Unfit for Purpose
When Human Evolution Collides with the Modern World
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
'A gripping and sobering reminder of how much we are all governed by our genetic inheritance. So much for free will.' The Mail on Sunday
Stress, obesity, poor mental health, drug addiction, bowel diseases, violence and fake news; a stark checklist of modern world problems and every one of them is an echo of our evolutionary past.
In Unfit for Purpose, biologist and broadcaster Adam Hart explores the mismatch between our fundamental biology and the modern world we have created. In each chapter Adam reveals the many ways in which biological adaptations that evolved to help us survive and thrive now work against us. For example, in the modern world stress is a killer but how did 'fight or flight' instincts turn from life-savers to life-takers? Obesity is a disease now but is it also just a side-effect of our evolutionary past? Whether it's the derailing of microbes in our gut, the rise of gluten and lactose intolerance, problems of social media or drug addiction, we always seem to have one foot in the modern world and the other firmly in our evolutionary past.
Adam explores science, archaeology, medicine, genetics, sociology and more, to show how, in a modern world of our own making, we find ourselves 'unfit for purpose'. But all is not lost! In unpicking the causes of our current woes, he unearths some secrets of evolutionarily informed treatments that will change the way we think about ourselves and our future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though Hart (The Life of Poo), a biologist and science journalist, explains the goal for his rambling book clearly enough, the underlying evolutionary premise he offers is flawed. He notes that "this book is about mismatches between evolutionary past and the environment we have created" but fails to mention what biologists understand very well: evolution never yields a perfect match between organisms and their environment. Hart devotes the bulk of the text to supposedly evolution-related problems such as stress, obesity, violence, addiction, and mental health issues, providing for each some brief biological background, a superficial analysis of current research, and a concluding note that the situation is too complex for any simple solution. At times, Hart's comments come across as gratuitous and unfair, as when discussing geneticist James Neel, who proposed a "thrifty gene" that promoted fat and carbohydrates conservation in ancient hunter-gatherers. Hart begins by mentioning accusations unrelated to his subject that Neel deliberately initiated a measles epidemic among a group of indigenous people in the Amazon, only to acknowledge that the accusation was later fully discredited. The few kernels of insight presented in this scattered survey are not worth the work of winnowing them from the large amount of chaff.
