Here's my evolutionary "Just So Story" for why human kids like to wander away and put things into their mouths. Basically, they acted as food tasters for the group. Makes sense, since the group has invested in them the least, they know nothing important, and in a state of nature, they're likely to die anyways.
Yes, but the same investment was made in every other member of the group as well. However, everyone who made it well past childhood had a lot more knowledge, food, and material invested in them.
Re:Tarrare
by woodpanel on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @07:35PM
(#19091580)
While I chuckle reading your explanation I think you forgot to consider how much nursing is deeply ingrained in our nature by us being mammals.
> in a state of nature, they're likely to die anyways.
So while this part, where they would die if left alone, is certainly right, it would make the whole concept of us humans not laying eggs, putting some semen and mud on them and disappear into the wilderness an evolutional waste of time.
Plus, I have some acquaintances whom I suspect would very much prefer to go about their business that exact same way. So it's not a demand side problem either.
Re:Tarrare
by stcredzero on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @12:19PM
(#19097221)
So while this part, where they would die if left alone, is certainly right
Where did I say that the babies would be left alone and abandoned? Apparently you are unaware that in human communities with low technology, infant mortality can be pretty high alarmingly. You're also apparently stating that parents looking after children is not a "state of nature." (Or you're ascribing that to me, which, given you're alone in this, indicates you need to work on reading comprehension.)
Re:Tarrare
by grkvlt on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @07:52PM
(#19101907)
> make the whole concept of us humans not laying eggs, putting some semen and mud on them and disappear into the wilderness an evolutional waste of time.
> putting some semen and mud on them and disappear into the wilderness
It would, however, select for the most attentive mothers. However, a kid discovering a heretofore unknown poisonous plant would be a benefit. So too, would a kid discovering a heretofore unknown edible thing.
Re:Tarrare
by laumars on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @02:02AM
(#19093286)
We have a pretty good understanding of why kids put stuff in their mouths and it’s more about exploration and their mouths being more centre of their sensory experience at younger ages. But the following link explains it better than I could:
Anecdotally, my daughter didn’t have this behaviour. Even at a very young age she’d only ever put food stuff in her mouth. However I’ve seen so many other kids, children of friends and relatives, put random objects in their mouths to know that my daughter is the exception to the rule.
Re:Tarrare
by tim333 on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @06:50AM
(#19094411)
That explanation is a bit circular along the lines that kids like putting things in their mouths because they like putting things in their mouths. As to why we've evolved that way it's probably to build the immune system. It needs exposure to stuff in the environment to figure what to react to. The increase in asthma and allergies in the modern world is probably because kids don't get enough dirt exposure and then the immune system overacts later.
Re:Tarrare
by laumars on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @07:18AM
(#19094519)
> That explanation is a bit circular along the lines that kids like putting things in their mouths because they like putting things in their mouths.
That's not what the article says at all. It says most of the babies sensory experiences are oral because they lack mobility to explore things with other tactile senses. Granted the article doesn't example this specifically but a lot of sensory input will be suckling (dummies, mother's nipple / bottle's teat, their own digits, etc).
By the time they're a bit more mobile and can open their hand to grasp objects (remember the ability for a baby to even open their hand takes a few weeks to learn) happens, they've often already gotten into the habit of exploring the world via their mouths.
It doesn't say it in that article I linked to, but I do vaguely recall reading elsewhere that because babies develop tactile senses on their hands later than the senses in their mouth, babies will often have more nerve endings in their mouth. However I cannot find a source for that so this might be a detail I'm miss-remembering.
Re:Tarrare
by stcredzero on Wednesday February 06, 2019 @02:54PM
(#19099140)
We have a pretty good understanding of why kids put stuff in their mouths and it’s more about exploration and their mouths being more centre of their sensory experience at younger ages.
Cool. So long as you're not conflating evolutionary pressures with internal mental states, drives, and desires. Doing so would mean you're dipping into Lamarckianism.
Damn fine hypothesis. Juvenile mortality is naturally really high from the get-go [not just for humans, but practically all life forms] -- why not have them engage in the most high-risk experiments? I think that's brilliant.
Re:Tarrare
by hnick on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @06:19PM
(#19091095)
All that and no mention of food poisoning despite eating offal from the gutters and dung heaps. I wonder if his super-charged metabolism made for a super-charged immune system or it's something we can all get used to?
Re:Tarrare
by hosh on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @08:17PM
(#19091814)
I was wondering about that too.
Seems he still vomited indigestible things (when they gave him the live cat). The autopsy revealed an inner body full of ulcers and pus. Maybe his metabolism was so high, he was burning a lot of it out.
Re:Tarrare
by jandrese on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @04:04PM
(#19089809)
I'm not sure he was absorbing so many calories from those meals. It sounds more like he had an extremely overactive digestive tract and just couldn't keep anything inside long enough to digest. Think of it more as a permanent case of explosive diarrhea.
His use as a courier suggests that material was going through his digestive tract mostly intact.
"Hyperthyroidism can induce an extreme appetite, rapid weight loss, profuse sweating, heat intolerance, and fine hair. Bondeson (2006) speculates that Tarrare had a damaged amygdala; it is known that injuries to the amygdala in animals can induce polyphagia."
Re:Tarrare
by cryoshon on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @12:09PM
(#19087232)
very interesting medical case history. i assume that the guy had a metabolic disorder of some kind, although a unique gut microbiome might have been at play too.
Re:Tarrare
by overgard on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @06:48PM
(#19091298)
Just a theory (not a doctor), a damaged pancreas could cause insufficient insulin, which would cause food energy not to be absorbed (although I don’t think it explains the other symptoms)
Re:Tarrare
by aboutruby on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @07:26PM
(#19091521)
> At the autopsy, Tarrare's gullet was found to be abnormally wide and when his jaws were opened, surgeons could see down a broad canal into the stomach. His body was found to be filled with pus, his liver and gallbladder were abnormally large, and his stomach was enormous, covered in ulcers and filling most of his abdominal cavity.
Re:Tarrare
by kmm on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @06:37PM
(#19091239)
Makes me think of DNP, a substance which acts to dissipate the protein gradient in our mitochondria, wasting the energy that the mitochondrion would otherwise use to make ATP. The wasted energy is turned into heat, giving its users an elevated body temperature and characteristic sweating. It'd be the perfect dieting aid were it not so toxic.
There are proteins in the human body having the same effect, performing some minor functions. Maybe he had a mutation making those proteins very prevalent, essentially making his metabolism very wasteful. Although I don't know if such a sustained fever wouldn't be deadly.
Re:Tarrare
by StavrosK on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @11:23AM
(#19086753)
Whenever I read articles about things that happened hundreds of years ago, I always think that most of it was made up along the way, so I take it with a boulder of salt.
Does anyone know how accurate these sorts of records are?
Re:Tarrare
by kej on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @12:46PM
(#19087566)
This isn't something that got passed down like a children's game of "telephone"; the outlandish details are present in the original contemporaneous accounts and we have copies of them (digitized even! [1]). So, if it was made up, it was at least made up at the time.
However, the person making the claim is Pierre-François Percy [2], chief surgeon of Napoleon's Grande Armée and a member of the Académie des sciences and, later, honorary member of the Académie Royale de Médecine. Inventing a case like this would be wildly out of character.
Reflexively dismissing every story from the past is just as fallacious as believing every detail.
Re:Tarrare
by close04 on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @11:59AM
(#19087137)
This thing reads more like a campfire story. I also wonder how much of this is real and how much is the inevitable embellishment added over the past more than 2 centuries.
Re:Tarrare
by trhway on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @02:09PM
(#19088628)
>Eating his body weight in a day? That's pretty outlandish and easily debunked.
no. I don't understand what you're basing your claim on. As far as i see it is easily possible. Even with anatomically normal gut some stuff can make from mouth to the other end in as short as 30 minutes. So the bandwidth is there (say it takes 1 hour to make through the 7m length of the gut pipe which say of 4 square centimeter section - that is 2.8 liter/hour speed) . The story of that guy says that he had severe diarrhea and overall really suggests that he had severe gut bacterial issues - that is one of the situations when stuff makes it very quickly through the gut.
He is described as of a small weight despite significant food intake - that again matches the situation of the food quickly passing through instead of thorough digestion. He is described as constantly scavenging and eating - say 15 hours a day 4 kg/hour (in the ballpark of the above mentioned 2.8l/hour) gives you 60kg. 4kg/hour quickly moving non-stop though the gut does sound like a severe diarrhea.
Turns out there's an entire academic field dedicated to this question! And a word for the concept: historiography! And over centuries, tens of thousands of academic historians have worked out any number of methods for assessing this sort of thing... there's even a history of historiography on the Wikipedia page about it! But you know, who knows if anything reported there is accurate?
Re:Tarrare
by gnulinux on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @12:48PM
(#19087588)
If they're consistent, you'd have to explain how can multiple actors imagine a similar story (assuming those witnesses didn't interact). You can use probabilistic reasoning to determine whether a large portion of the story is close to reality.
Re:Tarrare
by gambiting on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @02:06PM
(#19088600)
I feel like there is a difference between "we saw something between the trees! It must have been the bigfoot!" and "we gave this guy a cat and he ate it whole in front of us".
> His performances involved the consumption of metal, glass, rubber and other materials. He disassembled, cut up, and consumed bicycles, shopping carts, televisions, and a Cessna 150,among other items. The Cessna 150 took roughly two years to be "eaten", from 1978 to 1980. He began eating unusual material as a teenager, at around 16 years of age,[4] and performed publicly beginning in 1966.[citation needed] Lotito had an eating disorder known as pica. Doctors determined that Lotito also had a thick lining in his stomach and intestines which allowed his consumption of sharp metal without suffering injury
Indoor wonder if it's a coincidence both these guys were French....
Here's my evolutionary "Just So Story" for why human kids like to wander away and put things into their mouths. Basically, they acted as food tasters for the group. Makes sense, since the group has invested in them the least, they know nothing important, and in a state of nature, they're likely to die anyways.
Yes, but the same investment was made in every other member of the group as well. However, everyone who made it well past childhood had a lot more knowledge, food, and material invested in them.
> in a state of nature, they're likely to die anyways.
So while this part, where they would die if left alone, is certainly right, it would make the whole concept of us humans not laying eggs, putting some semen and mud on them and disappear into the wilderness an evolutional waste of time.
Plus, I have some acquaintances whom I suspect would very much prefer to go about their business that exact same way. So it's not a demand side problem either.
Where did I say that the babies would be left alone and abandoned? Apparently you are unaware that in human communities with low technology, infant mortality can be pretty high alarmingly. You're also apparently stating that parents looking after children is not a "state of nature." (Or you're ascribing that to me, which, given you're alone in this, indicates you need to work on reading comprehension.)
> putting some semen and mud on them and disappear into the wilderness
what?
They always go for the dirtiest thing in the room. Acquire and share.
http://drgailgross.com/parenting-families/why-does-my-8-mont...
Anecdotally, my daughter didn’t have this behaviour. Even at a very young age she’d only ever put food stuff in her mouth. However I’ve seen so many other kids, children of friends and relatives, put random objects in their mouths to know that my daughter is the exception to the rule.
That's not what the article says at all. It says most of the babies sensory experiences are oral because they lack mobility to explore things with other tactile senses. Granted the article doesn't example this specifically but a lot of sensory input will be suckling (dummies, mother's nipple / bottle's teat, their own digits, etc).
By the time they're a bit more mobile and can open their hand to grasp objects (remember the ability for a baby to even open their hand takes a few weeks to learn) happens, they've often already gotten into the habit of exploring the world via their mouths.
It doesn't say it in that article I linked to, but I do vaguely recall reading elsewhere that because babies develop tactile senses on their hands later than the senses in their mouth, babies will often have more nerve endings in their mouth. However I cannot find a source for that so this might be a detail I'm miss-remembering.
Cool. So long as you're not conflating evolutionary pressures with internal mental states, drives, and desires. Doing so would mean you're dipping into Lamarckianism.
Apparently, I was that was as a baby as well. I handled everything, but only food went into my mouth.
Plus try and get a 2 year old to try new things.
Is this something you've observed on teething children? They tend to chew things to ease the pain.
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCyuCA6viLm6zsL6LNq67Tjg
Be warned, though.. it can be a little disturbing
On a more serious note, here is a similar case I found on the talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Domery
Seems he still vomited indigestible things (when they gave him the live cat). The autopsy revealed an inner body full of ulcers and pus. Maybe his metabolism was so high, he was burning a lot of it out.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/video/2017/jan/26/watch-a-...
His use as a courier suggests that material was going through his digestive tract mostly intact.
https://soundcloud.com/thisparanormallife/044-tarrare-the-ma...
>His body was hot to the touch and he sweated heavily, he constantly had foul body odour [...]
suggests an fantastically high baseline metabolism.
There are proteins in the human body having the same effect, performing some minor functions. Maybe he had a mutation making those proteins very prevalent, essentially making his metabolism very wasteful. Although I don't know if such a sustained fever wouldn't be deadly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncoupling_protein
Does anyone know how accurate these sorts of records are?
However, the person making the claim is Pierre-François Percy [2], chief surgeon of Napoleon's Grande Armée and a member of the Académie des sciences and, later, honorary member of the Académie Royale de Médecine. Inventing a case like this would be wildly out of character.
Reflexively dismissing every story from the past is just as fallacious as believing every detail.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=4e0EAAAAQAAJ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Fran%C3%A7ois_Percy
The funny explanation. [0] [1]
[0] https://xkcd.com/1235/
[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/akeVeiq
Eating his body weight in a day? That's pretty outlandish and easily debunked.
no. I don't understand what you're basing your claim on. As far as i see it is easily possible. Even with anatomically normal gut some stuff can make from mouth to the other end in as short as 30 minutes. So the bandwidth is there (say it takes 1 hour to make through the 7m length of the gut pipe which say of 4 square centimeter section - that is 2.8 liter/hour speed) . The story of that guy says that he had severe diarrhea and overall really suggests that he had severe gut bacterial issues - that is one of the situations when stuff makes it very quickly through the gut.
He is described as of a small weight despite significant food intake - that again matches the situation of the food quickly passing through instead of thorough digestion. He is described as constantly scavenging and eating - say 15 hours a day 4 kg/hour (in the ballpark of the above mentioned 2.8l/hour) gives you 60kg. 4kg/hour quickly moving non-stop though the gut does sound like a severe diarrhea.
> His performances involved the consumption of metal, glass, rubber and other materials. He disassembled, cut up, and consumed bicycles, shopping carts, televisions, and a Cessna 150,among other items. The Cessna 150 took roughly two years to be "eaten", from 1978 to 1980. He began eating unusual material as a teenager, at around 16 years of age,[4] and performed publicly beginning in 1966.[citation needed] Lotito had an eating disorder known as pica. Doctors determined that Lotito also had a thick lining in his stomach and intestines which allowed his consumption of sharp metal without suffering injury
Indoor wonder if it's a coincidence both these guys were French....