The Sleep and the Reasoning with the Ancestors
Joseph Everett posted an interesting video about sleep on his YouTube channel What I've Learned. This video is about, among other things, how much sleep we need, whether we can catch up on sleep, how sleep affects our effectiveness, our health and our lifespan, which factors positively influence our sleep, and about the role of time, light, temperature and food.
What I found particularly good: Everett gives a nice example against the frequent, speculative and scientific acting argument with the ancestors. This line of reasoning goes something like this: One speculates about how our ancestors were and how they lived. Our ancestors asserted themselves through us, their descendants, so their behavior was good and exemplary, because otherwise they would not have asserted themselves. The past of our ancestors therefore explains and determines the present of their descendants and thus us. We should therefore orient ourselves to our ancestors in our lifestyle and for explanations of the present. I've encountered this line of reasoning in particular with the topics of evolution, sociology, dating and the paleo diet.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that we know very little about our ancestors for sure, and so much of what appears to be scientific is a uncertain speculation, and thus the theory, which is often misrepresented as scientific fact, is heavily derived from the basic assumptions of that theory and is dependent on these assumptions, which of course could also be very different. I have no problem with creating scientific theories, on the contrary, it is part of the healthy and good scientific process; but I have a problem with the fact that highly speculative theories are presented as reliable knowledge and thus as the results of science.
Those primitive people shown by Everett in the section Ancient Humans weren’t sleep deprived? Doubt it. are a nice counter-example to the described argumentation. On the one hand, Matthew Walker argues that nature never had to deal with sleep deprivation before because our ancestors didn't have a problem with sleep deprivation. On the other hand, against this argument speaks that the primitive people that we can observe, and are the closest to our assumed ancestors, have sleep deprivation and describe it. Matthew Walker is therefore very likely wrong in his talk about the sleep patterns of our ancestors, and the conclusions he draws further from this become therefore questionable.
If one now wants to argue like Walker, one should mark his argumentation as being based on uncertain basic assumptions. Anyone who presents this argumentation and its conclusions as reliable knowledge is telling the untruth. The same applies in particular to the areas of evolution, sociology, dating and the paleo diet.