Synopses & Reviews
We think of medical science and doctors as focused on treating conditions—whether it’s a cough or an aching back. But the sicknesses and complaints that cause us to seek medical attention actually have deeper origins than the superficial germs and behaviors we regularly fault. In fact, as Jeremy Taylor shows in
Body by Darwin, we can trace the roots of many medical conditions through our evolutionary history, revealing what has made us susceptible to certain illnesses and ailments over time and how we can use that knowledge to help us treat or prevent problems in the future.
In Body by Darwin, Taylor examines the evolutionary origins of some of our most common and serious health issues. To begin, he looks at the hygiene hypothesis, which argues that our obsession with anti-bacterial cleanliness, particularly at a young age, may be making us more vulnerable to autoimmune and allergic diseases. He also discusses diseases of the eye, the medical consequences of bipedalism as they relate to all those aches and pains in our backs and knees, the rise of Alzheimer’s disease, and how cancers become so malignant that they kill us despite the toxic chemotherapy we throw at them. Taylor explains why it helps to think about heart disease in relation to the demands of an ever-growing, dense, muscular pump that requires increasing amounts of nutrients, and he discusses how walking upright and giving birth to ever larger babies led to a problematic compromise in the design of the female spine and pelvis. Throughout, he not only explores the impact of evolution on human form and function, but he integrates science with stories from actual patients and doctors, closely examining the implications for our health.
As Taylor shows, evolutionary medicine allows us think about the human body and its adaptations in a completely new and productive way. By exploring how our body’s performance is shaped by its past, Body by Darwin draws powerful connections between our ancient human history and the future of potential medical advances that can harness this knowledge.
Review
“Taylor has accomplished the difficult feat of appealing to the general reader in a book aimed also at medical professionals. Doctors really do need to imbibe Darwinism, not just as the explanation for all life but as a message of direct importance to medicine itself.”
Review
“Body by Darwin packages cutting edge science into seven vivid true stories dramatically describing patients and their doctors discovering evolutionary explanations for diseases. More than just the perfect book club book, it advances the field of evolutionary medicine. I will use it in my classes and give copies to my friends.”
Review
"This is a fantastic book that I found hard to put down. Taylor has tackled some of the primary health concerns for many of us in industrialized nations, including allergies, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and back and knee problems that result from a lifetime of walking on two legs. Each chapter begins with a story of someone who is afflicted with one of these health challenges, drawing attention to real lives in ways that are compelling, and the thoroughness with which each topic is developed sets this book apart from most others that I have read on evolutionary medicine.”
Synopsis
In this landmark book of popular science, Daniel E. Lieberman—chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and a leader in the field—gives us a lucid and engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years, even as it shows how the increasing disparity between the jumble of adaptations in our Stone Age bodies and advancements in the modern world is occasioning this paradox: greater longevity but increased chronic disease.
The Story of the Human Body brilliantly illuminates as never before the major transformations that contributed key adaptations to the body: the rise of bipedalism; the shift to a non-fruit-based diet; the advent of hunting and gathering, leading to our superlative endurance athleticism; the development of a very large brain; and the incipience of cultural proficiencies. Lieberman also elucidates how cultural evolution differs from biological evolution, and how our bodies were further transformed during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.
While these ongoing changes have brought about many benefits, they have also created conditions to which our bodies are not entirely adapted, Lieberman argues, resulting in the growing incidence of obesity and new but avoidable diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. Lieberman proposes that many of these chronic illnesses persist and in some cases are intensifying because of “dysevolution,” a pernicious dynamic whereby only the symptoms rather than the causes of these maladies are treated. And finally—provocatively—he advocates the use of evolutionary information to help nudge, push, and sometimes even compel us to create a more salubrious environment.
(With charts and line drawings throughout.)
Synopsis
The natural world is rich with elegant evolutionary designs, but ask any patient who wakes daily with sciatica, or the many septuagenarians in need of cataract surgery, not to mention any woman who has given birth, and evolution might seem more dismal than divine. The human body is a wonderful example of evolutionary compromise and adaptations. Our eyes were not designed for the arc of our current lifespan, with upright walking the spine had to shift and years of gravitational pull then take their toll. And the sheer size of our heads coupled with the shape of a woman’s pelvis make birth the biological equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine, with many extra moving parts just to make sure the basics can be done.
While the human body may not be as elegant in form and function as those of other species, when explored from an evolutionary perspective, human medicine can be wonderfully illuminated. And this Darwinian view of body function and failure can in turn lead to innovative treatment and health care. This book takes some of the most fascinating and acute medical issues today--from high rate of autoimmune diseases to the high number of heart transplants needed—and explores them through an evolutionary prism. Evolutionary medicine prescribes new tools for understanding the origins of diseases and new kinds of research on possible treatments, of exactly the sort that this book so vividly describes.
Synopsis
Based on her hugely popular Atlantic article, science writer Kathleen McAuliffe reveals the myriad ways parasites control how humans act, feel, and think.
Synopsis
As we are now discovering, parasites—microbes that cannot thrive and reproduce without another organism as a host—are shockingly sophisticated and extraordinarily powerful. In fact, a host of parasites affect our behavior in ways we have barely begun to understand
In this mind-bending book, McAuliffe reveals the eons-old war between parasites and other creatures that is playing out in our very own bodies. And more surprising still, she uncovers the decisive role that parasites may have played in the rise and demise of entire civilizations. Our obsession with cleanliness and our experience of disgust are both evolutionary tools for avoiding infection, but they evolved differently for different populations. Political, social, and religious differences among societies may be caused, in part, by the different parasites that prey on us. In the tradition of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, This Is Your Brain on Parasites is both a journey into cutting-edge science and a revelatory examination of what it means to be human.
About the Author
KATHLEEN MCAULIFFE is a contributing editor to Discover. Her work has appeared in over a dozen national magazines, including Discover, the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, and Smithsonian. From 1999 to 2006, she was also a health columnist for More. Her work has been published in Best American Science Writing, and has received several grants and awards, including a science writing fellowship from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. She has appeared numerous times on TV and radio, and was interviewed by To the Point, the nationally syndicated Osgood FIle, and other programs after her 2012 Atlantic feature "How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy" became the second most widely read article in the magazine's history. McAuliffe lives in Miami with her husband—a research physicist—and her two children.