Quotes from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“Our body’s evolutionary journey is also far from over. Natural selection didn’t stop when farming started but instead has continued and continues to adapt populations to changing diets, germs, and environments. Yet the rate and power of cultural evolution has vastly outpaced the rate and power of natural selection, and the bodies we inherited are still adapted to a significant extent to the various and diverse environmental conditions in which we evolved over millions of years. The end product of all that evolution is that we are big-brained, moderately fat bipeds who reproduce relatively rapidly but take a long time to mature.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“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.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“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.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“Dobzhansky, T. (1973). Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. The American Biology Teacher 35: 125–29.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“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.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“Your guts also have about 100 million nerves, more than the number of nerves in your spinal cord or your entire peripheral nervous system.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“When Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935, old age was defined as sixty-five years, yet estimated life expectancy in the United States at the time was sixty-one years for males and sixty-four years for females.62 A senior citizen today, however, can expect to live eighteen to twenty years longer. The downside is that he or she also should expect to die more slowly. The two most common causes of death in 1935 America were respiratory diseases (pneumonia and influenza) and infectious diarrhea, both of which kill rapidly. In contrast, the two most common causes of death in 2007 America were heart disease and cancer (each accounted for about 25 percent of total deaths). Some heart attack victims die within minutes or hours, but most elderly people with heart disease survive for years while coping with complications such as high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, general weakness, and peripheral vascular disease. Many cancer patients also remain alive for several years following their diagnosis because of chemo-therapy, radiation, surgery, and other treatments. In addition, many of the other leading causes of death today are chronic illnesses such as asthma, Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, and kidney disease, and there has been an upsurge in the occurrence of nonfatal but chronic illnesses such as osteoarthritis, gout, dementia, and hearing loss.63 Altogether, the growing prevalence of chronic illness among middle-aged and elderly individuals is contributing to a health-care crisis because the children born during the post–World War II baby boom are now entering old age, and an unprecedented percentage of them are suffering from lingering, disabling, and costly diseases. The term epidemiologists coined for this phenomenon is the “extension of morbidity.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“There is nearly universal consensus that we should prohibit selling and serving alcohol to minors because wine, beer, and spirits can be addictive and, when used to excess, ruinous for their health. Is excess sugar any different?”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“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.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“Our recent divergence from a small population explains another important fact, one that every human ought to know: we are a genetically homogenous species.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, 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.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“Like sex, evolution elicits equally strong opinions from those who study it professionally and those who consider it so wrong and dangerous that they believe the subject shouldn’t be taught to children. Yet,”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“We have much to learn about myopia, but two facts are clear. First, myopia is a formerly rare evolutionary mismatch that is exacerbated by modern environments. Second, even though we don’t entirely understand which factors cause children’s eyeballs to elongate too much, we do know how to treat the symptoms of myopia effectively with eyeglasses. Eyeglasses”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“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.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“The Good News: Taller, Longer-Lived, and Healthier Bodies The last 150 years have profoundly transformed how we eat, work, travel, fight disease, keep clean, and even sleep. It is as if the human species had a total makeover: our daily lives would be barely comprehensible to our ancestors from just a few generations ago, but we are essentially identical genetically, anatomically, and physiologically. The change has been so rapid that too little time has elapsed for more than a modicum of natural selection to have occurred.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“general trend is that people who frequently carry heavy loads and do other “back-breaking” work get fewer back injuries than those who sit in chairs for hours bent over a machine.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“typical adult American male in 1900 had a healthy BMI of about 23, but since then BMI has steadily increased, albeit with a slight dip after World War II. The”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“natural selection is basically the inevitable outcome of two phenomena that still exist: heritable variation and differential reproductive success. Just”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“Human evolution is not over, but the chances of natural selection adapting our species in dramatic, major ways to common non-infectious mismatch diseases are remote unless conditions change dramatically. One reason is that many of these diseases have little to no effect on fertility. Type 2 diabetes, for example, generally develops after people have reproduced, and even then, it is highly manageable for many years.8 Another consideration is that natural selection can act only on variations that affect reproductive success and that are also genetically passed from parent to offspring. Some obesity-related illnesses can hinder reproductive function, but these problems have strong environmental causes.9 Finally, although culture sometimes spurs selection, it is also a powerful buffer. Every year new products and therapies are being developed that allow people with common mismatch diseases to cope better with their symptoms. Whatever selection is operating is probably occurring at a pace too slow to measure in our lifetimes.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“study of thirty thousand elderly people in fifty-two countries found that switching to an overall healthy lifestyle—eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, not smoking, exercising moderately, and not drinking too much alcohol—lowered heart disease rates by approximately 50 percent.14 Reducing exposure to carcinogens, such as tobacco and sodium nitrite, have been shown to decrease the incidence of lung and stomach cancers, and it is likely (more evidence is needed) that lowering exposures to other known carcinogens, such as benzene and formaldehyde, will reduce the incidence of other cancers. Prevention really is the most powerful medicine, but we as a species consistently lack the political or psychological will to act preventively in our own best interests. It is worthwhile to ask to what extent efforts to treat the symptoms of common mismatch diseases have the effect of promoting dysevolution by taking attention and resources away from prevention. On an individual level, am I more likely to eat unhealthy foods and exercise insufficiently if I know I’ll have access to medical care to treat the symptoms of the diseases these choices cause many years later? More broadly within our society, is the money we allocate to treating diseases coming at the expense of money to prevent them?”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“The final and most important point about adaptation is really a
crucial caveat: no organism is primarily adapted to be healthy, long-
lived, happy, or to achieve many other goals for which people strive.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“no matter how you look at the issue, prevention is a fundamentally preferable and more cost-effective way to promote health and longevity. Most people agree that we invest insufficiently in prevention, but they would also surmise that it is difficult to get young, healthy people to avoid behaviors that increase their risk of future illness. Consider smoking, which causes more preventable deaths than any major risk factor (the other big ones being physical inactivity, poor diet, and alcohol abuse). After prolonged legal battles, public health efforts to discourage smoking have managed to halve the percentage of Americans who smoke since the 1950s.19 Yet 20 percent of Americans still smoke, causing 443,000 premature deaths in 2011 at a direct cost of $96 billion per year. Likewise, most Americans know they should be physically active and eat a healthy diet, yet only 20 percent of Americans meet the government’s recommendations for physical activity, and fewer than 20 percent meet government dietary guidelines.20 There are many, diverse reasons we are bad at persuading, nudging, or otherwise encouraging people to use their bodies more as they evolved to be used (more on this later), but one contributing factor could be that we are still following in the footsteps of the marquis de Condorcet, waiting for the next promised breakthrough. Scared of death and hopeful about science, we spend billions of dollars trying to figure out how to regrow diseased organs, hunting for new drugs, and designing artifical body parts to replace the ones we wear out. I am in no way suggesting that we cease investing in these and other areas. Quite the contrary: let’s spend more! But let’s not do so in a way that promotes the pernicious feedback loop of just treating mismatch diseases rather than preventing them. In practical”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“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”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“These natural tendencies then make us vulnerable to manufacturers and marketers who easily exploit our basic urges to eat too much, eat the wrong foods, and exercise too little. Because these unhealthy behaviors are deep instincts they are very difficult to overcome. The bottom line is that knowledge is power, but not enough. Most of us need information and skills, but we also require motivation and reinforcement to overcome basic urges in order to make healthier choices in environments replete with plentiful food and labor-saving devices.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“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 on 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.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“we humans (myself included) sometimes behave in ways that are not in our best interests because we lack sufficient information, we cannot control our environments, we are unfairly manipulated by others, and—crucially—because we are poorly adapted to control deep cravings for comforts and calories that used to be rare. Consequently, a sensible role of government that benefits everyone is to help one another make choices that we would rationally judge to be in our own self-interest. In other words, government has the right and even duty to nudge or sometimes push us to behave rationally while preserving our right to still behave irrationally if we so choose. Government also”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“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. What’s more, interactions between the bodies we inherited, the environments we create, and the decisions we sometimes make have set in motion an insidious feedback loop. We get sick from chronic diseases by doing what we evolved to do but under conditions for which our bodies are poorly adapted, and we then pass on those same conditions to our children, who also then get sick. If we wish to halt this vicious circle then we need to figure out how to respectfully and sensibly nudge, push, and sometimes oblige ourselves to eat foods that promote health and to be more physically active. That,”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“Remember, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Our evolutionary history thus accounts for how and why our skeletons, hearts, intestines, and brains work the way they do. Evolution also explains how and why in the course of a mere 6 million years we changed from being apes in an African forest to being upright, striding bipeds who peer through telescopes into distant galaxies searching for other forms of life. It’s been an amazing 6 million years, but our species’ evolution occurred through just a few transformations. None of these shifts were drastic, all of them were chance events contingent on previous changes, and, more often than not, they were driven by climate change. In the grand scheme of things, if there is any one most transformative human adaptation that we evolved it must be our ability to evolve through culture rather than just natural selection. Today, cultural evolution is outpacing and sometimes outwitting natural selection. Many recent human inventions were adopted because they helped our ancestors produce more food, harness more energy, and have more children. Unintended by-products of these cultural innovations, however, were increased levels of infectious disease from larger, denser populations, inadequate sanitation, and less nutritious food. Civilization also brought extreme famines, dictatorships, war, slavery, and other modern misfortunes. In recent years we have made much progress to redress these man-made problems, and arguably people in the developed world are now better off than hunter-gatherers ever were.”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“More than six hundred generations ago, everybody everywhere was a hunter-gatherer. Until relatively recently—the blink of an eye in evolutionary time—your ancestors lived in small bands of fewer than fifty people. They moved regularly from one camp to the next, and they survived by foraging for plants as well as hunting and fishing. 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”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

“Natural selection is a remarkably simple process that is essentially the outcome of three common phenomena. The first is variation: every organism differs from other members of its species. Your family, your neighbors, and other humans vary widely in weight, leg length, nose shape, personality, and so on. The second phenomenon is genetic heritability: some of the variations present in every population are inherited because parents pass their genes on to their offspring. Your height is much more heritable than your personality, and which language you speak has no genetically heritable basis at all. The third and final phenomenon is differential reproductive success: all organisms, including humans, differ in how many offspring they produce who, themselves, survive to reproduce. Often, differences in reproductive success seem small and inconsequential (my brother has one more child than I do), but these differences can be dramatic and significant when individuals have to struggle or compete to survive and reproduce. Every winter, about 30 to 40 percent of the squirrels in my neighborhood perish, as did similar proportions of humans during great famines and plagues. The Black Death wiped out at least a third of Europe’s population between 1348 and 1350. If you agree that variation, heritability, and differential reproductive success occur, then you must accept that natural selection occurs, because the inevitable outcome of these combined phenomena is natural selection. Like”
― quote from The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease

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