Exercise: For your health, grin and bear it

Bears hibernate. "But," according to Bernd Heinrich's book, Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, "they were for a long time not considered to hibernate, simply because their body temperature showed only modest drops and hibernation was defined in terms of low body temperature." [p. 258]

One of the first issues of hibernating bears to be studied was how, despite maintaining a high metabolic rate (high body temperature), the bear still does not need to drink or urinate all winter....[p. 259]

    The answer is fascinating, but I'm not going to summarize it; you're better off picking up this wonderful book yourself, anyway.
    But bears also

do without...exercise [during their winter hibernation] and suffer no ill effects....
    Hibernating bears accomplish metabolic feats that, if we knew their secrets, would likely lead to cures for many human ills. They have the secrets of how to survive lack of exercise, and then, after five months of resting, of how to get up and walk up a mountain. In all of those months of what amounts to bed rest, they suffer no bed sores. They have marginal loss of muscle mass and no change in muscle fiber type. Despite their non-weight-bearing position for months at a time, they do not suffer from bone loss or osteoporosis. After burning fat for fuel for months during which their cholesterol levels become double those of humans and those they have in the summer, yet they still don't suffer from hardening of the arteries or gallstones, conditions resulting from high cholesterol levels in us. Most of the enigmas that have been revealed in hibernating bears have not been solved [as of 2003, when the book was published], maybe because bears just can't be studied as conveniently as lab rats. We can be reasonably certain, however, that once we understand how bears hibernate through the winter, we will also have a larger window into ourselves. We inadvertently simulate a hibernation-like state of inactivity in our modern environment, a new state of nature to which we are not well-adapted. [pp. 260, 262]

We are not well-adapted to physical inactivity, and we need to avoid it. That's where the book's exercise health advice comes in:

We require mechanical stress of exercise on our skeleton to maintain bone structure and function...Most of the American population subjects itself to the physical stress of inactivity [emphasis mine]...Every hour of vigorous exercise as an adult was repaid [in a study of "the effects of lifestyle on 17,000 Harvard students for twenty-five years"] with two hours of additional life span [how did they concluded that?]. There is, obviously, a limit to the benefits of human exercise or else more exercise could make us immortal. Instead, too much exercising increases the aging process as well. I suspect the debate of optimum exercise for maximum longevity may relate less to how much exercise we get than to how many calories we take in versus how many we burn off. There is a correlation between eating less and having a longer lifespan. But of course starvation shortens life, and there is thus also a correlation between eating more and having a longer lifespan. The difference is in the range of food intake versus the amount of exercise. [pp. 260-261]

    Bernd Heinrich has been a marathoner and has also written a book about running: Why We Run: A Natural History.

"Insects own the world"

Bernd Heinrich

The bumper sticker on the 1992 Honda Accord that we "inherited" from our daughter (who now drives a boat) occasionally gets an admiring comment. It features a statement attributed to Chief Seattle (1780-1866), a Duwamish chief (not a Suquamish chief, according to Wikipedia): "The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth."
    Or to the insects? I'm reading Bernd Heinrich's stunning book Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival (2003), whose accounts of animal adaption to winter are mind-boggling. I'm not going to quote one of those particular accounts just now, but rather this general statement about insects [pp. 178-179]:

To an entomologist and anyone who aspires to be one, there is no life-form on earth as diverse, varied, tough, and inventive as the insects. In their teeming millions of species, they own the world [emphasis mine]. We may not like many of them that compete with us for food, fiber, timber,or that suck our blood and spread our diseases, but we are obliged to acknowledge their tenacious success, and we may admire many of them for their stunning beauty. Within the animal world they have collectively pushed the limits of things possible, in terms of diversity, beauty, noxiousness, social organization, architecture, powers of flight, sensory capabilities, and ability to survive extremes of climate. And when I contemplate these organsms that are much more ancient than us, and that will long survive us, I wonder about the "secret" of their success....
    Insects' success is derived from exploiting individual specificity. No one way is best. Insects achieve their success through their diversity, where each individual case is special within the generalizations. Each species is adapted ever more specifically into a specialist niche, catering to specific individual needs. An ever-greater narrowing down to the specific has resulted in miniaturization, and ever-greater diversity. Insects exhibit an exhilaration and a celebration of the exceptions, where anything goes that can. There are few boundaries, because there has been no enforcement or encapsulation by or in laws. That is why they are so successful, and I suspect that it would be difficult to find an entomologist who is also a theist, who believes that there is a force or a power that hands down rules because "he" deems them good. No entomologist could fathom why fleas, mosquitoes, tsetse flies, migratory locusts, and dozens of other insects would have been deliberately created and let loose to cause indiscriminate and unimaginable agony to millions of totally innocent human children and adults over all the ages of humanity.

At Caffe Driade in Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon, during coffee with a friend who had retired at the end of February, I thought of the Earth's not belonging to us.
    We had lots to catch up on, mainly books and movies and TV programs. He recommended the 2008 film, Dean Spanley. "If you like dogs [which he knows we do], you'll love it." And did we ever! Last nigth. For it, I could have added another "E" to my "ExtraOrdinary" rating.
    We talked about Christopher Hitchens. "No," I said, "he hasn't died, but he is suffering from esophageal cancer. Hitchens said on 60 Minutes that the chance of surviving esophageal cancer is five percent."
    I thought of my own "Barrett's esophagus."
    My friend asked me if I'd read god Is Not Great. He said he'd only read comments about it.
    I was surprised that he hadn't heard of Sam Harris, or his book The End of Faith, which had been a self-affirming book for me, as I've described elsewhere on Moristotle.
    I told him about Harris's latest book, The Moral Landscape, about its proposed central moral value, the well-being of conscious beings.
    "Conscious beings includes other animals," I said.
    "Yes," he said. "One of my daughters is a vegan, and [his wife] and I are almost-vegetarians. Respect for all conscious life."

    That's when I thought of the bumper sticker. "Gaia," I said. "The living Earth itself created all the life on it, using the materials of its molten beginning over its four and a half billion years."
    He agreed.

The Earth created us. And insects, too—Bernd Heinrich got it wrong: insects don't own the world, any more than we do.
    But they will likely inherit it from us (still be on board after we're all gone).