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Daniel E. Lieberman Books

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“We have conquered or quelled many diseases that used to kill people in droves: smallpox, measles, polio and the plague. People are taller, and formerly life-threating conditions like appendicitis, dysentery, a broken leg or anemia are easily remedied. To be sure, there is still too much malnutrition and disease in some countries, but these evils are often the result of bad government and social inequality, not a lack of food or medical know how.”

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“Even after agriculture was invented starting about 10,000 years ago, most farmers still lived in small villages, labored daily to produce enough food for themselves, and never imagined an existence now common in places like Tampa, Florida, where people take for granted cars, toilets, air-conditioning, cell phones, and an abundance of highly processed, calorie-rich food.”

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“Yet as good as things are, they could be much better, and there are plenty of reasons to worry about the human body's future. Apart from potencial threats posed by climate change, we are also confronting a massive population boom combined with an epidemiological transition. As more people are living longer and fewer are dying young from diseases caused by infections or insufficient food, exponentially middle-aged and elderly people are suffering from chronic noninfectious diseases that used to be rare or unknown.”

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“Remember that for millions of years natural selection favored women who devoted whatever extra energy they had toward reproduction, partly through the action of reproductive hormones such as estrogen. Natural selection, however, never geared women's bodies for coping with long-term surfeits of energy, estrogen, and other related hormones. As a result, women today are very different and vastly more at risk of developing cancer than mothers from long ago because their bodies are still functioning as they evolved to have as many surviving children as possible.”

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“We are still evolving. Right now, however, the most potent form of evolution is not biological evolution of the sort described by Darwin, but cultural evolution, in which we develop and pass new ideas and behaviors to our children, friends and others. Some of these novel behaviors, especially the foods we eat and the activities we do (or don't do), make us sick.”

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“Food processors, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and clothes-washing machines have substancially lessened the physical activity required to cook and clean. Air conditioners and central heating have decreased how much energy our bodies spend to maintain a stable body temperature. Countless other devices, such as electric can openers, remote controls, electric razors and suitcases on wheels, have reduced, calorie by calorie, the amount of energy we expend to exist.”

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“In short, the Industrial Revolution was actually a combination of technological, economical, scientific and social transformations that rapidly and radically altered the course of history and reconfigured the face of the planet in less than ten generations -a true blink of an eye by the standards of evolutionary time.”

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