does not run uphill.

~90% of Earth's mammalian excreta is produced by humans and their livestock. The livestock especially are immobilized in close quarters and their manure is spread to fields by mechanical means. The manure is often in a fresh condition with viable gut flora present. This means that the fitness of the gut microbiome is independent of the host's mobility and fitness. They can find plenty of new hosts nearby, and have a good chance of spreading far and wide with tractors. If it can make the host eat x% more, it gains roughly that big an advantage: that much more manure along which it can spread. In state of nature that tactic obviously would not work, it would be much better to have a slim host with good legs.

Selection for larger animals, antibiotic feeding and selection by market forces could also contribute towards more hunger-inducing gut microbes.

Maybe overweight is not the only hit on the host's well-being. There could be other pathologies by which the mechanised microbes improve their fitness. If this is the case, exposure to bad manure – or biome that derives from it – would be a common cause for both obesity and some other diseases associated with it.

Of course if one insists on some of the assumptions you did not need, namely doing the standard microcanonical ensemble approach, it trivializes everything and no second law comes out.

In microcanonical ensemble the system is isolated, meaning its energy is fixed. Microstates are partitioned into a macrostates by their energy (stronger version of your assumption of macro being a function of micro), so they don't switch into a different macrostate. If you take them to be energy eigenstates, the microstates don't evolve either.

I don't endorse the idea of a macrostate secretly being in a certain microstate. They are different things, preparing a microstate takes a lot more effort.

When this phrase is used it is maybe implied that the equilibriating happens much faster and further than the actor (usually a democratic regulating body) expected, and that they are too slow to "evaluate medium term, make corrections".

One other potential benefit of an unstable mechanism is that there is no energy loss that comes with damping, in other words the many possible errors are not rejected as heat. Instead, the error can be measured with a much smaller energy cost, and then a reversible correction can be made that on average costs no energy. In concrete terms this can be pictured as replacing a dashpot or a shock absorber with a finely controlled quick response linear electric motor (one that can reproduce and correct any error that occurs). Of course a dashpot-like solution is usually simpler and more reliable. I have come to appreciate reliability even more as I've grown older.

Xylitol seems to be a source of oxalic acid. I don't know if it metabolized into that form by the body or gut microbiome, or both, but it definitely shows up in urine. It says "Excessive use may cause laxative effects" on the bag of chewing gum, but I think oxalic acid is a much bigger concern with potential for long term damage to kidneys and joints. Highly processed vegetable rich diets might already contain excessive amounts, especially for people with gut problems and fat malabsorption.

If were talking about easy adjustments to fight caries, how about switching to porridge based breakfast (in place of cereals or muesli) and opting for 100% oat bread instead of dry white bread. This in my experience has a big effect on how much and for how long starchy matter adheres to fissures in teeth.

(I feel like I'm betraying Finland by attacking xylitol. I'm making up for that by talking up oats and porridge.)

Thank you for the information. Now I feel a lot safer when eating osso buco.

But why is it a ruminant species having these problems again? Why not chickens or whales or fish? Perhaps it's the grazing lifestyle combined with unnaturally high population densities and immobility. Or herbivores having low natural resistance to prion pathologies.

I believe the ultimate origin of bovine pathogenic prions is in high temperature processing of skins, offal, and especially CNS tissue and bones (prion is expressed in the marrow more than average). Remember, we used to feed bonemeal and other residues of bovine origins to cows until the mad cow episode. Some of that matter had gone through stages like rendering off the fat.

CWD might be a spillover from BSE or have an independent but similar origin.

Why not whales then? They have plenty of lifetime to manifest a prion disease if they get one. Whalers even used to process blubber on ships and tip the reject into sea. But, 1. oceans are immensely larger than pastures and fields, 2. the scale of processing was smaller than in 20th century bovine materials, and 3. nobody fed that material straight back to whales.

I like and respect cows and other ungulates, but they don't exactly live and die by their wits. A carnivore would have starved long before, and a bird flown into a wall, before we found one in a state in which we sometimes find elk or reindeer. So far the cases in Finland have been of a "non-transmissible" variety. However, the rate of occurence seems higher than in spontaneous Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (humans). A population on the order of 100k (of which only a small portion lives to an advanced age) and a few cases per year. Let's hope no-one buys American urine based deer attractant on Ebay.