11 Quotes by Daniel E. Lieberman

Farming is often viewed as an old-fashioned way of life, but from an evolutionary perspective, it is a recent, unique, and comparatively bizarre way to live.

The fundamental answer to why so many humans are now getting sick from previously rare illnesses is that many of the body’s features were adapted in environments from which we evolved, but have become maladapted in the modern environments we have now created. This idea, known as the mismatch hypothesis, is the core of the new emerging field of evolutionary medicine, which applies evolutionary biology to health and disease.

According to one calculation, everyone alive today descends from a population of fewer than 14,000 breeding individuals from sub-Saharan Africa, and the initial population that gave rise to all non-Africans was probably fewer than 3,000 people.

An evolutionary perspective predicts that most diets and fitness programs will fail, as they do, because we still don’t know how to counter once-adaptive primal instincts to eat donuts and take the elevator.

Your guts also have about 100 million nerves, more than the number of nerves in your spinal cord or your entire peripheral nervous system.

We didn’t evolve to be healthy, but instead we were selected to have as many offspring as possible under diverse, challenging conditions. As a consequence, we never evolved to make rational choices about what to eat or how to exercise in conditions of abundance and comfort.

In short, the invention of agriculture caused the human food supply to increase in quantity and deteriorate in quality, but food industrialization multiplied this effect. Over.

Muscle imbalances caused by hours of sitting in chairs have also been hypothesized to contribute to one of the most common health problems on the planet: lower back pain. Depending on where you live and what you do, your chances of getting lower back pain are between 60 and 90 percent.

Another relevant factor is money. In the United States and many other countries, health care is partly a for-profit industry.21 Consequently, there is a strong incentive to invest in or promote treatments such as antacids and orthotics that alleviate the symptoms of diseases and that people have to buy frequently and for many years. Another way to make lots of money is to favor costly procedures like surgery instead of less expensive preventive treatments like physical therapy. Preventive.