

The man who invented exercise - epidemiologist Jerry Morris - arihelgason
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e6ff90ea-9da2-11de-9f4a-00144feabdc0.html

======
tokenadult
I've just been reading an autobiographical sketch that my paternal grandmother
wrote in 1926, after her third year of college. She wrote quite a lot about
what she did to maintain her good health--which she remembered as being very
good throughout childhood. She acknowledged health benefits of physical
exercise and considered it an advantage that she walked from home two miles to
her college and then two miles back home each day. She also noted that she
liked eating a variety of fruits and vegetables, and not too much meat. She
even reports her height (five feet and three inches) and weight (one hundred
and fourteen pounds) at that age. It is apparent that in her milieu there were
plenty of Minnesotans living in county seat college towns who knew exercise
and good diet were good for health.

Alas, she was the only one of my four grandparents who didn't live into my
lifetime. She died about twenty-five years later while driving across
Minnesota in the winter to pick up my dad from the same college. Before she
arrived at her destination, her car slipped on the icy highway and crashed
head-on with another car, killing both drivers. Epidemiologically, there is no
doubt that exercise is beneficial for health. But of course it is not a cure-
all. My dad was paralyzed for six years before he died when he slipped and
fell on the ice on a different Minnesota winter day while going out shopping
for a condolence card for a friend's funeral. That kind of concern is what
keeps some people in their cars.

After edit:

I agree with the other person who just commented that this is a particularly
striking paragraph in the submitted article:

"And yet Morris sat on his data for years. If there were flaws in his theory,
he was determined to find them before anyone else could. 'We set about
destroying this observation,' he says. 'We brought in outside people with no
blood in their veins, no interest, to destroy it.' But they couldn’t."

That, of course, is just what Richard Feynman recommended that a true
scientist should do. "But there is one feature I notice that is generally
missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have
learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is,
but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific
investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of
it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific
thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over
backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report
everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is
right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and
things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how
they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been
eliminated."

<http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf>

------
anamax
Contrast ""And yet Morris sat on his data for years. If there were flaws in
his theory, he was determined to find them before anyone else could. 'We set
about destroying this observation,' he says. 'We brought in outside people
with no blood in their veins, no interest, to destroy it.' But they couldn’t."

With "hide the decline" and "trick".

~~~
ZeroGravitas
A Google Scholar search for science articles with "trick" in the title:

[http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?as_q=trick&num=10...](http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?as_q=trick&num=10&as_subj=phy&as_subj=eng&as_sdts=5&hl=en&as_vis=1&as_occt=title)

This intentional misreading is as misguided as assuming that we are all
"hackers".

~~~
anamax
Yes "trick" can have benign meanings.

Do you really want to argue that the "trick" in this case is benign?

Where's the skepticism among the AGW folks?

They were rewarded for finding "confirmation"....

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Yes, in this case the word is clearly used as a synonym for "technique".

Here's the original text:
[http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=154&filen...](http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=154&filename=942777075.txt)

Even if "hide the decline" was considered to be referring to something
dubious, the use of "trick" would still clearly mean "technique".

It would be like if a student was breaking into a school computer (i.e.
"hacking") and used a tool in an ingenious manner (i.e. a "hack"). Someone
could say "That's a cool hack" and it would be clear from the context that
they're not complimenting the lawbreaking, but on the creative use of a tool.

Maybe if you were later prosecuting that student in court then you'd take that
"cool hack" phrase and try your best to sell it to the jury as referring to
breaking the law to bolster your case, and maybe they'd buy it, but it would
still be obvious to someone who understood the context and culture that it
didn't mean what it was being purported to say.

~~~
anamax
> Even if "hide the decline" was considered to be referring to something
> dubious, the use of "trick" would still clearly mean "technique".

Yes, read the link. The "technique" was concatenating two dissimilar datasets
in a way that suggested a trend that simply wasn't there.

They had tree data for a certain period of time and then both tree and temp
data. They used a model to generate temp data from the tree data. They then
concatenated the temp from tree data for the time when they didn't have temp
data with the temp data that they did have.

They didn't show that applying the same procedure to the tree data when they
had temp data did not produce the actual temp data....

Do you really want to argue that the model was good only when they didn't have
a way to check it?

Yes, it's "creative". The problem is that it's deceptive, or if you like,
intended to trick.

And the fact that it's deceptive has nothing to do with them calling it a
"trick". They could have called it a banana.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
My point was entirely about the very intentional misreading of the word
"trick".

If you feel you have a good argument with the tree ring stuff then concentrate
on that then and don't ruin it by throwing in the irrelevant fact that they
used the word "trick" in an entirely different sense from what you imply.

Just like the lawyer intentionally misrepresenting "hack", it might help make
a case to people without strong English skills, but it also makes your case
seem weaker for anyone who knows how to use the word properly.

~~~
anamax
> My point was entirely about the very intentional misreading of the word
> "trick".

Except, as I've shown, it wasn't a misreading of the word trick. They
accurately characterized their technique.

> by throwing in the irrelevant fact that they used the word "trick" in an
> entirely different sense from what you imply.

Huh? I "implied" that they intended to deceive and they did.

------
nandemo
_He had inadvertently (...) stumbled on a great truth about health: exercise
helps you live longer._

Er, maybe he might have been the first to demonstrate scientifically the link
between lack of exercise and specific illnesses. However, the ancient Greeks
already knew that physical exercise leads to good health.

~~~
miles
_the ancient Greeks already knew that physical exercise leads to good health._

Exactly. One can go even further back to the Chinese, etc:

<http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/history.html>

~~~
tokenadult
The dates are incorrect for China (said the Chinese major). Actually, most of
the widely known writers from China are no more ancient than the widely known
writers from Greece, so "even further back," which I suppose you typed relying
on the source you kindly linked to, is incorrect. Confucius's dates of
traditionally September 28, 551 B.C.E. to 479 B.C.E.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius>

are somewhat in dispute, but the dates of Thales, ca. 624 BC to ca. 546 BC,

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales>

are actually earlier. The source you link to doesn't get transcription
spelling of Chinese words correct, either, so you can be sure the author is
not familiar with Chinese history.

~~~
miles
_most of the widely known writers from China are no more ancient than the
widely known writers from Greece, so "even further back," which I suppose you
typed relying on the source you kindly linked to, is incorrect._

Actually, I was relying on early Taoist exercises for life extension predating
comments on exercise I could find from Epictetus and other Greeks
demonstrating their awareness of the beneficial effects of exercise. Whether
or not Thales predates Confucius is irrelevant, unless either addressed the
question of exercise (a quick Google search fails to uncover such a
possibility).

Mention should also be made of India: yoga is estimated to go back at least
5000 years, though I have not the energy or interest to go digging for
evidence that they realized the connection between exercise and life
extension.

~~~
tokenadult
If you want to talk about history, you have to refer to historical sources,
and those sources don't show that people in what is now called China or what
is now called India thought about these issues any earlier than people in what
is now called Greece. We have no idea whether or not there even were "early
Taoist exercises" (and it would be debatable to call anything "Taoist" before
the life of Lao Tzu,

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi>

who may not even be a historical person) unless we can find mention of "Tao"
and mention of that thing associated in a historical source.

~~~
miles
_sources don't show that people in what is now called China or what is now
called India thought about these issues any earlier than people in what is now
called Greece._

If you can provide historical sources for exercise from Greece that predates
yoga, I would be much obliged. Considering that:

"Traditionally, the Ancient Greek period was taken to begin with the date of
the first Olympic Games in 776 BC, but most historians now extend the term
back to about 1000 BC." <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greece>

and that the earliest known text addressing yoga (the Rig Veda) can be traced
back to _at least_ 1700–1100 BC (with some sources putting it closer to 3000
BC), you will have your work cut out for you.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda>
[http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/aryan-harappan-
my...](http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/aryan-harappan-myth.html)
[http://mindbodyfitness.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_old_is_y...](http://mindbodyfitness.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_old_is_yoga_fascinating_new_information)

~~~
tokenadult
I had not heard before how much nationalist myths (recently very influential
in politics in India) had influenced entries in English-language publications
such as Wikipedia. Suffice it to say that there is utterly no manuscript or
epigraphic evidence for what you have said in your comment. The method of
history is to work from written records. (Archeology wouldn't support what you
said either.) But thanks for letting me know, by pointing to examples, that
currently quick Google searches for facts on the history of India are even
less reliable than searches for facts on the history of China.

After edit: remember, as the thread is structured, you were the first to claim
that peoples more ancient than those of ancient Greece "already knew that
physical exercise leads to good health." That was your statement. You linked
to pages that people can Google up, but you haven't yet pointed to any primary
source for that proposition of undisputed date and provenance. On the one
hand, I can accept as a general proposition that human beings for as long as
Homo sapiens has been around had an intuition based on anecdotal experience
that keeping moving preserves health (and helps catch tasty animals to eat),
but on the other hand the epidemiologist mentioned in the article opening this
thread really did discover a NEW, more detailed, epidemiological observation,
which has been confirmed through multiple channels through physiological
experiments in both animal and human subjects.

~~~
miles
My dear fellow, if you insist upon maintaining such a patronizing attitude, at
least be good enough to provide some documented evidence, even something that
can be "Googled up". So far you've offered nothing but blanket statements of
supposed fact, hand waving, and sarcasm.

------
bootload
_"... And yet Morris sat on his data for years. If there were flaws in his
theory, he was determined to find them before anyone else could. “We set about
destroying this observation,” he says. “We brought in outside people with no
blood in their veins, no interest, to destroy it.” But they couldn’t. His
paper (“Coronary heart-disease and physical activity of work”) finally
appeared in The Lancet in 1953. His hypothesis, as he still called it, was
greeted with general disbelief. What could exercise possibly have to do with
heart attacks? ..."_

Not for me. I've got 160Km to go before I've marched, run & hiked my way
through 1000Miles in just under 15 months.

------
tungstenfurnace
Do people move about lots because they are healthy, or vice versa?

~~~
tokenadult
The submitted article reports one of the first published findings by an
epidemiologist showing that moving around a lot protects health, and is not
just an outcome of being healthy in the first place. Since his work, there
have been many more studies that reach the same conclusion, quite a few of
them having been done in Canada as the provinces of Canada developed their
health insurance programs.

~~~
tungstenfurnace
What's the scientific explanation of why exercise makes one healthy?

(Otherwise it might just be a correlation. A study can only support one
explanation over another; it can't generate an explanation.)

