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“Like it or not, we are slightly fat, furless, bipedal primates who crave sugar, salt, fat, and starch,” he writes, “but we are still adapted to eating a diverse diet of fibrous fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, tubers, and lean meat. His argument is that many of the health problems we battle have arisen out of a kind of evolutionary mismatch, with our bodies shaped by selective pressures that no longer govern whether we live or die - or reproduce. Lieberman, chairman of the Harvard Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, discusses the impact of natural selection and the dynamics of evolution over all those millennia on the bodies we inhabit. In “The Story of the Human Body,” Daniel E. And some evolutionary explanations that seemed dubious then now seem just silly - I am thinking of one that I dimly recall on the evolutionary advantages of joining a sorority to improve your reproductive fitness.īut it was an exciting time to study evolutionary biology, and it certainly left me with a sense of the intellectual challenge of considering how the long time frame of human evolutionary change might or might not explain modern human patterns and problems.
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There were battles over notions that seemed radical back then but are now widely accepted - for example, that many aspects of behavior, personality and temperament are strongly affected by genetic tendencies. Wilson published “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,” and controversial ideas about health, biology and behavior were fought out in some of my college biology classes. The Foundation’s mission is to increase scientific knowledge, education, and public understanding of human origins, evolution, behavior, and survival.I was an undergraduate in 1975, when E.O. The Leakey Foundation is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco that advances human origins research and offers educational opportunities to cultivate a deeper, collective understanding of what it means to be human.
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He also tackles the question of whether you can exercise too much, even as he explains why exercise can reduce our vulnerability to the diseases mostly likely to make us sick and kill us. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology and anthropology, he suggests how we can make exercise more enjoyable, rather than shaming and blaming people for avoiding it.
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Harvard Division of Science, Cabot Science Library, and Harvard Book Store, in partnership with the Leakey FoundationĬontact Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, a pioneering researcher on the evolution of human physical activity, and the acclaimed author of The Story of the Human Body, will present his new book, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding.ĭoes running ruin your knees? Should we do weights, cardio, or high-intensity training? If exercise is good for you, why do many people dislike or avoid it? Exercised tells the story of how humans never evolved to exercise-to do voluntary physical activity for the sake of health. Using his own research and experiences throughout the world, Lieberman recounts without jargon how and why humans evolved to walk, run, dig, and do other necessary and rewarding physical activities while avoiding needless exertion.