Beth Linker

speaker

154 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 20 Jul

Beth Linker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · Have We Been Wrong About Posture? & How Memory Champions Think · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

Darwin actually posited that evolution

humans came about and were able to become more supreme beings because of upright posture.

So their straight spine.

So without a straight spine or upright posture, our human intellect and our speech would not have developed.

So after Darwin, everybody gets very concerned about upright posture.

And it is a real concern, as you said, especially in the United States.

This is the, you know, we have the second great migration into the country.

Suddenly the huddled masses, maybe they're going to bring disease and disability with them, all of these people who are hunched over.

And Darwin believed that upright posture occurred first.

So a lot of researchers, physicians, and anthropologists went around the world looking for fossils to prove Darwin right.

They proved him right.

Then these same physicians started to apply this theory in their clinic, looking at patients who were slumped over.

And these physicians feared that we were going into a decline, that the nation was going into a decline, that there could be de-evolution.

So suddenly this link between poor posture and a de-evolution or degrading of a civilization became very real and a fear.

And so they began this preventative health program that resulted in widespread surveillance of human posture that included things like buying the right shoes, sitting in the right chair, wearing the right foundation garment, the right undergarment.

I would say that the early 20th century posture scientists did look, did research this.

They found that 80% of the population slumped or slouched.

They never did any follow-up studies, however, to see whether or not that actually mattered.

It was just simply 80% of the population has poor posture, therefore...

We need to be on guard against, in the early 20th century, they believed it was linked to respiratory diseases.

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