Daniel Lieberman Quotes
Best 19 Quotes by Daniel Lieberman
The Story of the Human Body Quotes
“A 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.
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“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Natural selection is basically the inevitable outcome of two phenomena that still exist: heritable variation and differential reproductive success.”
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
“Our body’s evolutionary journey is far from over.”
“Our recent divergence from a small population explains another important fact, one that every human ought to know: we are a genetically homogenous species.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The 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.
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“The invention of agriculture caused the human food supply to increase in quantity and deteriorate in quality, but food industrialization multiplied this effect.”
“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?”
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“Try your utmost to keep away thoughts that are not perfectly modest.
Impure ideas are generally ready to present themselves to most boys' minds.
In whatever way the are suggested – whether by indecent pictures, 'smutty' talk, or by the boy's own imagination – the mental influence which they produce quite apart from their moral dangers, has a direct effect upon the physical formation of the s*men.
And so freedom from all questionable thoughts is likely to diminish the number of nightly discharges.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Your guts also have about 100 million nerves, more than the number of nerves in your spinal cord or your entire peripheral nervous system.”
