Narrative of the body, with a nasty twist
Humans crave comfort. Sadly, comfort isn’t always good for us. That’s one of the conclusions of Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman, who has spent the past couple of years considering what our evolutionary history says about today’s roaring epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, as well as other chronic ailments. The work was key to his new book, “The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease,” in which Lieberman guides the reader all the way from our divergence from the apes to the present-day epidemiological transition, a period of increased longevity but also higher prevalence of noninfectious diseases such as osteoporosis and cancer. To some extent, these and other ailments are more common because we’re living longer, but many are “mismatch diseases” that stem from our bodies being inadequately adapted to the modern world. Millions of years of natural selection gave us bodies meant to be extraordinarily physically active and...