Russ Roberts recently had a discussion on Econtalk with Arthur de Vany. A lot of it covered baseball and social science, but he also spent a lot of time on “evolutionary fitness” (see the website at the link). I agree with a lot of what he had to say, but felt that some of his assertions about past evolutionary history exhibited too much certitude in the consensus of the field. In particular, when it comes to nutrition I think that evolutionary informed diets may need to take into account individual differences more than they do. I think there’s an unfortunate tendency of many people who find a particular diet which works for them to strongly extrapolate the efficacy of that diet to everyone else to the same extent. Probably limiting strong advice to near relatives would get rid of most of my concerns since families would share many of the same predispositions.
