They are not. You step up over the sill to get into an SUV, then your feet go down into the footwell. Your eyes end up slightly lower than a person standing (and much lower in a sedan), while a motorcycle is very close to exactly standing (they have to be able to put their feet down when stopped).
Don't be bothered by the down votes. HN consensus is not something worth pursuing. Your criticism is valid, it's just that it runs against what HN readers want to believe in this instance. Readers here like to think they're motivated by reason and intelligence and whatnot, but that is laughable - examples of logical fallacies and assertions of fact rocketing to the top comments abound. Overconfidence and readiness to accept bold claims is a more dangerous cultural dysfunction than the lack of seriousness and ubiquitous monetization that plagues other platforms.
In any case this study will likely go on the pile of papers judged by time to be an overreach of conclusions and a dead end.
Seriously. Hasn't the main thesis of that book (a distinct advantage of human upright evolution is our ability to run long distances) and several key supporting points been mostly disproven scientifically (early humans often hunted by running to exhaustion, for example)?
Seems to me another enticing narrative with little to no sound evidence a la Guns, Germs, and Steel, Sapiens, and the like. The stuff this site loves to gobble up with comment after comment of supporting anecdata.
The insistence HNers have for utterly re-inventing their lives off of a single completely unsubstantiated book astounds me.
You know literally anyone can write literally anything in a book right? There's no vetting, no magical reality check. You can write a book that's nothing but good sounding falsehoods and nobody can stop you. You can even fill it with 10 pages of garbage, low quality citations!
The modern equivalent of a book is a 3 hour Youtube video essay, and most of them have more research behind them!
But nobody would obsess over them like people here obsess over lifestyle books.
I definitely believe you. I know from a few injuries that with tendons you want to be moving and applying resistance as soon as you are able to prevent the formation of scar tissue and encourage blood flow. It's not a huge leap of logic that bones, too, benefit from movement and resistance when healing.
Honest question, how did you know to disregard the doctor 's instructions and start home exercises on the bone at 4 weeks? How did you limit yourself during your riding and other resistance work? How long was the recovery period after every session?
> how did you know to disregard the doctor 's instructions
My background (Russian). Don't trust western approach to solve problems with pills etc. End up talking to (usually) Soviet-trained doctors who can't practice here in the west. The advice makes sense so I follow it believing they know what they're talking about. It's always about the cause, not the symptom. This sort of thing.
> How did you limit yourself during your riding and other resistance work
By feel. Biking is a second nature to me. Femur neck wasn't the only bone I broke. More plates too.
> How long was the recovery period after every session?
First few, felt a bit fucked but I think it was both being out of shape and one leg's muscles sleeping for 4 weeks. So the usual, sit for 5-10 min, back on the crutches, off to the shower and the life goes on.
Best Soviet doctors! Poor guys working without any equipment to get perfect results. Sure good way for easy cases, bud hard cases are cripples afterwards. Or badly healed bones are separated with chisel and then comes next try… been there, saw that. Thanks but no, I’ll take a western medicine with all the screws and plates. Despite screws and plates being much easier to work with, every sane doctor will try without them at first even for moderately hard cases.
you are not wrong, shattered leg, waited too long, can't do shit now. never healed properly. should have listened to my body rather than my doctors. fucking sucks.
I think this is commonly accepted now (maybe?), but tendons, ligaments, and cartilage don't heal well without movement to increase fluid exchange. When I was a kid it was a big deal to avoid any pressure on these tissues after an injury, but it seems imperative for recovery.
When my kids hurt themselves in sports, it's straight to easy yoga, light calisthenics, and lecturing them for not cross training and treating their tissues better when they aren't competing. I sound like a dumb old man to them now, but I think in 10 or 15 years they'll be spending a lot more time focused on building that kind of resilience.
> I think this is commonly accepted now (maybe?), but tendons, ligaments, and cartilage don't heal well without movement to increase fluid exchange.
It's getting better. RICE protocol after a sprain is still too unknown to/overlooked by many physicians, although I'd rate it to 50-80% these days.
Many would recommend a 4-6 week rest after an ankle sprain, with a prescription of 10 sessions at a physiotherapist 2 weeks in, and crutches til then.
Luckily physiotherapists are better trained and usually tell you to come yesterday, start with massaging to reduce the swelling and promote lymphatic and blood flow, and movements to break down scar tissue as it forms, and walk as much as you can, with crutches not as walking aids but as "seatbelts" so that you have something to immediately lean on instead of the injured foot should you trip over.
Once tissue has healed enough the next step is relearning and recovering strength and movement (general motion, hence why in french physiotherapist is "kinésithérapeute" from greek kinesis a.k.a motion) towards normal levels. Problem is halfway through the allotted 10 sessions are up :/ so you're either down for a trip back to the physician and convince them you need more or you're on your own.
Maybe it's just too early or there are other posts, but I find it an interesting insight into human behavior - supposedly intelligent human behavior - that there were hundreds of comments on the posting of the original study here at HN, the vast majority of which accepted the study's conclusion, yet there are much fewer comments on the "adjustment" to the study's conclusion.
I shouldn't be too cynical, but it's a reminder to be skeptical, always.
Right, but life down there didn't independently spark from raw organic molecules. Or, rather, there is no evidence for that, whereas there is quite a bit of evidence to suggest all such life on earth is migratory to new ecosystems and shares one common ancestor.
That leap from organic molecules to "life" is still a bit of a mystery. And how often it occurs is still up for debate.
Look at Earth's history - trees existed for 60 million years before some chance bacterial mutation stumbled on efficiently breaking down lignin. And then boom, trees everywhere - every continent on earth - immediately (in geologic timescales) were decomposed.
The fact that it took 60 million years for extant bacteria to allow for that should give pause to any sweeping statements about the certainty of life and especially complex life.
It's not, this is all internet click bait sensational stuff. Wood can be an effective composite and has been used in space vehicles for at least 40 years. First time I saw it used was old LV fairings. These days there are much better composites available so the use of wood is likely for non-technical reasons.
Metal spatulas aren't an option for most, either, as they scratch pans. So what's the suggested realistic alternative? Wood?
Edit: wasn't trying to be snarky or anything. Honestly concerned for my family's health and trying to figure out the best path. Wood spatulas it is. Replacing all our PTFE pans with much more expensive cast iron pans isn't an option for our budget right now. Plus I haven't seen convincing scientific evidence that PTFE is as harmful as people here seem to imply. My understanding could be outdated though.
Nonstick pans are covered with plastic; that’s what PTFE is.
The answer is wood and metal tools with stainless steel, carbon steel, cast iron, glass, stoneware, and enameled cast iron cookware and bakeware. Aluminum bakeware is also great once you put a layer of seasoning on it to protect the aluminum from corrosion.
I've been a fan of using stainless steel spatulas on cast iron for years now and it doesn't seem to scratch or degrade the "seasoning" on the cast iron in any apparently meaningful way.
Seasoning isn't that precious either. I accidentally left my cast iron on the stove and burned off most of the seasoning, took it as an opportunity to smooth out the surface with sandpaper, gave it a couple of coats of canola and put it back into service. Within a couple of days it was basically where it was before.
I've been cooking exclusively with Le Creuset cast iron pans. I use to care about seasoning and never using soap to clean but I've gotten way more relaxed as of late. I still take care of the pans and "season them" when it looks pretty bare, but I haven't really noticed much of a difference between seasoned and nonseasoned as an amateur chef.
I make up for the lack of seasoning by using more butter or oil.
The true reason why I use these cast iron pans is that they have a very long lifecycle (going 12 years now for some of my pans) and they sear way better than other cookware.
Worth pointing out that this is also true of the Le Creuset "cast iron" skillets and frying pans with the black cooking surface. That surface is (annoyingly) enamelled too.
huh, TIL. There's a Le Creuset outlet store near me and when I bought 2 more it never really clicked how different they were from my Lodge pans (outside of the enamel bottom).
Just another plus one for cast-iron pans and wooden spatulas. We’ve been using those for over a decade, 20 bucks each, never needs replacing, works for everything.
We switched from gas stove to induction and now they work even better since the handle doesn’t get as hot and it’s easier to control the temperature.
The whole seasoning thing is extra credit, the only failure mode I’ve seen is trying to fry an egg on a completely unseasoned pan, which just means some extra soaking and scrubbing is needed. The pan seasons itself after a few uses. Hand wash the pan instead of sticking it in the dishwasher, done.
Yeah, eggs can be hard. What I do is have a smaller cast iron pan strictly for a single egg. I just make sure to use more butter and clean after right after.
I think it is healthy. There is basically nothing to be worried about that dealt killed by water or heat. A hot pan is twice the temperature of a medical autoclave.
Soap is more of a cleaning aid for removing flavor than a safety control.
A little mentioned downside to cast iron is that it's porous enough that it will absolutely absorb certain things like turmeric that will only come out once you cook something else in it, no amount of washing or soap seems to make a difference past a certain point. Kind of a non issue to me, just a quirk of the tool.
You hear this sometimes from cast iron owners that think using some soap will "ruin" the seasoning. It's a myth, you can absolutely use soap. My preferred method is chainmail + coarse salt + small drop of dawn.
Yes, I use a little bit of Dawn when the pan is really greasy or crusty. Hot water in the pan, a little bit of Dawn, let it sit for a few minutes, scrub. Dawn is not agressive enough to remove the seasoning, it will just emulsify the liquid grease/oil in the pan.
Do not put them in the dishwasher though, or you'll have to re-season them.
Dawn kinda smells tho, especially when the pan is heated again for the first time. Whatever it pyrolyzes to, I'm not sure I want to smell or eat it. The store brand dishwasher detergent seems to not smell as much but if there's no debris from the food I avoid soap or use it very sparingly.
Good tip with the coarse salt, I'll have to try that sometime.
I do almost all my cooking on cast iron—no philosophical reason, it just works well and once I figured out how to use it I found that I pretty much always reach for a cast iron pan over stainless steel or non-stick. (Except non-stick for omelettes and stainless steel for anything where I want the find.)
My big realization was that there’s a lot of macho information there about the care of cast iron, and it’s pretty much all pointless because the stuff is indestructible and the seasoning doesn’t matter much. Every time I make tortillas in a pan the seasoning gets wrecked, and it’s just not a problem. So long as you get the pan to the right temp and have enough fat, nothing sticks regardless of the quality of the seasoning. Skimp on the oil or set the temp too low, and stuff sticks no matter how good the seasoning.
I wash the pans with soap and water (and not too much scrubbing), I never season them deliberately, and they work wonderfully. It’s a very forgiving cooking surface.
When i went home to visit my dad, I cooked an egg on his decades old cast iron. He scrapes the absolute bejeezus out of it, has no idea what seasoning is, uses soap. It cooked wonderfully. That was my eye opener moment.
Man, I'm so turned off by the entire cast iron hype cult. I've tried so hard to make it work for me, and it just doesn't, and everyone's advice is totally different so it's impossible to know what to do. Wash it. Don't wash it. Scrub the shit out of it. Just remove the chunks and leave the rest.
The reply will inevitably be "it's simple, just...." where the words following "just" are different from anything ever written on the topic before.
I think the reason there is so much conflicting advise on the topic is because it's such a forgiving cooking medium, but people swear by their method as the one true method.
I cook on cast iron multiple times a week. Have for years, using a very antique pan from a dead relative. My rules are fairly straightforward. I don't do any other maintenance or cleaning than this after-care routine:
* Let the pan cool (if I'm lazy or it's late, possibly this is overnight and then I do the rest in the morning).
* Scrape out any easy solid waste (burnt food bits, etc) with a wood spatula edge and throw the waste in the trash.
* Toss a healthy amount of salt into the pan and scrub the pan using the salt, with your hands/fingers. The salt is a great abrasive, like sand, but I don't want sand ground into my cookware, while salt is fine for food.
* Rinse out the dirty-salt-mess with plain water from the sink.
* Occasionally, if stuck-on things are particularly stubborn, repeat some of the above steps as necessary until the pan surface is smooth and clean.
* Wipe off most of the remaining wetness with a paper towel (the towel will probably look pretty dirty, that's ok).
* Throw the pan back on the cooktop, pour a few tbsp of cheap olive oil in the middle, and turn the burner on as high as it goes. Wait a few minutes for the oil to thin, spread, and smoke. Once it's smoking pretty well, shut off the fire and leave the pan to cool again.
* Later when it's cooled off again (possibly overnight or hours later, whatever), gently wipe off any excess liquid oil with a paper towel and store the pan back in the cabinet, ready for next use.
If your cooking utensils are gouging or pulling up 'seasoning', it's not 'seasoning'. Seasoning is a micrometer-thin layer of polymerized oil. What you're describing is carbon build-up from a poorly cleaned pan.
At least once a week I give my vintage cast iron a good scrub with Dawn powerwash and chainmail, dry on the stovetop, apply a layer of Crisco, and then wipe it all off as if I put it on by mistake.
Wood food working implements get stained, develop cracks and chips that may retain bacteria, can't go through the dishwasher, may have finishes we'll all be concerned about later, etc.
They're my least favorite to clean and most likely to throw away because I can't get them cleaned.
Food-safe wood conditioner (or just beeswax, or coconut oil, etc.) is basically free, and you should be taking care of everything wooden in the kitchen on a semi-regular basis. If your wooden cookware is degrading, I'd be more worried about the state of your wooden cutting boards.
One thing that's helped me is to every-so-often oil my wood utensils the same way I oil my wood cutting board. It's helps protect the wood and retain moisture so it doesn't crack. Also, at least some (if not all) woods have anti-microbial properties.
Lodge cast iron pans are like $20 and will outlast your grandchildren. You can get a set of them for < $100. Carbon steel are more expensive, but are easier to handle and I think are worth investing in at least one for daily use. They'll also last generations.
Metal. I haven't noticed scratches, and have been using exclusively my whole adult life. I suspect my pans are covered in superficial scratches, but I don't notice.
Presumably you’re not using Teflon pans then, because there’s no way you wouldn’t notice the non-stick surface getting destroyed by metal utensils.
There’s also a potential health argument against cooking with Teflon pans to begin with, but people do and those people shouldn’t be using metal if they want their pans to stay non-stick for any reasonable length of time.
I've had my share of non-stick pans, including higher quality ones. They all degrade to the point where I need to use oil.
I switched to carbon steel as a daily driver two years ago and it is is trivialy non-stick with a little maintenance. The non-stick properties are infinitely refresha le, unlike "non-stick" pans.
I also have cast iron and stainless pans for other uses.
Preaching to the choir here - I love carbon steel and cast iron.
Unfortunately try as we might to get people to switch, the fact is that undamaged Teflon is more non-stick than anything else and most people don’t want to put the effort into seasoning their pans.
Teflon is popular, and Teflon owners could do with utensils that don’t destroy their pans or give them cancer.
It's not about cleaning. It's about the increased amount of oil needed to prevent delicate foods like eggs and fish from sticking. That adds cost and calories.
Carbon steel solves this issue. You can get nonstick eggs and fish with a very minimal amount of oil. You can also do this with stainless steel but it takes more practice to get the temperature control down.
Maybe one day we’ll all have affordable temperature controlled induction ranges similar to the Breville/Sage control freak. If you have the ability to preheat your pan to an exact temperature then getting nonstick results with tiny amounts of oil or butter becomes rather trivial.
The Control Freak is fantastic, but it doesn’t work all that well with some cast iron pans. I think there are a couple reasons:
1. Too much thermal mass and too little thermal conductivity. This causes poor feedback and unnecessarily high delay between heat being added and the measurement reflecting it.
2. Manufacturers love to cast their logo right in the bottom center, which means that the sensor doesn’t make good contact with the pan.
I wonder if someone makes a nice stainless-aluminum-carbon steel clad pan.
I wonder if someone makes a nice stainless-aluminum-carbon steel clad pan
This pan exists! It's made by an American company called Strata. Stainless steel on the bottom/outside, carbon steel on the inside/cooking surface, and aluminum sandwiched in between. It came out this year. I've seen a few cookware YouTube channels do some first looks, unboxing, seasoning, and first cook tests but no long-term reviews so far.
Cast iron is definitely the most challenging cookware material to use with any flat-top cooking appliance. Whether induction or traditional ceramic, flat-top ranges tend to be quite poor at creating even heating in cast iron. Gas on the other hand works quite well because of the natural upward draft produced by the hot combustion gases which wrap around the sides of the pan, enveloping it in a blanket of heat from below.
I think eggs and certain fish recipes are the primary use of non stick. But there are also ways to cook those without non stick.
For scrambled eggs you can use a double boiler (you’ll never have had fluffier eggs). An extremely well seasoned carbon steal pan will also work wonders (basically what fry cooks use)
For fish, cooking fish whole on a grill is amazing. Another technique with stainless pans is to get the pan searing hot first. Then add a tiny amount of oil and cook the fish and don’t touch it. This should set the surface protein quickly and create a crust that prevents sticking (requires a little practice but not too hard)
Counter-intuitively, it doesn't really add calories.
What a lot of people don't realize is -- in non-stick, virtually all the oil winds up in the food. Since it doesn't stick to the pan. With steel/iron, most of the cooking oil stays in the pan.
So yes you will end up using 3x or more oil. But you're not consuming 3x oil calories. It probably isn't any extra calories at all.
Yes, exactly. I can’t believe how little mention of silicon and wood there is here.
Silicon is much more resistant to heat and chemicals. I believe the polymers are also more tightly bound.
I also think people cook too much on nonstick. Non stick has a place in the kitchen for specific dishes. But for the most part you can cook most things in a combination of high quality stainless steel pans and cast iron. Some food sticking in stainless is a good thing (Maillard reaction), deglaze the pan and scrape it up with a good wood spatula.
John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist, regularly makes the point [0] that human evolution has accelerated enormously in the last 50k years.
Lactase metabolism is new, in the last 19k years. European skin colours and blue eyes appear to be very recent too, maybe 3.5k years.
Almost certainly there are all kinds of super interesting human evolutionary changes that are occurring now, with our huge population that won’t be visible for thousands of years…
This makes me sad every time - I know for a fact that mountains are evolving, but in my lifetime the mountains are just mountains. Still. Not changing a bit unless I'm looking really really close (which means that it's not the mountain that changes, but merely its surface).. So the same with humans.
I don't care about living forever, I just want to see what happens in 10k years. Just out of curiosity.
There’s a really great sci fi book that touches on this, I’m blanking on the name. They can “bobble” up regions of space which basically freezes time for a duration in that region. Highly recommend.
If you look at the complete collapse of fertility rates in the developed world, that is probably the strongest evolutionary pressure humans have faced for millennia.
It is a bit weird to me that the scientific press doesn't talk more about how evolutionary pressure applies here. I think that people are wary to talk about this because it can end up sounding like social Darwinism, or that they believe "Idiocracy" was a scientific documentary.
But it's inescapable, for example, that education rates are now strongly negatively correlated with fertility. While "level of education" is obviously not inherited genetically, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to hypothesize that genetic factors play a role in someone's educational attainment. And, currently, the more education you get, the less likely you are to reproduce (statistically, of course).
Sex evolved to feel really good because for most of human history having sex would usually, eventually lead to babies. Reliable birth control has fundamentally broken that link. Similarly, when a major factor preventing you from reproducing was starving to death, being smarter or cleverer was an evolutionary advantage. I'd argue that advantage no longer exists.
Another simple anecdote: I recently went to my uncle's funeral, and his family was very religious (Catholic). My father, on the other hand, rejected religion and raised us all atheists. My father has 6 descendants, my uncle 24. Again, "religiosity" is not a genetically inherited trait, but I think it would be foolish to believe genetic predisposition plays 0 role.
I say all this just to highlight that, eventually, the "collapse in birthrates" will take care of itself - people with a strong desire and ability to procreate will outcompete, at least in terms of offspring survival, their peers. This will have a huge, profound effect on world society that most academics are too scared to talk about.
> But it's inescapable, for example, that education rates are now strongly negatively correlated with fertility. While "level of education" is obviously not inherited genetically, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to hypothesize that genetic factors play a role in someone's educational attainment. And, currently, the more education you get, the less likely you are to reproduce (statistically, of course).
Far from inescapable, this is just a phantom of noisy data.
It's easy to find statistically communicative population slices where family size is quite high and so is level of education (ignoring that "level of education" is a culturally specific and disputable measure in the first place).
What we really see is that integration into the modern US/EU-inspired "universal middle class" urban culture, which now spans the globe, seems to correlate with lower birth rates and family sizes. But there are countless factors contributing to what makes that culture unique and that could easily be playing a role in the birth rates and family sizes.
That said, it does suggest that the this "modern" culture needs to induct outsiders in order to maintain its scale since its proving relatively poor at growing its own population among insiders. What that means for the future is unclear, and if you're personally all in the on the "modern", it can easily look concerning or even bleak in the way you describe.
You're mistaken. Polygenic scores for educational attainment correlate negatively with fertility in the US, UK and elsewhere (in fact, AFAIK everywhere it has been tested). So it's not just because people in poor countries have more kids.
Note also that natural selection is about correlation not causality. If an lab accident blows up MIT, that will select against intelligence, even though intelligence wasn't causal.
I highly doubt birth control has altered the selection process in humans in the span of two or three generations.
I think you're right for the wrong reasons. Correlation does not equal causation. I think it's very clear it's our modern lifestyle. Our diet. Many of us are over weight. Most of us are sedentary. We're consuming higher percentage alcohol and weed. We're consuming other drugs. There are microplastics in our blood stream and the food we eat. There are chemicals like BPAs that were in our products for years before we removed them. Pollution. The list goes on. I would rule out these factors first before ever considering the idea that evolution is at play.
The fact that you have said this makes me think you have misunderstood my point.
I am not arguing that genetic differences are responsible for any change over the past couple generations. I am strongly arguing that there is now an enormous new selection pressure, i.e. a new factor that strongly affects fertility rates, and over time (and, perhaps a very long time) that genetic inheritance will respond to that selection pressure. That is inherently how evolution works.
People love to say "correlation is not causation", but all evolution really works with in the first place is correlation. That is, the environment changes, and then organisms that happen, through "the genetic lottery", to not be able to reproduce in that new environment are outcompeted by those organisms that do. My argument is that the environment that determines whether humans reproduce has changed drastically over the past ~100 years or so, and that this will affect which genes are likely to be more prevalent in the future. I am not arguing this genetic change has already happened.
> But it's inescapable, for example, that education rates are now strongly negatively correlated with fertility.
You can easily say that city dwelling is strongly correlated with higher education rates, and higher noise pollution, therefore high noise pollution is strongly negatively correlated with fertility. Correlation doesn't equal causation.
> Reliable birth control has fundamentally broken that link.
Reliable birth control has severely reduced unwanted pregnancy, but there's a whole host of people who would like to have children that can't.
Among them, eventually, will be modern medicine if we manage to preserve it long enough and share it widely enough.
By suppressing the consequence of genetic predispositions and vulnerabilities, it lets those genes propagate more freely and invisibly than they would have been doing before. It helps individuals and communities today in a way we can't possibly refuse, but sets up the species to become perpetually dependent on an elaborate, brittle medical infrastructure. Genetic engineering and eugenics could eventually address that, but those invite scifi horrors of their own. We seem to have set ourselves into a bit of a trap.
>but sets up the species to become perpetually dependent on an elaborate, brittle medical infrastructure
How is this any different than the transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculture caused us to "become perpetually dependent on an elaborate, brittle agricultural infrastructure"?
Agriculture took hold in numerous civilizations and indeed introduced one of the primary threats of collapse for those civilizations. Throughout history, we can see civilizations collapse when their dependence on agriculture faltered, which happened often enough.
But neither the technology (agriculture) nor its failures (blight, famine, etc) were universal and so it hadn't become a threat to the species as a whole.
Modernity, however, has become aggressively global and more successfully universalizing. We not only invite every community into it, we insist they do so for their own good. Further, its technological contrivances (and therefore their brittleness) are more intense because of industrialization and later accelerating technology. As it continues to progress and expand, it brings the whole species into its gamble and raises the stakes of that gamble at the same time.
I don't think you've interpreted that quite right. Modern wars aren't funded by the bank accounts of the people profiting from them. War is a wealth transfer to the top.
The biggest thing we're doing now is accumulating a huge amount of genetic diversity, full of all sorts of novel mutations and interesting admixtures.
It's hard to know what genes or traits will be advantageous over the next centuries. The biggest place where our technological advantage still has large gaps that our biology can compensate is disease, and there it's almost random -- a gene that results in a novel protein which is normally advantageous or disadvantageous might have the opposite effect if it makes you exceptionally vulnerable or resistant to a new disease.
White skin will probably go away in a few thousand years or so. It likely only ever appeared to absorb more UV light and synthesize vitamin D at low sun angles while mostly covered in heavy clothing. Since we can now supplement vitamin D, all the other disadvantages should make it maladaptive.
But is there an evolutionary pressure in this direction because of the decrease in need? That would be Lamarckian then. I wonder if certain traits need evolutionary pressure to stay stable, and otherwise degenerate in some specific direction.
Many (most?) traits require energy to develop and maintain. A stronger muscle will need more energy so there's always pressure to reduce it. That pressure may just be countered by pressures in other directions.
Something something opportunity cost? If you can allocate your next bit of energy and protein to something with better bag-for-buck than a jaw muscle then that should be an evolutionary advantage.
More expected (over ensemble of specimens) evolutionary "fitness" per unit of whatever you need to expend to make a jaw muscle a bit stronger. The buck is small because we're doing optimization calculus.
One thing to consider is that some things might not be genetic, but environmental. I think jaw muscles are one such thing and short-sightedness might be other. First caused by food we eat and the other by less natural light and less time spend outside in childhood.
I could see plastics, chemicals, for-ever chemicals and in general various pollutants leading various pressures on reproduction. So on medium term there could be pressure for genetics that handle those better.
The primary "pressure" at the moment is to develop species-level self awareness to stabilize the planetary life support system before we crash civilization.
Not true at all except for the lowest-sitting cruisers. Most bikes put you eye level with an SUV driver and taller bikes above.