Sorry, I was being a little more flippant than I should have. This is a serious subject and perhaps this is not really the place to go into it in detail, but I'll address a few things.
When I tossed off the quote that tribal life is not all that it's cracked up to be, what I meant is that living a paleolithic life was not something
I'd like to go back to. There were some good things, but a whole lot of bad as well. One of the most significant characteristics of small, tribal groups is the razor-thin margins you live with.
One bad season and you could have malnutrition. One bad year and you jettison the old, sick, very young and weak either through death, disease or abandonment.
Even what we would consider common and entirely treatable problems could get you into a lot of trouble. Sure, with a better diet there's less of the lifestyle diseases like heart attacks and diabetes, but accidental injury, broken bones, infections, food-born and water-born diseases could all be fatal.
Childbirth and childhood are risky times. So much can go wrong. The strategy of hunting and gathering tribal societies, and even ours as well up until very recently, is to have lots of kids. Eventually, some will survive. You may end up with three or four kids who live to adulthood and reproduction. That's enough for survival of the species, but you may well have had eight kids to begin with. Even with the wonders of modern medicine we still lose mothers and children. I would not have a child now except for these very same wonders. Even just 20 years ago he would not have survived. 100 years ago I would have lost both him and his mother. Now I have a healthy baby boy and a healthy wife.
The world is not a naturally nice place. Hominids were able to survive and thrive not because of some great natural strength or speed, but because of our intelligence. Our intelligence and ability to model and change and adapt to our natural environment seems to have been the driving force for our evolution for quite a while now. It's just that I'm not completely ready to throw out all of the last 10,000 years of that evolution.
Look, I see, and agree with much of what I read and observe about the benefits of eating like we ate while our physical evolution developed. I just don't think I'm willing to chuck it all and live like my ancestors did 10-12,000 years ago. (actually, some of my ancestors were still wandering nomadic hearders some 2500 years ago)
I think where the disagreement in our perspectives may come from is definition of the problem. I believe the problem is that we don't know enough, about how our body really works, about how we can get the most out of what we have both physically and mentally. Others, and I'm not saying this is you, I'll obviously let you speak for yourself, may feel that we have forgotten the real knowledge, how to live "naturally" in this world.
The world is the same, but the approach is different. I think that if we know more, we can use our intelligence to live well, we just don't know enough yet. Others think that we need to forget and return to some time in the past where some think we were all better off. Reality is, that won't be happening.
The genie is out of the bottle, we can either progress towards a future where we understand our environment and our selves better, and strive towards goals of harmonious existence, or we continue on our path of ignorant destruction of our environment and poisoning of our selves. Regardless of what we may want, technology is progressing. Even if someone is somehow able to move back to the savannah, they will not escape for long. It's still a running away.
I will be the first to admit that technology has brough death and destruction along with the benefits. Like all of our human inventions from fire onwards, with power comes responsibility, with every extension of our abilities comes the possiblity of abuse. The answer to this, I believe, is to be vigilant and careful because there is no going back.
My 2-cents. I don't want to hijack this thread, so we can stop here or you can respond but I won't keep up this side-track. Sorry I caused the kerfuffle (sp?)
Plane