the story of the human body evolution health and disease sparknotes

Lieberman is good at explaining why simplistic nostrums aren't appropriate for considering creatures such as human beings. Beyond the best-known example – the lactose tolerance gene, which has gone from almost zero to nearly 100% in northern Europe – most of them have not yet been characterised, but many almost certainly relate to the infectious diseases that accompanied hugely expanded human populations living hugger-mugger with domestic animals. The question is: if human evolution is ongoing, what factors are influencing it now, as opposed to in the distant past? Genomic studies show that more than 100 genes indicate positive selection since farming began 10,000 years ago. He goes further by regretting that for most of his career as a professor of human evolutionary biology he taught the old line that human biology has hardly changed since the Ice Age.

Lieberman says this cannot be true: human beings continue to show a great degree of heritable variation, and reproductive success is also variable so evolution of some kind must still be active. Notable figures including David Attenborough and the geneticist Steve Jones have remarked that human evolution has now ceased. What actually evolves is due to many competing tendencies, and the result is always a work in progress with no destination. Evolution, as he stresses, intends nothing. Lieberman is far from endorsing such crass simplifications. At the extreme, the evolutionary perspective has given rise to the Paleo lifestyle, an attempt to return to the way we lived before the invention of farming 10,000 years ago: to live 'as evolution intended'. But seen in the light of evolution, as Daniel Lieberman considers it, farming itself was the Great Unnatural Practice. This could be dubbed the Prince Charles Line. When the organic food movement began, the premise was that traditional farming practices were the norm, from which we have departed by adopting intensive techniques to produce highly processed food. T he effect the modern western diet has had on our health and wellbeing has been a rumbling issue for decades it has become more controversial recently thanks to the influential evolutionary perspective on the subject.

The story of the human body evolution health and disease sparknotes