My group right or wrong...  

I have met a handful of Hutterites at speeches and farm meetings in Canada and the Northern Plains, but only had a vague idea of their beliefs and practices. This blog post and comments from Real Agriculture perked up my interest.

To suggest that Hutterite colonies are destroying the traditional family farm is ridiculous To suggest that colonies are panicking without the Canadian Wheat Board is just being uninformed.  Lamenting that  that there is advantages to colony life that make it impossible to compete with them is an over statement.
Do colonies have human resource advantages?  Yes.  Are some colonies very aggressive in their acre growth aspirations?  Yes.  Are some colonies now sending members to College and University? Yes.

Many non-colony farmers have just as much a human resource advantages with the whole family working on the farm.  It is always easier for family members to draw less income to help the farm through a tight financial period.  This is where large corporate farms actually have a disadvantage. With commodity prices rising over the past decade, land values and the competition amongst farmers is going to naturally increase.  Many farmers don't care for their colony neighbours because they create competition for land.  One of the major changes with rising commodity prices is that colonies and large farms are expanding outside of their traditional areas.  Lethbridge farmers seeding in Vulcan, or Red Deer farmers seeding in Yorkton is a new reality of agriculture.  Its not just colonies that are aggressively trying to expand. [More]

Obviously, the much-nicer-than-us (no sarcasm) Canadians are struggling with the ramp up in land competition and the ensuing ethical changes in community expectations. Of course, the Corn Belt is moving their direction, so their stakes may be even higher.

My rough comparisons to the Amish with which I am slightly more familiar are probably not very accurate either. The one thing I did sorta know was their colony size seemed to buttress the idea that we evolved in groups of 200 or less as a basic community self-limit. (Dunbar's number)

Hutterites live in colonies and have a "community of goods" - there is no private ownership of property except for small things. They live in colonies of about 15 families, but each family usually has its own home or apartment. Colonies range in size from about 60 to about 150 people.
Farming is a big part of the Hutterite culture, and it's how colonies support themselves. However, some have turned to small manufacturing because of scarce land and difficulties farming.
Hutterites wear dark clothing. Men wear simple pants, shirts and jackets, and sport beards. Women wear long sleeves, headscarves and long skirts, and never wear pants. Both the women's and men's attire aren't limited to black.
Hutterites go to church services on Sunday and to half-hour services daily. Members don't watch TV or listen to the radio to keep separate from the outside world.
Traditionally, Hutterite children leave school at age 15 (or whatever age allowed by each province) and work in the community. But this is where the differences start. According to John J. Friesen, professor of history and theology at the Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Group 1 of the Schmiedeleut Hutterian Brethren Church in Manitoba provides high school classes for members. Some members eventually go on to the Brandon University Hutterian Education Program to become teachers for the colonies.
Another Hutterian belief that the groups differ involves photographs. Some Hutterians believe they cannot willingly have their photos taken, based on the second of the Ten Commandments. "The commandment is, 'Thou shalt not make no graven images,' " says David Goa, director of the Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public life, at the Augustana campus of the University of Alberta. He says this is generally understood as no images of God, but can be interpreted differently. [More]

In Jonathon Haidt's, The Righteous Mind, which I just finished, he asserts that belonging is as central as believing. In other words, our actions and beliefs are all mixed up with the groups we belong to. We don't choose groups to match our beliefs so much as the other way around. 

As true belonging becomes a scarcer commodity ("networking" may not be a substitute), we seem to be willing to become more dogmatic and illogical in order to stay with our groups. Hence one big factor on the death of compromise.

Successful groups got that way, Haidt says, by group evolution. The idea our groups are naturally selected just as individuals are selected within them is controversial, but gaining ground. I find it persuasive and helpful in explaining the new dynamics of cooperation and confrontation in our culture.

The debate above seems to be another reflection of this struggle between groups and individual rights.

The end of the "dumpy" strategy...

In the evolutionary battle for procreation advantage, muscles can be an advantage, but not cheap.

Because muscles come at such cost, Dr Gaulin thinks an evolutionary fight is going on between natural selection, which conserves metabolic expenditure and promotes longevity, and sexual selection, which willingly trades both for extra mating opportunities. This may explain why men have such a range of muscularity. In the past, the strong man would have had better mating opportunities in the short term, but the skinny guy who outlived him could have had just as much reproductive success over the course of his longer life.

The irony for the skinny guy is that the laws which protect him from aggression also make it less likely that the hulk will fight himself into an early grave. Modern medicine, meanwhile, means the hulk’s weakened immune system is less likely to expose him to lethal infection. Time, then, to get the weights out, and start pumping iron. [More]

As usual, the outlook for guys in the middle is ambiguous.

Why your piggies are little...

Like most of you, I'm sure, I worry about why my toes are as long as they are.  Oh sure, you can pretend you don't know what I'm talking about, but every time you take your socks off I'll bet you wistfully gaze at your stubby metatarsals and and wonder how they came to be.

Answer (maybe): we're built to run. And run. And run.

But a handful of scientists think that these ultra-marathoners are using their bodies just as our hominid forbears once did, a theory known as the endurance running hypothesis (ER). ER proponents believe that being able to run for extended lengths of time is an adapted trait, most likely for obtaining food, and was the catalyst that forced Homo erectus to evolve from its apelike ancestors. Over time, the survival of the swift-footed shaped the anatomy of modern humans, giving us a body that is difficult to explain absent a marathoning past.
...

We know that roughly 2 million years ago, Australopithecus, with its tiny brain, hefty jaw and diet of rough, fibrous plants, evolved into Homo erectus, our slim, long-legged ancestor with a big brain and small teeth suited for tearing into animal and fruit flesh. Such a transformation almost certainly involved a reliable supply of calorie-laden meat, yet according to the fossil record, spear points have been in use for 200,000 years at most, and the bow and arrow for only 50,000 years, leaving an enormous stretch of time when early humans were consuming meat without the use of tools. Lieberman believes they ran their prey to death, often called “persistence hunting.” [More]

If this approach is anywhere near correct, shouldn't our sedentary lifestyle be selecting for long-toed humans? In fact, could the popularity of sandals be an early indicator?