The paradox of the modern world is reduced mortality but greater morbidity i.e. At the same time, we are living longer but spending many of those years suffering from chronic, preventable diseases. In many senses, the agricultural and industrial revolutions have propelled humans to new heights of health and longevity, with modern science curing diseases and fixing people better than ever before. His position is more nuanced than many of the extreme black and white positions out there, as befitting the complexity of gene-environment interaction. Lieberman is no luddite, and certainly doesn’t advocate a return to the caves and giving up on modern science and technology. It turns out that surrounding ourselves with unlimited sources of cheap junk food is a bad idea because humans are genetically wired to crave food with dense amounts of fat, sugar, starch, and salt. Lieberman calls this this paradoxical unhealthiness “dysevolution”. Lieberman argues that all of these diseases are in some sense a result of cultural evolution speeding ahead of natural evolution with the result that have humans manufactured a psychologically comfy and satisfying environment that is paradoxically unhealthy without fundamentally affecting our reproductive fitness. We know they’re mismatch diseases primarily because they used to be rare, are largely preventable, and are almost unheard of in hunter-gatherer populations.
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a disease that is primarily caused by our bodies not being sufficiently adapted to novel gene-environment contexts. Lieberman argues these diseases are examples of “mismatch diseases” i.e.
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Now ask, why do people in modern societies suffer from “diseases of affluence” like obesity, type-2 diabetes, tooth decay, metabolic syndrome, flat feet, nearsightedness, lower back pain, and sleep disorders? Daniel Lieberman argues that these questions can only be fully answered by understanding the evolutionary history of our species. Why do humans stand and walk on two legs? Why are we weak compared to other primates of comparable size? Why are our legs and feet shaped the way they are, with springy tendons and arched feet? Why does our spine have a special S-curve? The answer to these questions lies in the the evolutionary history of our species. If you want to know where your body comes from, you need to understand its evolutionary history.
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And finally – provocatively – he advocates the use of evolutionary information to help us nudge, push, and sometimes oblige us to create a more salubrious environment.In The Story of the Human Body Daniel Lieberman builds a strong case that making fully informed decisions about diet and lifestyle is only possible through the lens of evolutionary history. 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. He elucidates how cultural evolution differs from biological evolution, and has further transformed our bodies during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. In a book that illuminates, as never before, the evolutionary story of the human body, Daniel Lieberman deftly examines the major transformations which 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. A landmark book of popular science, The Story of the Human Body is 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 in which we live is fueling the paradox of greater longevity but more chronic disease.