Uriah

The general trend as far as looks go is that present day women are vastly more beautiful and athletic looking on average than those in the past, whereas in the change is more ambiguous (I think they’re a little less handsome).

There are a lot of 12 year olds who watch basketball or soccer from the 80’s and mock the slowness of the athletes, while their wise elders instruct that either 1. Those guys didn’t have fancy weightlifting/nutrition or 2. The old guys were actually better. Neither is true.

While heights have stopped growing, every upcoming cohort of young people is more athletic than the last, even while their hands and fine motor skills are weaker. There were not janitors in 1975 with the athleticism of Zion or Lebron waiting for NBA salaries to go up.

When Kevin Durant entered the NBA he was roundly mocked for not being able to bench 180 pounds on draft day. But in 1986 the Nigerian born Hakeem Olajuwon’s teammates teased him for not being able to lift 130. People who grow up malnourished and inflamed are different.

What explains the difference in strength? Since birth weights went up for decades, one way to approach the problem is to ask why low birth weight infants are so weak as adults.

I think the underlying metabolic difference between generations is that older people tend to oxidize fat into energy more easily, which contributes to their thinness and vigor, but also ages them faster as opposed to younger folks who tend to store fat/muscle instead.

The best illustration of “spillover” is the incredible increase in the size of the ass and thighs in girls. This is not due to squatting or implants, because you see it at very young ages. There are 1st grade girls in 2021 that have asses that didn’t used to show up until 16.

The way to utilize this information to understand autism treatment is to look expectantly toward the use of PPAR agonist drugs like pioglitazone or fenofibrate which upregulate fatty acid oxidation

A few months ago I wrote a thread which detailed how grip strength has declined in the West universally, to the point where most top arm wrestlers are over 40, even though grip strength declines at 30.https://twitter.com/crimkadid/status/1312567390148931587 …

What was really stunning was that when you looked at the age of the competitors there was a huge drop off in those born after 1980. In the US and North Europe, the first cohorts to attain maximum adult height were born around 1978.

My belief is that kids born around the same year as Tom Brady received the maximum beneficial dose of growth and nutrition before we reached some kind of Omega Point that natural selection had never designed us for.

For most of history the average North European male height was 5’5-5’6”, with exceptionally good conditions leading to heights of up to 5’8”. Through most of history people never even came close to maxing out their size, producing a problem natural selection has yet to solve.

If you have autistic relatives, you might be curious how this kind of growth spillover actually leads to autism. My stance is that much of autism qualifies as “precocious depression”, in which normal depressive symptoms occur so early as to become fixed.

Depression and autism are both characterized by low levels of brain blood flow; from a certain fmri point of view autism doesn’t look _like_ depression it looks like it IS depression, but depression that begins at an abnormally early point in development.

When people become depressed they undergo mental declines in areas like psychomotor speed and episodic memory for real events that sometimes outlast the depression by months. The decline in memory leads to a kind of self-centered rumination reminiscent of autism.

Hopefully that makes sense, but what’s much more baffling is how exactly autism would be associated with high intelligence, likely having something to do with their overgrown frontal lobes.

Autistics have large, impressive looking frontal lobes, but autism is in many ways actually reminiscent of the executive dysfunction and avolition of people who have suffered frontal lobe damage. It's possible there are just too many cells.

A solution to the problem might be glimpsed by looking at childhood prodigies, among whom autism in close relatives is much more common than among the general population. https://www.scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Ruthsatz-Urbach-2012.pdf …. The world’s greatest mathematician, Terence Tao, has a severely autistic brother

The autistic frontal lobe can be compared to a huge ceremonial sword a man keeps on his wall. It looks powerful, but if he actually tries to swing it he fails so miserably he’d be better off with his fists. But if the right, rare person came along to pick it up.....

I do think, though, that the autistic frontal lobe is evidence of an isolated mental superiority. The frontal lobe’s role in working memory, in blocking the sensory interference of the outside world, interacts with episodic memory deficits to produce a kind of blindness.

One of the few conditions that competes with tuberous sclerosis in its autism overlap is congenital blindness: nearly half of children born blind have autistic symptoms and this group also produces prodigies at a greatly elevated rate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693122/pdf/12639331.pdf …

Autistics often seem to be half-blind, unable to track what’s happening around them. You might ask them to pick up an object on the other side of the room and see them scanning desperately trying to identify something five feet away.

I once saw a very smart autistic kid waiting in a lunch line with a look of deep concentration on his face. A cook put a cupcake on his tray and waited for him to leave, which he didn’t, eventually asking politely: “Uh, can I get my cupcake?” He hadn’t seen it.

Of all the autistics I have ever met this particular kid had the best memory, a genuine prodigy. The autistic deficit in their awareness of the real world is in part a pure defect related to depression, but it’s also the result of a genuinely superior ability to focus attention.