Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
He began with the topic of variation among domestic animals, noting the obvious point that individuals differ slightly from one another in size, weight, color, and other ways. Because some of those differences are heritable, human breeders have been able to perpetuate and even amplify desirable traits by carefully selecting which animals to pair. With enough selection over long stretches of time, breeders even produced new races—speedy horses versus dray horses and tallow cows versus beef cows, for instance. This was the setup for Darwin’s crucial analogy. From variation among domestics he moved to variation among wild creatures, and to what he called here “the natural means of selection.” Variation in the wild might not be as common or as extreme as variation among domestics (so he thought), but under certain circumstances it did occur. What caused it? He didn’t know—and, for the present, that didn’t matter. Some of those variations, like the ones among domestic animals, were heritable. Given the inherent rates of population increase and the enormous excess of insupportable offspring, to which Malthus had awakened him, wild creatures would be subjected to an automatic sort of culling, based on their capacities to compete for survival and for mating opportunities. By now he had hit upon not just his analogy, with domestic breeding, but his chosen term: “natural selection.” The net result over thousands of generations, he wrote mutedly, would be to “alter forms.” He had described a physical mechanism (or at least, part of it) by which new species could be produced.
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
David Quammen
Lab testing at UC Davis’s sports performance lab showed that Ballinger’s metabolism shifted from burning predominantly fat to predominantly carbohydrate at a relatively low heart rate of 115 beats per minute. In the “death zone” near the summit of Everest, where appetite is suppressed and digestion and other bodily functions begin to shut down, this carbohydrate dependence left him starved of energy, shivering uncontrollably, with hands so numb that he could no longer work the carabiners that protected him. Wisely, he turned back two hours from the summit. To help Ballinger tap into his fat stores more effectively, Johnston told him to add fasted endurance workouts to his training and shift to a higher-fat diet. The changes were initially challenging: Ballinger’s usual twelve mile runs turned into seven miles slogs taking the same amount of time. But before long, he was going out for five-hour workouts without needing to eat anything. A return visit to the lab four months later confirmed that his fat-carbohydrate crossover point had moved from 115 to 141 beats per minute, allowing him to rely more on fat during moderate-intensity ascents and preserve his precious carbohydrate stores for when they were really needed. In the spring of 2017, Ballinger and his climbing partner Cory Richards returned to Everest, with Johnston and House monitoring their uploaded heart rate data from afar. On the 12-mile climb to Advance Base Camp, higher than the highest point in North America, Ballinger’s heart rate was below 120; two days later, climbing to the North Col, it stayed below 125. The difference from the previous year was dramatic, and on May 27, Ballinger joined the very short list, started less than four decades earlier by Messner and Habeler, of those who have stood on the roof of the world powered by their lungs alone.
Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability The 4DX authors elaborate that the final step to help maintain a focus on lead measures is to put in place “a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.” During these meetings, the team members must confront their scoreboard, commit to specific actions to help improve the score before the next meeting, and describe what happened with the commitments they made at the last meeting. They note that this review can be condensed to only a few minutes, but it must be regular for its effect to be felt. The authors argue that it’s this discipline where “execution really happens.”
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise