Behind many of these proscriptions is the implication that the human body simply isn’t “meant” to do the things we ask it to do every day, from driving a car to sleeping past dawn to eating food that comes from a factory. How did we get into this mess? And is there anything we can do to stop the catastrophe from getting even worse? Again, everyone seems to have a solution, often contradicting someone else’s – we should all be taking supplements, we should all stop taking supplements, we should run barefoot, we shouldn’t run at all, we should eat like cavemen, we should eat like rabbits, we should eat like rabbits from the time of the cavemen. On top of all that, rates of autism, autoimmune disorders, and food allergies are escalating, with the former alone costing us an estimated $137 billion per year. And a 2010 publication from Harvard Health frets that only one in six of us gets anywhere close to the recommended amount of exercise. Nearly one third of Americans have high blood pressure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which costs $47.5 billion annually in direct medical expenses and $3.5 billion each year in lost productivity. A 2008 paper in the aptly named journal Obesity predicted that within a decade and a half, virtually all Americans could be overweight or obese. The horrifying statistics are easy to come by. It’s enough to make one think we are on the brink of apocalypse, with apparently our only consolation being that said apocalypse will be the most, well, apocalyptic imaginable. There is no shortage of books, blogs and articles bemoaning our overweight, over-stressed and under-exercised society. (With charts and line drawings throughout.WE ALL SEEM TO BE prone to excess, even in discussions of how prone to excess we really are. And finally-provocatively-he advocates the use of evolutionary information to help nudge, push, and sometimes oblige us to create a more salubrious environment. He proposes that many of these chronic illnesses persist and in some cases are intensifying because of "dysevolution," a pernicious dynamic whereby only the symptoms rather than the causes of these maladies are treated. Lieberman illuminates how these ongoing changes have brought many benefits, but also have created novel conditions to which our bodies are not entirely adapted, resulting in a growing incidence of obesity and new but avoidable diseases, including type-2 diabetes.
In a book that illuminates, as never before, the evolutionary story of the human body, Daniel Lieberman deftly examines the major transformations that contributed key adaptations to the body: the advent of bipedalism the shift to a non-fruit-based diet the rise of hunting and gathering and our superlative endurance athletic abilities the development of a very large brain and the incipience of modern cultural abilities. He elucidates how cultural evolution differs from biological evolution, and how it further transformed our bodies during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.
A landmark book of popular science-a lucid, engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years and of how the increasing disparity between the jumble of adaptations in our Stone Age bodies and the modern world is fueling the paradox of greater longevity but more chronic disease.