The China Study II: Gender, mortality, and the mysterious factor X

WarpPLS and HealthCorrelator for Excel were used to do the analyses below. For other China Study analyses, many using WarpPLS as well as HealthCorrelator for Excel, click here. For the dataset used, visit the HealthCorrelator for Excel site and check under the sample datasets area. As always, I thank Dr. T. Colin Campbell and his collaborators for making the data publicly available for independent analyses.

In my previous post I mentioned some odd results that led me to additional analyses. Below is a screen snapshot summarizing one such analysis, of the ordered associations between mortality in the 35-69 and 70-79 age ranges and all of the other variables in the dataset. As I said before, this is a subset of the China Study II dataset, which does not include all of the variables for which data was collected. The associations shown below were generated by HealthCorrelator for Excel.

The top associations are positive and with mortality in the other range (the “M006 …” and “M005 …” variables). This is to be expected if ecological fallacy is not a big problem in terms of conclusions drawn from this dataset. In other words, the same things cause mortality to go up in the two age ranges, uniformly across counties. This is reassuring from a quantitative analysis perspective.

The second highest association in both age ranges is with the variable “SexM1F2”. This variable is a “dummy” variable coded as 1 for male sex and 2 for female, which I added to the dataset myself – it did not exist in the original dataset. The association in both age ranges is negative, meaning that being female is protective. They reflect in part the role of gender on mortality, more specifically the biological aspects of being female, since we have seen before in previous analyses that being female is generally health-protective.

I was able to add a gender-related variable to the model because the data was originally provided for each county separately for males and females, as well as through “totals” that were calculated by aggregating data from both males and females. So I essentially de-aggregated the data by using data from males and females separately, in which case the totals were not used (otherwise I would have artificially reduced the variance in all variables, also possibly adding uniformity where it did not belong). Using data from males and females separately is the reverse of the aggregation process that can lead to ecological fallacy problems.

Anyway, the associations with the variable “SexM1F2” got me thinking about a possibility. What if females consumed significantly less wheat flour and more animal protein in this dataset? This could be one of the reasons behind these strong associations between being female and living longer. So I built a more complex WarpPLS model than the one in my previous post, and ran a linear multivariate analysis on it. The results are shown below.

What do these results suggest? They suggest no strong associations between gender and wheat flour or animal protein consumption. That is, when you look at county averages, men and women consumed about the same amounts of wheat flour and animal protein. Also, the results suggest that animal protein is protective and wheat flour is detrimental, in terms of longevity, regardless of gender. The associations between animal protein and wheat flour are essentially the same as the ones in my previous post. The beta coefficients are a bit lower, but some P values improved (i.e., decreased); the latter most likely due to better resample set stability after including the gender-related variable.

Most importantly, there is a very strong protective effect associated with being female, and this effect is independent of what the participants ate.

Now, if you are a man, don’t rush to take hormones to become a woman with the goal of living longer just yet. This advice is not only due to the likely health problems related to becoming a transgender person; it is also due to a little problem with these associations. The problem is that the protective effect suggested by the coefficients of association between gender and mortality seems too strong to be due to men "being women with a few design flaws".

There is a mysterious factor X somewhere in there, and it is not gender per se. We need to find a better candidate.

One interesting thing to point out here is that the above model has good explanatory power in regards to mortality. I'd say unusually good explanatory power given that people die for a variety of reasons, and here we have a model explaining a lot of that variation. The model  explains 45 percent of the variance in mortality in the 35-69 age range, and 28 percent of the variance in the 70-79 age range.

In other words, the model above explains nearly half of the variance in mortality in the 35-69 age range. It could form the basis of a doctoral dissertation in nutrition or epidemiology with important  implications for public health policy in China. But first the factor X must be identified, and it must be somehow related to gender.

Next post coming up soon ...

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Washing with an Ecoegg

Having had a week of half-term fun, it's time to channel the domestic goddess spirit and get back to the chores.   Can you sense my lack of enthusiasm?  Well I suppose a girl can't be off enjoying herself all of the time and before the excitement of Halloween kicks off, today's task is catching up with a huge pile of laundry!

Anyone who's followed this blog for a while will know just how much I adore my relationship with the washing machine.  In fact this old post about washing with balls was as true then as it is now, except for the tiny detail about the balls.

Don't get me wrong.  The Eco Balls have done a fabulous job, despite one getting lost and another getting warped, leaving me with just one single ball to tackle the washday woes! They've also saved us loads of money that we would have otherwise spent on detergent.  However, with only one fully functioning ball after three years of usage, I was recently left wondering how effective it all was.

Then just as I was pondering a temporary return to washing powder until I sorted out an alternative solution, out of the blue, in the guise of a fairy godmother, I received an invitation to test out something new.

Of course if it had been the real Fairy Godmother, my pumpkin would have turned into a carriage, I'd have been adorned with glimmering satin and glittering diamonds and despatched to the nearest high society ball, with the local mice dressed as handsome footmen.

Instead, I was offered...... an Ecoegg!

I suppose that despite my dreams of running away from the domestic drudgery of the laundry, and having already won over my Prince Charming 19 years ago, this fairy godmother knew what I really needed and so the trial commenced.

Three months on, having tackled piles upon piles of laundry, I am pleased to say that the Ecoegg is still going strong. I haven't lost it!  It's still in one piece and all's good. 

I can't tell whether the Ecoegg is more effective than the Eco balls in terms of washing results.  They are both comparable, absolutely perfect for getting your average laundry pile as fresh as a daisy but in need of extra help when it comes to more grubby marks that the children sometimes get on their clothes.

However, having experienced the two products, I admit that I like the Ecoegg more.  I love the fact that it's a single item and from a design perspective, well it feels less clumsy.

If you've never considered the switch from laundry detergent before, I'd seriously recommend giving it a go.  I can't remember how much we used to spend on monthly top-ups now but I'd hazard a guess that since 2008 we've saved somewhere in the region of £350.

Admittedly the lack of "fresh laundry" scent takes getting used to at first, but it doesn't take long to realise that it's actually one of the advantages and soon becomes more preferable to the chemically induced detergent scent that previously filled our drawers.

Well I guess all this talk of laundry is not actually going to get it done.  I've already admitted how I let the side down for womanhood when it comes to multi-tasking.  So for now I'll bid you Adieu and go and salute the washing pile and then it's time to hunt down a pumpkin....Fairy Godmother, if you are looking in, I still fancy the idea of turning it into a carriage once Halloween is over and perhaps popping to the ball too.  

What's that..."In my dreams"?

Oh well - Washer Woman it is then - see you next week!

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More information about the Ecoegg and how it works can be found at www.ecoeggonline.com.  As a comparison, you can also find out more about the Eco Balls here.

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The China Study II: Animal protein, wheat, and mortality … there is something odd here!

WarpPLS and HealthCorrelator for Excel were used in the analyses below. For other China Study analyses, many using WarpPLS and HealthCorrelator for Excel, click here. For the dataset used, visit the HealthCorrelator for Excel site and check under the sample datasets area. I thank Dr. T. Colin Campbell and his collaborators at the University of Oxford for making the data publicly available for independent analyses.

The graph below shows the results of a multivariate linear WarpPLS analysis including the following variables: Wheat (wheat flour consumption in g/d), Aprot (animal protein consumption in g/d), Mor35_69 (number of deaths per 1,000 people in the 35-69 age range), and Mor70_79 (number of deaths per 1,000 people in the 70-79 age range).

Just a technical comment here, regarding the possibility of ecological fallacy. I am not going to get into this in any depth now, but let me say that the patterns in the data suggest that, with the possible exception of some variables (e.g., blood glucose, gender; the latter will get us going in the next few posts), ecological fallacy due to county aggregation is not a big problem. The threat of ecological fallacy exists, here and in many other datasets, but it is generally overstated (often by those whose previous findings are contradicted by aggregated results).

I have not included plant protein consumption in the analysis because plant protein consumption is very strongly and positively associated with wheat flour consumption. The reason is simple. Almost all of the plant protein consumed by the participants in this study was probably gluten, from wheat products. Fruits and vegetables have very small amounts of protein. Keeping that in mind, what the graph above tells us is that:

- Wheat flour consumption is significantly and negatively associated with animal protein consumption. This is probably due to those eating more wheat products tending to consume less animal protein.

- Wheat flour consumption is positively associated with mortality in the 35-69 age range. The P value (P=0.06) is just shy of the 5 percent (i.e., P=0.05) that most researchers would consider to be the threshold for statistical significance. More consumption of wheat in a county, more deaths in this age range.

- Wheat flour consumption is significantly and positively associated with mortality in the 70-79 age range. More consumption of wheat in a county, more deaths in this age range.

- Animal protein consumption is not significantly associated with mortality in the 35-69 age range.

- Animal protein consumption is significantly and negatively associated with mortality in the 70-79 age range. More consumption of animal protein in a county, fewer deaths in this age range.

Let me tell you, from my past experience analyzing health data (as well as other types of data, from different fields), that these coefficients of association do not suggest super-strong associations. Actually this is also indicated by the R-squared coefficients, which vary from 3 to 7 percent. These are the variances explained by the model on the variables above the R-squared coefficients. They are low, which means that the model has weak explanatory power.

R-squared coefficients of 20 percent and above would be more promising. I hate to disappoint hardcore carnivores and the fans of the “wheat is murder” theory, but these coefficients of association and variance explained are probably way less than what we would expect to see if animal protein was humanity's salvation and wheat its demise.

Moreover, the lack of association between animal protein consumption and mortality in the 35-69 age range is a bit strange, given that there is an association suggestive of a protective effect in the 70-79 age range.

Of course death happens for all kinds of reasons, not only what we eat. Still, let us take a look at some other graphs involving these foodstuffs to see if we can form a better picture of what is going on here. Below is a graph showing mortality at the two age ranges for different levels of animal protein consumption. The results are organized in quintiles.

As you can see, the participants in this study consumed relatively little animal protein. The lowest mortality in the 70-79 age range, arguably the range of higher vulnerability, was for the 28 to 35 g/d quintile of consumption. That was the highest consumption quintile. About a quarter to a third of 1 lb/d of beef, and less of seafood (in general), would give you that much animal protein.

Keep in mind that the unit of analysis here is the county, and that these results are based on county averages. I wish I had access to data on individual participants! Still I stand by my comment earlier on ecological fallacy. Don't worry too much about it just yet.

Clearly the above results and graphs contradict claims that animal protein consumption makes people die earlier, and go somewhat against the notion that animal protein consumption causes things that make people die earlier, such as cancer. But they do so in a messy way - that spike in mortality in the 70-79 age range for 21-28 g/d of animal protein is a bit strange.

Below is a graph showing mortality at the two age ranges (i.e., 35-69 and 70-79) for different levels of wheat flour consumption. Again, the results are shown in quintiles.

Without a doubt the participants in this study consumed a lot of wheat flour. The lowest mortality in the 70-79 age range, which is the range of higher vulnerability, was for the 300 to 450 g/d quintile of wheat flour consumption. The high end of this range is about 1 lb/d of wheat flour! How many slices of bread would this be equivalent to? I don’t know, but my guess is that it would be many.

Well, this is not exactly the smoking gun linking wheat with early death, a connection that has been reaching near mythical proportions on the Internetz lately. Overall, the linear trend seems to be one of decreased longevity associated with wheat flour consumption, as suggested by the WarpPLS results, but the relationship between these two variables is messy and somewhat weak. It is not even clearly nonlinear, at least in terms of the ubiquitous J-curve relationship.

Frankly, there is something odd about these results.

This oddity led to me to explore, using HealthCorrelator for Excel, all ordered associations between mortality in the 35-69 and 70-79 age ranges and all of the other variables in the dataset. That in turn led me to a more complex WarpPLS analysis, which I’ll talk about in my next post, which is still being written.

I can tell you right now that there will be more oddities there, which will eventually take us to what I refer to as the mysterious factor X. Ah, by the way, that factor X is not gender - but gender leads us to it.

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Adding glamour to zero waste

Vivienne Westwood Skyscraper design

Forget cardboard compactors.  These days jumping on your used pizza boxes in killer heels is the way to go to for adding extra sex appeal to recycling. Especially if you're wearing zero waste shoes.

Okay, I jest. I know I like to entertain my friends but the only way these shoes would add such glamour to my recycling activities is in carrying my feet towards my kitchen bin!   Performing star jumps in high heels just to crush old boxes is a little far fetched, even for me.

However, the zero waste aspect of these shoes isn't.  They're one of the latest designs to come out from Melissa, a Brazilian based shoe manufacturer that prides itself not just on great design and ethical policies but on zero waste operations too.  Not only does the factory recycle its waste water, but any excess material used in its current collection gets recycled into the next season's shoes.

Melissa shoes, made from its mono-material MelFlex (apparently a toxin-free adaptation of PVC, developed from bio-engineered and recovered plastics) have emerged as one of the darlings of the eco-style world and have become popular with vegans and the eco-conscious alike. They even come with the promise that they can be 100% recycled.   And I admit I too have fallen for them this season.  Thanks to a friend bringing them to my attention, I was quickly seduced by a pair of Vivien Westwood heels especially designed for Melissa's Anglomania range,

Yes I admit, they add that special "je-ne-sais-quoi" never witnessed by my wardrobe in recent years and their comfort will hopefully ensure they remain a key item for many decades to come.  However, despite my love of having shoes that have been made via zero waste production, I feel it fair to dispell the promise of a zero waste nirvana when it comes to recycling such items in the UK.

Just because a shoe is made from a single material that says it can be recycled, it doesn't mean it can be easily recycled.  The Melissa range is the only collection of shoes I know that have a recycling triangle on them, (revealing type 3 for PVC), however in the UK, the municipal collection of this type of material is not particularly widespread.  With that said, it is a sector that is currently being met by major research and development in Europe and eco-efficient collection and recycling processes, which replace less sustainable ways of managing such waste, should see much improvement over the next decade thanks to the development of voluntary agreements such as Vinylplus.

The recyclability may be marketed as a selling point when it comes to the end of a shoe's life. However as any "zero waster" should know, it's the product maintenance and reuse aspects that are the most obvious solutions to enjoying an item and managing its life-span post use.

As with anything, post-consumer recycling is just one consideration when making a purchase, but commitment to longevity and an ethical manufacturing process should be high on the agenda too, and for those reasons I think I'm going to enjoy my relationship with my Melissa shoes for many years to come.

I really was joking about jumping up and down on pizza boxes.  I think these shoes are more suited to moments of enjoying cocktails and wine.

And of course, the closest they will ever come to a recycling centre, is if a touch of glamour is needed when recycling the empties.

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More information about the Melissa shoe range can be found at www.melissa.com.br/en, supplemented by a wealth of reviews appearing in Eco magazines that include Ecosalon, Dare2Magazine and The Ecologist.

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Ornamental melons & food waste

(Photo credit: Bettnet on Flickr Creative Commons License)

How I wish I had the patience to carve fruit like this.  The best I can do is to create an oddity of star-shaped slices from a hacked apple, a technique I learned a while back when trying to reinvigorate my children's interest in fruit.  They were going through that phase, turning up their noses at anything but grapes and for a while much of the produce that I used to cart home from the supermarket would end up in the compost bin.

In short, our home was embellished with a weekly bowl of fruit whose purpose had become increasingly ornamental and it seemed I was the worst offender.  Not only did I keep buying it automatically without thinking the issue through, I'd repeat shopping habits that were just plain daft.

For instance, take my love of melons.  I'd spot them in the supermarket and pop one - or even two - in my trolley in anticipation of enjoying it later, thinking about the mouthwatering taste and refreshing texture.  Then I'd arrive home, unpack, juggle the children and cook dinner and end up too blimmin' knackered to even think about taking a knife to the fruit I'd imagined myself devouring.

This pattern would repeat itself for days, with the melon perched on my kitchen worktop. Against a backdrop of busy family life, thoughts of its stickiness and mess-creating potential would stand in the way of the promise of it tickling the tastebuds.  Eventually, it would just go off, creating that all familiar pungent melon stink and end up being tossed into the compost bin.  The following week it would be replaced by a whole new fresh piece of fruit and the cycle of desire and inconvenience would begin once more.

When I told this story on  Radio 4's Woman's Hour last week, I was met with an incredible response from friends and Twitter followers.  The tale of my ornamental melons attracted a fair portion of light-hearted innuendo banter, but after the laughs were over, reactions settled into shared stories of similar habits that friends recognised in themselves, telling me about their ornamental pineapples and other fruity installations.

It really is startling that - thanks in part to habits like this - as a country we still throw away 8.3 million tonnes of food, which could have been eaten.  That amounts to roughly £50 of food being wasted in domestic bins per month.  Extrapolate the melon story to the contents of the fridge and wasted leftovers, it becomes easy to see how this mounts up.

The experts say that tackling food waste comes down to planning and they are right.  Planning meals, budgeting properly and taking a shopping list really does help.  However, I'd go beyond that and say it also requires much more. Realising the impact on the family budget. awareness of why food waste is such an environmental issue, being able to identify with your own daft habits, developing a conviction to change and then adopting new ideas that enable you to do so are all equally important factors.

Four years ago I was totally pants at managing food waste.  As well as the fruity debacle, I'd think nothing of tossing out-of-date yoghurts in the bin along with leftovers from the serving bowl.   I'm a terrible planner, a half-hearted cook and even now a shopping list still fills me with fear of control as opposed to the helpful guide it should be. 

However, I stumbled through all sorts of changes in my habits.  I stopped buying the stuff that I'd regularly throw out. I swapped the time-consuming huge weekly shop for a couple of very short visits, instead buying only the fresh produce that we really needed and I also got into the habit of using up leftovers.  We saved loads of dosh in the meantime.   I admit that I am by no means the picture of perfection.  Threats from my husband, who sometimes reveals an unusal desire to post up some of my more dodgy looking carrots, could bear witness to that.  But addressing food waste has really made an enormous impact on our household.

So, if food waste is your thing and you are now determined to do something about it, don't just take my word for it.  I can tickle you away from using your rubbish bin, but for some really decent advice you'll find no better website than www.lovefoodhatewaste.com.  It's full of facts and figures to get you motivated and is packed with top tips that range from using up veg that might appear to be at death's door, recipes for leftovers, how best to use the freezer and understanding date-labelling.  If you use Facebook, you can also keep in touch with updates via the new Love Food Hate Waste community page.

Now coming back to those melons...I've just done a quick calculation and reckon I've probably saved somewhere in the region of £300 in the last three and a half years... and that ladies and gentleman is without the "Two for £3" deals. 

Flippin' 'eck. 

£300. 

For once I declare myself officially speechless!

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Book review: Perfect Health Diet

Perfect Health Diet is a book that one should own. It is not the type of book that you can get from your local library and just do a quick read over (and, maybe, write a review about it). If you do that, you will probably miss several important ideas that form the foundation of this book, which is a deep foundation.

The book is titled “Perfect Health Diet”, not “The Perfect Health Diet”. If you think that this is a mistake, consider that the most successful social networking web site of all time started as “The Facebook”, and then changed to simply “Facebook”; which was perceived later as a major improvement.

Moreover, “Perfect Health Diet” makes for a cool and not at all inappropriate acronym – “PHD”.

What people eat has an enormous influence on their lives, and also on the lives of those around them. Nutrition is clearly one of the most important topics in the modern world - it is the source of much happiness and suffering for entire populations. If Albert Einstein and Marie Curie were alive today, they would probably be interested in nutrition, as they were about important topics of their time that were outside their main disciplines and research areas (e.g., the consequences of war, and future war deterrence).

Nutrition attracts the interest of many bright people today. Those who are not professional nutrition researchers often fund their own research, spending hours and hours of their own time studying the literature and even experimenting on themselves. Several of them decide to think deeply and carefully about it. A few, like Paul Jaminet and Shou-Ching Jaminet, decide to write about it, and all of us benefit from their effort.

The Jaminets have PhDs (not copies of their books, degrees). Their main PhD disciplines are somewhat similar to Einstein’s and Curie’s; which is an interesting coincidence. What the Jaminets have written about nutrition is probably analogous, in broad terms, to what Einstein and Curie would have written about nutrition if they were alive today. They would have written about a “unified field theory” of nutrition, informed by chemistry.

To put it simply, the main idea behind this book is to find the “sweet spot” for each major macronutrient (e.g., protein and fat) and micronutrient (e.g., vitamins and minerals) that is important for humans. The sweet spot is the area indicated on the graph below. This is my own simplified interpretation of the authors' more complex graphs on marginal benefits from nutrients.

The book provides detailed information about each of the major nutrients that are important to humans, what their “sweet spot” levels are, and how to obtain them. In this respect the book is very thorough, and also very clear, including plenty of good arguments and empirical research results to back up the recommendations. But this book is much more than that.

Why do I refer to this book as proposing a “unified field theory” of nutrition? The reason is that this book clearly aims at unifying all of the current state of the art knowledge about nutrition, departing from a few fundamental ideas.

One of those fundamental ideas is that a good diet would provide nutrients in the same ratio as those provided by our own tissues when we “cannibalize” them – i.e., when we fast. Another is that human breast milk is a good basis for the estimation of the ratios of macronutrients a human adult would need for optimal health.

And here is where the depth and brilliance with which the authors address these issues can lead to misunderstandings.

For example, when our body “cannibalizes” itself (e.g., at the 16-h mark of a water fast), there is no digestion going on. And, as the authors point out, what you eat, in terms of nutrients, is often not what you get after digestion. It may surprise many to know that a diet rich in vegetables is actually a high fat diet (if you are surprised, you should read the book). One needs to keep these things in mind to understand that not all dietary macronutrient ratios will lead to the same ratios of nutrients after digestion, and that the dietary equivalent of “cannibalizing” oneself is not a beef-only diet.

Another example relates to the issue of human breast milk. Many seem to have misunderstood the authors as implying that the macronutrient ratios in human breast milk are optimal for adult humans. The authors say nothing of the kind. What they do is to use human breast milk as a basis for their estimation of what an adult human should get, based on a few reasonable assumptions. One of the assumptions is that a human adult’s brain consumes proportionally much less sugar than an infant’s.

Yet another example is the idea of “safe starches”, which many seem to have taken as a recommendation that diabetics should eat lots of white rice and potato. The authors have never said such a thing in the book; not even close. "Safe starches", like white rice and sweet potatoes (as well as white potatoes), are presented in the book as good sources of carbohydrates that are also generally free from harmful plant toxins. And they are, if consumed after cooking.

By the way, I have a colleague who has type 2 diabetes and can eat meat with white potatoes without experiencing hyperglycemia, as long as the amount of potato is very small and is eaten after a few bites of meat.

Do I disagree with some of the things that the authors say? Sure I do, but not in a way that would lead to significantly different dietary recommendations. And, who knows, maybe I am wrong.

For example, the authors seem to think that dietary advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) can be a problem for humans, and therefore recommend that you avoid cooking meat at high temperatures (no barbecuing, for example). I have not found any convincing evidence that this is true in healthy people, but following the authors’ advice will not hurt you at all. And if your digestive tract is compromised to the point that undigested food particles are entering your bloodstream, then maybe you should avoid dietary sources of AGEs.

Also, I think that humans tend to adapt to different macronutrient ratios in more fundamental ways than the authors seem to believe they can. These adaptations are long-term ones, and are better understood based on the notion of compensatory adaptation. For instance, a very low carbohydrate diet may bring about some problems in the short term, but long-term adaptations may reverse those problems, without a change in the diet.

The authors should be careful about small errors that may give a bad impression to some experts, and open them up to undue criticism; as experts tend to be very picky and frequently generalize based on small errors. Here is one. The authors seem to imply that eating coconut oil will help feed colon cells, which indeed seem to feed on short-chain fats; not exactly the medium-chain fats abundantly found in coconut oil, but okay. (This may be the main reason why indigestible fiber contributes to colon health, by being converted by bacteria to short-chain fats.) The main problem with the authors' implied claim is that coconut oil, as a fat, will be absorbed in the small intestine, and thus will not reach colon cells in any significant amounts.

Finally, I don’t think that increased animal protein consumption causes decreased longevity; an idea that the authors seem to lean toward. One reason is that seafood consumption is almost universally associated with increased longevity, even when it is heavily consumed, and seafood in general has a very high protein-to-fat ratio (much higher than beef). The connection between high animal protein consumption and decreased longevity suggested by many studies, some of which are cited in the book, is unlikely to be due to the protein itself, in my opinion. That connection is more likely to be due to some patterns that may be associated in certain populations with animal protein consumption (e.g., refined wheat and industrial seed oils consumption).

Thankfully, controversial issues and small errors can be easily addressed online. The authors maintain a popular blog, and they do so in such a way that the blog is truly an extension of the book. This blog is one of my favorites. Perhaps we will see some of the above issues addressed in the blog.

All in all, this seems like a bargain to me. For about 25 bucks (less than that, if you trade in quid; and more, if you do in Yuan), and with some self-determination, you may save thousands of dollars in medical bills. More importantly, you may change your life, and those of the ones around you, for the better.

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A rubbish hack to help sort out your waste

Amongst many things, the Dispatches documentary on Monday demonstrated how confused people still are over which packaging can be recycled in their local bins.

Packaging information, especially in relation to plastics, is still inconsistent and even though the on-pack labelling is getting better, for many the uncertainty of what can be recycled locally still pervades like a bad smell.

So if you're one of the hundreds of thousands who are still confused, here are my top tips.


1. Get the latest information from your council

Before you do ANYTHING ELSE, yes,  even embarking on reading the rest of this post, get on the blower to your local council, and ask the recycling officers EXACTLY what you should put in your bins. I know it sounds obvious, but if you've been pondering how complicated it all is, this really is the best place to start.


Council information generally describes recyclables by product type and you'll find local authorities mainly fall into two categories; those where you can recycle most types of plastic packaging (and will include yoghurt pots, margarine tubs and fruit punnets) or those that can't, thus limiting your plastics collection to simply bottles (including drinks bottles, detergent bottles, milk containers & toileteries).

If the information isn't clear.  Then ask questions so that you are clear on what can\can't be put in your local bins.

Another excellent source at your disposal (please excuse the pun), is the Recycle Now website.  You just pop in your postcode and Bob's your uncle, as the system will return the results of what can be recycled at your kerbside, as well as Bring Banks and Household Waste Recycling Centres.

Once you are confident about your council's rules, you will become less reliant on packaging labelling and hopefully less frustrated.

After all, if you can't recycle a plastic fruit punnet through your local collection, you just can't recycle it regardless what  message the packaging information might tell you, so don't fall into the trap of getting hot and bothered.  Instead try and buy the product loose instead.




2. Find out what the recycling labels really mean.

Even though your local recycling officer is the best source to use, the new on-pack recycling labels can offer some extra help, and that's mainly to raise awareness of the materials used and the likelihood that they can be recycled.

Again, the best place to find out about the labelling guidelines is at the Recycle Now website.  Remember, the labelling advice should be followed as a call to action, prompting you to check with your local authority (coming back to point 1) as opposed to a definitive guide in itself.

Once you are familiar with your local rules, even if the packaging doesn't have the correct up-to-date information printed on it you'll be more confident about what you should do.  For example, whilst shopping in a supermarket the other day, the own-brand bread packaging showed that it couldn't be recycled, despite the fact that a new in-store collection had been introduced only a month or so earlier, which actually collects packaging film such as bread bags and toilet-roll wrappers.



3. Avoiding packaging that can't be recycled.

With all the controversy surrounding recycling, with its complications, targets and whether it is sorted properly in the first place, it is very easy to lose sight of what we as consumers actually can do to reduce our waste contribution. 

We might not feel as though we have much power, but actually we do...lots!   There are many small changes that we can make, which can have a huge impact if they are applied across the nation.  I'd hoped to include some of these this week on Woman's Hour, but we simply ran out of time.  This list is not exhaustive by any means, and should really be considered as a starter for ten....

• Avoid packaging: Buy loose wherever possible, and support independent stores such as Unpackaged, which actively promotes that you use your own containers.

• Switch packaging: If there isn't an unpackaged option, switch products you can't recycle for those that you can. For example one particular major toothpaste brand comes in small thin plastic bottles, made from the same plastic as fizzy drinks bottles and can be recycled widely.

• Choose reusable: You can also reduce your packaging by switching from disposable products to reusable ones and prevent other waste too.  Jackie, who was featured in the Dispatches programme, took my advice about ditching floor wipes and bought a reusable mop.  This will save her loads of cash as well as reducing the amount of rubbish thrown away.  If you're an avid baby wipe user, try using soft washable cloths instead.

• Upcycle: If you can't recycle the packaging or avoid it completely, try upcycling it instead and raise some cash for your favourite charity.  Terracycle offers an upcycling service for packaging from brands that include Johnson's baby wipes, Ella's smoothies, Kenco coffee refills and Aquafresh toothpaste tubes and toothbrushes.  It's a great scheme for schools and local community groups.  The products are turned into new things that are sold on the Terracycle website.

• Split It: If you live in one of the areas that doesn't recycle plastic yoghurt pots, check your supermarket shelves for products that use less plastic.  There are pots on the market that now have a thinner plastic liner and a tear-off cardboard outer (just like the one in the photo).  These can be separated, with the cardboard being recycled and less plastic actually going to waste.   More packaging will move in this direction, especially thanks to innovations such as Split-it, so keep an eye out on the shelves for products that can help you reduce waste.

• DIY: That's right, do it yourself! If you're hacked off with not being able to recycle your ready-meal trays, see if you can save money and waste by making it yourself.  Or if you've got a great friend who can really cook, and I mean really cook, invite yourself around and have a great night out instead of worrying about what you're going to do with the dirty plastic tray and ikky film. Then invite them over next week for some beans on toast!

These few ideas are just touching the surface, but I hope it at leasts provides some food for thought.  I am sure you'll have loads more suggestions to add to this, which suit your lifestyle better.  And if you want more inspiration, then check out The Rubbish Diet Challenge, which you can read online for free.

Of course, all I've covered here is just packaging waste.  Food waste is much more of a significant issue.  If you're interested in tackling that, watch this space as I'll be back soon with more tips on what you can do at home.

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If you missed the Dispatches "Britain's Rubbish" documentary on Monday, it is still available for the next 27 days at 4OD. It's packed with footage about fly-tipping, plastics, recycling systems and politicians arguing their case as well as the story of how Jackie, a mum from Manchester reduced her family's rubbish from 13kg a week to 5kg.  I know I'm biased, but for me, that's the best bit.  (Just in case you're looking out for it, my appearance is at 15 minutes and 28 minutes into the programme).

If you want to catch up on the Woman's Hour broadcast this week featuring Bob Gordon, Head of Environment for the British Retail Consortium and Liz Goodwin, Chief Executive of WRAP, you can 'listen again' via the BBC Woman's Hour webpage.  Just look for the chapter on Zero Waste.

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Certain mental disorders may have evolved as costs of attractive mental traits

I find costly traits fascinating, even though they pose a serious challenge to the notion that living as we evolved to live is a good thing. It is not that they always deny this notion; sometimes they do not, but add interesting and somewhat odd twists to it.

Costly traits have evolved in many species (e.g., the male peacock’s train) because they maximize reproductive success, even though they are survival handicaps. Many of these traits have evolved through nature’s great venture capitalist – sexual selection.

(Source: Vangoghart.org)

Certain harmful mental disorders in humans, such as schizophrenia and manic–depression, are often seen as puzzles from an evolutionary perspective. The heritability of those mental disorders and their frequency in the population at various levels of severity suggests that they may have been evolved through selection, yet they often significantly decrease the survival prospects of those afflicted by them (Keller & Miller, 2006; Nesse & Williams, 1994).

The question often asked is why have they evolved at all? Should not they have been eliminated, instead of maintained, by selective forces? It seems that the most straightforward explanation for the existence of certain mental disorders is that they have co-evolved as costs of attractive mental traits. Not all mental disorders, however, can be explained in this way.

The telltale signs of a mental disorder that is likely to be a cost associated with a trait used in mate choice are: (a) many of the individuals afflicted are also found to have an attractive mental trait; and (b) the mental trait in question is comparatively more attractive than other mental traits that have no apparent survival costs associated with them.

The broad category of mental disorders generally referred to as schizophrenia is a good candidate in this respect because:
    - Its incidence in human males is significantly correlated with creative intelligence, the type of intelligence generally displayed by successful artists, which is an attractive mental trait (Miller & Tal, 2007; Nettle, 2006b).
    - Creative intelligence is considered to be one of the most attractive mental traits in human males, to the point of females at the peak of their fertility cycles finding creative but poor males significantly more attractive than uncreative but wealthy ones (Haselton & Miller, 2006).

The same generally applies to manic–depression, and a few other related mental disorders.

By the way, creative intelligence is also strongly associated with openness, one of the "big five" personality traits. And, both creative intelligence and mental disorders are seen in men and women. This is so even though it is most likely that selection pressure for creative intelligence was primarily exerted by ancestral women on men, not ancestral men on women.

Crespi (2006), in a response to a thorough and provocative argument by Keller & Miller (2006) regarding the evolutionary bases of mental disorders, makes a point that is similar to the one made above (see, also, Nettle, 2006), and also notes that schizophrenia has a less debilitating effect on human females than males.

Ancestral human females, due to their preference for males showing high levels of creative intelligence, might have also selected a co-evolved cost that affects not only males but also the females themselves though gene correlation between the sexes (Gillespie, 2004; Maynard Smith, 1998).

There is another reason why ancestral women might have possessed certain traits that they selected for in ancestral men. Like anything that involves intelligence in humans, the sex applying selection pressure (i.e., female) must be just as intelligent as (if not more than) the sex to which selection pressure is applied (i.e., males). Peahens do not have to have big and brightly colored trains to select male peacocks that have them. That is not so with anything that involves intelligence (in any of its many forms, like creative and interpersonal intelligence), because intelligence must be recognized through communication and behavior, which itself requires intelligence.

Other traits that differentiate females from males may account for differences in the actual survival cost of schizophrenia in females and males. For example, males show a greater propensity toward risk-taking than females (Buss, 1999; Miller, 2000), and schizophrenia may positively moderate the negative relationship between risk-taking propensity and survival success.

Why were some of our ancestors in the Stone Age artists, creating elaborate cave paintings, sculptures, and other art forms? Maybe because a combination of genetic mutations and environmental factors made it a sexy thing to do from around 50,000 years ago or so, even though the underlying reason why the ancestral artists produced art may also have increased the chances that some of them suffered from mental disorders.

A heritable trait possessed by males and perceived as very sexy by females has a very good chance of evolving in any population. That is so even if the trait causes the males who possess it to die much earlier than other males. In the human species, a male can father literally hundreds of children in just a few years. Unlike men, women tend to be very selective of their sexual partners, which does not mean that they cannot all select the same partner (Buss, 1999).

So, if this is true, what is the practical value of knowing it?

It seems reasonable to believe that knowing the likely source of a strange and unpleasant view of the world is, in and of itself, therapeutic. A real danger, it seems, is in seeing the world in a strange and unpleasant way (e.g., as a schizophrenic may see it), and not knowing that the distorted view is caused by an underlying reason. The stress coming from this lack of knowledge may compound the problem; the symptoms of mental disorders are often enhanced by stress.

As one seeks professional help, it may also be comforting to know that something that is actually very good, like creative intelligence, may come together with the bad stuff.

Finally, is it possible that our modern diets and lifestyles significantly exacerbate the problem? The answer is "yes", and this is a theme that has been explored many times before by Emily Deans. (See also this post, by Emily, on the connection between mental disorders and creativity.)

Reference
(All cited references are listed in the article below. If you like mathematics, this article is for you.)

Kock, N. (2011). A mathematical analysis of the evolution of human mate choice traits: Implications for evolutionary psychologists. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 9(3), 219-247.

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Me being serious on TV: Dispatches, Britain's Rubbish, C4 8pm

Morland Sanders, investigates Britain's rubbish for C4 Dispatches

I recently did some filming for the Dispatches documentary that's being broadcast tonight. It's called "Britain's Rubbish" and will be aired at 8pm on Channel 4.

When I was asked to contribute, a huge part of me wanted to batten down the hatches, draw the curtains and say "Thanks but no thanks". I normally stay away from the heavy stuff and regular readers will know I don't normally campaign against issues, but instead promote ideas that help empower householders to reduce waste, even if it's just by a small amount.

But as I was about to say "No thank you" to the documentary makers, my thoughts turned back to why I keep raising awareness of recycling and waste reduction. It's because it really is such a serious issue, despite my own natural tendency towards lightening the mood. And I am still as passionate about getting people to talk about their rubbish as I've ever been. Furthermore I'm a constant troubleshooter, who loves sharing positive information that I've gathered, even if it has turned this average householder into a bit of a waste geek. So, as I gave my reply I found myself changing my mind and saying "yes".

I knew the documentary could offer another avenue to raise awareness of all the advances that have taken place in recent years, including the fantastic On-Pack Recycling Labelling standard that helps shoppers better understand whether an item can be recycled. There's also the news how popular brands have made steady inroads into "lightweighting" packaging, designing out wasteful components as well introducing a greater percentage of recycled materials into their products. Such developments should make it far easier for shoppers to dramatically reduce their waste.

However, it soon became clear during filming that whilst being able to demonstrate some of the aforementioned positive points, the experience actually revealed that we are still a long way off from the ideal of a totally transparent system that consumers can easily rely on.

Participating in the documentary gave me the first opportunity in ages to examine a wide range of packaging and I was shocked at that no matter what strides have been made in the last couple of years, labelling across products is still highly inconsistent, with many lines not giving any clear instructions. There were plenty of examples where the text was too small to read easily or simply had outdated advice. Where some products would state that the packaging was recyclable (where facilities exist), other products packaged in the same material stated that it could not yet be recycled. 

Despite well thought-out labelling standards, design guidelines developed by the British Retail Consortium and WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme) and strong engagement campaigns to get these adopted by retailers and brands, it has become clear that much of the grocery sector is still lagging behind the need to hurry change. Coupled with this are many examples of overpackaged products that have are still being introduced as new lines.

As a shopper, consumer, householder and waste geek, this is far more than just frustrating. It is a major concern that clear consumer advice is not coming at the speed that is needed and that if the government is serious about its Zero Waste goals and waste prevention strategy, change in the manufacturing sector needs to be implemented faster than is currently tolerated, whether by government or by industry itself.

And the same could be said for the processing of mixed plastics packaging. It's seems very much a futile exercise to invest in labelling if recycling facilities aren't widespread.  It is very encouraging to see commercial plants for mixed plastics being implemented by Biffa and new developments in sorting technologies that are starting to be rolled out by Veolia, but the UK needs deeper investment to make more plants available at a faster speed with flexible contracts that enable disposal authorities to use them.

As things stand, it is increasingly difficult for busy households to shrink their packaging waste when so many local authorities are still unable to recycle common items such as yoghurt pots, margarine tubs, meat trays, ready meal trays, fruit punnets and the cake tubs, the latter of which are becoming an increasingly ubiquitous item in the confectionary aisle. I often argue that it's the consumer's choice to buy these products and I agree that many could chose to vote with their wallets and make alternative choices. However, not everyone has the impetus, the awareness, the time, motivation, access to choice or even the money to tackle their household waste in such way, and we shouldn't be expect it to ultimately be our responsibility either.

So whose responsibility is it to tackle the UK's waste problem?  Naturally we need to start with the brands and the manufacturers. After all, that's where our rubbish actually starts, during the design and manufacturing process. However it only then becomes rubbish if waste operators and local authorities can't collect it because the facilities aren't in place or they don't have markets onto which it can be sold on. However demand is changing and I've spoken to a variety of manufacturers, ranging from bottling plants to recycled plastic tile-makers who want to buy more recycled plastic from the UK.   So it's their responsibility too, to find sustainable solutions and a steady bank of customers. But then there's government, which has the power to legislate, to set much tougher targets, show greater leadership and make better investment to kickstart zero waste economies.

But it's all too easy to fall into the blame culture, which we often witness when one sector has a foodfight with the other.  It's time to move forward from that and whilst the big boys battle it out, I believe that consumers can have a key role to play too in reducing our residual packaging waste and food waste where possible. Whether that means taking a small amount of time to clear up any ambiguities over local recycling advice, switching from disposable to reusable products, boycotting overpackaged products, composting,  following great campaigns such as Love Food Hate Waste, Recycle Week or Zero Waste Week, or even asking for better recycling facilities in local neighbourhoods, it means we can take more control over our bins. And if you're unclear on the packaging guidelines tell your supermarket that you'll leave it all with them, asking that they get back to you.

The waste problem won't go away until we all start working together.  Waste reduction won't be sorted without the help of us, the consumer, even if we are mostly beholden to what's for sale in the shops. Against the background need to preserve our material resources and save energy, as a society, it starts by individuals taking more interest and being more aware of some small changes that could make a big difference and the wider consequences of what happens to the stuff that we chuck in our bins.

The documentary will be aired tonight and I'll be happy to follow up on any issues raised, as soon as I can.   However, I'm away for much of this week, including joining a discussion panel in London for tomorrow's Woman's Hour (BBC Radio 4, 10-11am)

So in the meantime, if you're a householder who is interested in how you can battle the elements of your rubbish bin and reduce the waste that goes in there, www.recyclenow.com and www.lovefoodhateswaste.com are great places to start, as is the fantastic website www.myzerowaste.com.  Of course you can also ring your local council for advice and if you're the chatty type, talk to friends and neighbours about how they reduce their rubbish.  You'll never know what local tips you'll find out.

But remember, don't feel guilty about what you can't do, just feel relieved about what you can!

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Many thanks go to the production team at Blakeway for inviting me to add my small contribution and also to Jackie and her family who were brave enough to let us go through their rubbish on camera.  I don't know which of my contributions will be featured but I'm looking forward to watching what else was unearthed during the wider filming.  More information about tonight's programe is shown below:

Dispatches: Britain's Rubbish, Channel 4 10 October 2011, 8pm

Dispatches lifts the lid on Britain's bins and asks what the plan is to tackle the country's growing rubbish problem.

Reporter Morland Sanders travels the UK in the wake of the government's Waste Policy Review to find out about bin collections, litter, excessive packaging and Britons' secret bin habits.  He finds householders angry about their bins not being collected every week and fly-tipping setting resident against resident.

He asks whether we can do more to help reduce the rubbish problem ourselves and sets a family the challenge of living without a bin for a fortnight. Can they really recycle everything?

On the high street, he questions whether we are simply sold too much packaging with the things we buy, making us throw far too much away, and sifts through litter to see who should be doing more to keep Britain tidy.

He also talks to the people who collect, sort and recycle our waste and discovers what happens to our paper and plastics once they are collected. Does profit win out over green considerations?

And he investigates whether the waste companies are really solving our rubbish problem.

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Karen meets Kevin at Grand Designs Live

Today I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin McCloud at the Grand Designs Live exhibition. Given that I'm a random blogger, I suppose it could have been any Kevin, so it was a real privilege to finally meet the man who, since the launch of Grand Designs on Channel 4, has left me and millions of others day-dreaming about designing our own homes.

But I didn't trek all the way up to Birmingham to talk to him about that perfect self-build dream, nor to wax lyrical about my obsession with proper lighting, one of his other passions.  What really interested me on this occasion was Kevin's Green Heroes, the range of eco products that he has selected to highlight at the show as a showcase for strong eco and ethical design.

So while Kevin McCloud was busy greeting visitors following the official opening, I took the opportunity to have a quick glance at the products that he'd chosen.  The ones that particularly caught my eye were "slate" roof tiles made from recycled plastic, unusual picture frames and a chest made from old tyres and some beautiful lights designed from old books that would have otherwise been discarded into landfill. There was even a gumdrop bin that was actually made from recycled chewing gum. 

Kevin McCloud with Anna Bullus andThe Gumdrop bin

 

Here's the gorgeous Lula Dot paper lampshade designed by Lucy Norman, which is made from discarded old books.

On meeting Kevin minutes later in the VIP Lounge, I asked how easy it was to discover such products.

Of course, it's a process he actually finds quite easy. Through his work he has access to a wide range of technologies and ideas and when he sees something new, it really does catch his attention.  However, he highlighted that one of the key criteria for this year's show was that the products had to be market-ready, as it is frustrating for visitors if they are inspired by the designs but unable to buy them.

As he settled into the conversation, Kevin's passion for his Green Heroes showcase was clear.

"What I love about these products is that they've been recontextualised," he revealed.

My ears pricked up and although I was recording the interview, it was a word I didn't want to lose.  In other settings I've heard the term "upcycled" but this concept seemed more specific.

"Recontextualising is when you take something and you change the setting contextually," he added "taking a functional quality material and changing it into something beautiful, thus persuading you that it's something else".

He went on to add that the first rule of recontextualisation is that the object being recycled should not be changed that much. Processing it minimally and turning into something else is the trick to clever design.

Kevin illustrated this point with the Tread Tyre recycled eco products, highlighting how the tread looks like carved wood and plays on the visual language of something else and it's the amazement that it is "something else" which contributes to the joy of ownership.


It was at this point that I showed Kevin my much-coveted handbag, which is made from decommissioned firehouse that would otherwise be discarded in landfill.  Could this be described as a recontextualised product?

After a moment of admiration, he confirmed that it indeed fitted the bill, with its clever design, using the different textures of a practical piece of emergency equipment and changing it into a desirable fashion accessory that resembled leather.


Changing mindsets

Like many of the designs that have been chosen for the Green Heroes showcase, I highlighted that such businesses with their size limitations can only "rescue" a small amount of waste for redesign and broached the question over how we get the wider industry to notice the same issues and follow greater opportunities to turn waste into useful products.

"It's a slow, somewhat painful and long process," Kevin replied.  "And in the context of the bag, one day other companies such as Mulberry will probably make them and then you'd likely find two or three brands flooding the market."

And he made another equally valid point,  "On one hand you want everyone to do it but on the other you'd like the small companies to thrive as well.  The issue is as much about creating a change in mindset in consumers and users."

Kevin explained, "There are lots of ways in which we can and should reappraise our relationships with made things.  Fundamentally the real problem is not whether we are making items out of leather or firehose, it's whether or not  it is made in a giant factory by people who are underpaid, exploited and the environment is damaged, the local ecology and biodiversity is wrecked, materials are squandered and carbon is burned."

Suddenly we'd progressed from the appreciation of clever design to the worrying issues of global manufacturing, something that is easy to forget when you're so mesmerised by the glossy world of a lifestyle exhibition such as Grand Designs Live.  Kevin McCloud's concerns run very deep.

"The root of the problems that we face is the disconnection that has happened between us and the things that we make, consume and use.  If we all met the people in the factories where our goods are made, we would think twice or even offer more money."

We were now broaching the need for wider education and Kevin McCloud is in a privileged position to do this. I asked if there were any more projects in the pipeline that would help make people more aware and adopt more sustainable practices.

He mentioned his new TV series as one particular example, which will be broadcast this autumn about his sustainable housing scheme in Swindon.  He says it's a project which came about in no small way because of what he'd seen in Mumbai, during the filming of Slumming it, where he spent two weeks living in the city slums.

He added,  "It's the principle of sharing, which underscores both a coherent civic society but also a more sustainable way of life, with low carbon and low resource use.  That use of sharing is what I saw in India, occuring in every walk of people's lives and it's something that we could be doing a lot more of here in our society."

"There are lots of ways of sharing, whether it's signing up to a car club, joining a food network, growing veg and swapping it with your neighbour or simply taking a bus.  It's down to how we eat, live, move around and consume.  These ideas point to a much more efficient way of life and much more lower carbon impact and resource use. It's only one in a small army of approaches but it's a real powerful one.  The whole idea of shared time, shared work, shared responsibility and shared ownership, is really interesting."

As we approached the end of the interview Kevin pointed to the key position that the UK holds in global society and asserted,

"This country was once the cradle of the industrial revolution and because of that we have an ethical responsibility to the rest of the world to demonstrate what the post industrial solutions should be."

I've often pondered this very thing and wondered whether we can actually succeed. I looked at Kevin and asked what he thought.

There came a light shrug and he replied, "For every wonderful new idea there is a terrible groan from a corner as the government backtracks on policy, or local council does the wrong thing or a business decides to give up on an idea due to the recession."

And as we were about to discuss the way that communities harness roots-based projects at the time of recession, our time was up and Kevin McCloud needed to move on to his next appointment. It was unfortunate as I could have listened to what he had to say for hours.

I thanked him for taking time out of his busy schedule to be interviewed by a random blogger.

"A blogger and a bag," he laughed as he picked up my recontextualised handbag again, coveting it once more. After he asked to look at the lining, he responded with a teasing comment and a warm smile  "I'm a blogger. You don't know me, but here are my credentials. That's a great calling card"

And as Kevin McCloud admired the lining that had been made from orange parachute material, I immediately regretted not recycling all my old receipts. Honestly woman!  If you're going to show Kevin your bag, the top tip really should be to declutter the contents first.

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Design guru and TV broadcaster Kevin McCloud also hosts Grand Designs Live. Based on his popular Channel 4 series, the inspirational and innovative home improvement, self-build and design show is running at the Birmingham NEC (7-9^th October) and will run next year from 5-13 May 2012 at the London Excel Centre. The show boasts over 500 exhibitors as well as offering free consultations, catering for both home owners looking for new ideas to renovate their homes and aspiring self-builders looking for advice, inspiration and value to build their very own Grand Design. Book ahead and see Kevin at the live show www.granddesignslive.com

Also, if you fancy living rent-free for a year to test out an Eco Home, check out the competition that is being promoted by Velux.

(Updated 8/10/11 with extra images & extra info about next year's show).

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Great evolution thinkers you should know about

If you follow a paleo diet, you follow a diet that aims to be consistent with evolution. This is a theory that has undergone major changes and additions since Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin proposed it in the 1800s. Wallace proposed it first, by the way, even though Darwin’s proposal was much more elaborate and supported by evidence. Darwin acknowledged Wallace's precedence, but received most of the credit for the theory anyway.

(Alfred Russel Wallace; source: Wikipedia)

What many people who describe themselves as paleo do not seem to know is how the theory found its footing. The original Wallace-Darwin theory (a.k.a. Darwin’s theory) had some major problems, notably the idea of blending inheritance (e.g., blue eye + brown eye = somewhere in between), which led it to be largely dismissed until the early 1900s. Ironically, it was the work of a Catholic priest that provided the foundation on which the theory of evolution would find its footing, and evolve into the grand theory that it is today. We are talking about Gregor Johann Mendel.

Much of the subsequent work that led to our current understanding of evolution sought to unify the theory of genetics, pioneered by Mendel, with the basic principles proposed as part of the Wallace-Darwin theory of evolution. That is where major progress was made. The evolution thinkers below are some of the major contributors to that progress.

Ronald A. Fisher. English statistician who proposed key elements of a genetic theory of natural selection in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. Fisher showed that the inheritance of discrete traits (e.g., flower color) described by Gregor Mendel has the same basis as the inheritance of continuous traits (e.g., human height) described by Francis Galton. He is credited, together with John B.S. Haldane and Sewall G. Wright, with setting the foundations for the development of the field of population genetics. In population genetics the concepts and principles of the theories of evolution (e.g., inheritance and natural selection of traits) and genetics (e.g., genes and alleles) have been integrated and mathematically formalized.

John B.S. Haldane. English geneticist who, together with Ronald A. Fisher and Sewall G. Wright, is credited with setting the foundations for the development of the field of population genetics. Much of his research was conducted in the 1920s and 1930s. Particularly noteworthy is the work by Haldane through which he mathematically modeled and explained the interactions between natural selection, mutation, and migration. He is also known for what is often referred to as Haldane’s principle, which explains the direction of the evolution of many species’ traits based on the body size of the organisms of the species. Haldane’s mathematical formulations also explained the rapid spread of traits observed in some actual populations of organisms, such as the increase in frequency of dark-colored moths from 2% to 95% in a little less than 50 years as a response to the spread of industrial soot in England in the late 1800s.

Sewall G. Wright. American geneticist and statistician who, together with Ronald A. Fisher and John B.S. Haldane, is credited with setting the foundations for the development of the field of population genetics. As with Fisher and Haldane, much of his original and most influential research was conducted in the 1920s and 1930s. He is believed to have discovered the inbreeding coefficient, related to the occurrence of identical genes in different individuals, and to have pioneered methods for the calculation of gene frequencies among populations of organisms. The development of the notion of genetic drift, where some of a population’s traits result from random genetic changes instead of selection, is often associated with him. Wright is also considered to be one of pioneers of the development of the statistical method known as path analysis.

Theodosius G. Dobzhansky. Ukrainian-American geneticist and evolutionary biologist who migrated to the United States in the late 1920s, and is believed to have been one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis. Much of his original research was conducted in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1930s he published one of the pillars of the modern synthesis, a book titled Genetics and the Origin of Species. The modern evolutionary synthesis is closely linked with the emergence of the field of population genetics, and is associated with the integration of various ideas and predictions from the fields of evolution and genetics. In spite of Dobzhansky’s devotion to religious principles, he strongly defended Darwinian evolution against modern creationism. The title of a famous essay written by him is often cited in modern debates between evolutionists and creationists regarding the teaching of evolution in high schools: Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.

Ernst W. Mayr. German taxonomist and ornithologist who spent most of his life in the United States, and is believed, like Theodosius G. Dobzhansky, to have been one of the main architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis. Mayr is credited with the development in the 1940s of the most widely accepted definition of species today, that of a group of organisms that are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. At that time organisms that looked alike were generally categorized as being part of the same species. Mayr served as a faculty member at Harvard University for many years, where he also served as the director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He lived to the age of 100 years, and was one of the most prolific scholars ever in the field of evolutionary biology. Unlike many evolution theorists, he was very critical of the use of mathematical approaches to the understanding of evolutionary phenomena.

William D. Hamilton. English evolutionary biologist (born in Egypt) widely considered one of the greatest evolution theorists of the 20th Century. Hamilton conducted pioneering research based on the gene-centric view of evolution, also know as the “selfish gene” perspective, which is based on the notion that the unit of natural selection is the gene and not the organism that carries the gene. His research conducted in the 1960s set the foundations for using this notion to understand social behavior among animals. The notion that the unit of natural selection is the gene forms the basis of the theory of kin selection, which explains why organisms often will instinctively behave in ways that will maximize the reproductive success of relatives, sometimes to the detriment of their own reproductive success (e.g., worker ants in an ant colony).

George C. Williams. American evolutionary biologist believed to have been a co-developer in the 1960s, together with William D. Hamilton, of the gene-centric view of evolution. This view is based on the notion that the unit of natural selection is the gene, and not the organism that carries the gene or a group of organisms that happens to share the gene. Williams is also known for his pioneering work on the evolution of sex as a driver of genetic variation, without which a species would adapt more slowly in response to environmental pressures, in many cases becoming extinct. He is also known for suggesting possible uses of human evolution knowledge in the field of medicine.

Motoo Kimura. Japanese evolutionary biologist known for proposing the neutral theory of molecular evolution in the 1960s. In this theory Kimura argued that one of the main forces in evolution is genetic drift, a stochastic process that alters the frequency of genotypes in a population in a non-deterministic way. Kimura is widely known for his innovative use of a class of partial differential equations, namely diffusion equations, to calculate the effect of natural selection and genetic drift on the fixation of genotypes. He has developed widely used equations to calculate the probability of fixation of genotypes that code for certain phenotypic traits due to genetic drift and natural selection.

George R. Price. American geneticist known for refining in the 1970s the mathematical formalizations developed by Ronald A. Fisher and William D. Hamilton, and thus making significant contributions to the development of the field of population genetics. He developed the famous Price Equation, which has found widespread use in evolutionary theorizing. Price is also known for introducing, together with John Maynard Smith, the concept of evolutionary stable strategy (ESS). The EES notion itself builds on the Nash Equilibrium, named after its developer John Forbes Nash (portrayed in the popular Hollywood film A Beautiful Mind). The concept of EES explains why certain evolved traits spread and become fixed in a population.

John Maynard Smith. English evolutionary biologist and geneticist credited with several innovative applications of game theory (which is not actually a theory, but an applied branch of mathematics) in the 1970s to the understanding of biological evolution. Maynard Smith is also known for introducing, together with George R. Price, the concept of evolutionary stable strategy (EES). As noted above, the EES notion builds on the Nash Equilibrium, and explains why certain evolved traits spread and become fixed in a population. The pioneering work by John Maynard Smith has led to the emergence of a new field of research within evolutionary biology known as evolutionary game theory.

Edward O. Wilson. American evolutionary biologist and naturalist who coined the term “sociobiology” in the 1970s to refer to the systematic study of the biological foundations of social behavior of animals, including humans. Wilson was one of the first evolutionary biologists to convincingly argue that human mental mechanisms are shaped as much by our genes as they are by the environment that surrounds us, setting the stage for the emergence of the field of evolutionary psychology. Many of Wilson’s theoretical contributions in the area of sociobiology are very general, and apply not only to humans but also to other species. Wilson has been acknowledged as one of the foremost experts in the study of ants’ and other insects’ social organizations. He is also known for his efforts to preserve earth’s environment.

Amotz Zahavi. Israeli evolutionary biologist best known for his widely cited handicap principle, proposed in the 1970s, which explains the evolution of fitness signaling traits that appear to be detrimental to the reproductive fitness of an organism. Zahavi argued that traits evolved to signal the fitness status of an organism must be costly in order to the reliable. An example is the large and brightly colored trains evolved by the males of the peacock species, which signal good health to the females of the species. The male peacock’s train makes it more vulnerable to predators, and as such is a costly indicator of survival success. Traits used for this type of signaling are often referred to as Zahavian traits.

Robert L. Trivers. American evolutionary biologist and anthropologist who proposed several influential theories in the 1970s, including the theories of reciprocal altruism, parental investment, and parent-offspring conflict. Trivers is considered to be one of the most influential living evolutionary theorists, and is a very active researcher and speaker. His most recent focus is on the study of body symmetry and its relationship with various traits that are hypothesized to have been evolved in our ancestral past. Trivers’s theories often explain phenomena that are observed in nature but are not easily understood based on traditional evolutionary thinking, and in some cases appear contradictory with that thinking. Reciprocal altruism, for example, is a phenomenon that is widely observed in nature and involves one organism benefiting another not genetically related organism, without any immediate gain to the organism (e.g., vampire bats regurgitating blood to feed non-kin).

There are many other more recent contributors that could arguably be included in the list above. Much recent progress has been made in interdisciplinary fields that could be seen as new fields of research inspired in evolutionary ideas. One such field is that of evolutionary psychology, which has emerged in the 1980s. New theoretical contributions tend to take some time to be recognized though, as will be the case with ideas coming off these new fields, because new theoretical contributions are invariably somewhat flawed and/or incomplete when they are originally proposed.

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