The story of the human body by daniel lieberman review
That’s what made us the dominant species on earth.īut change didn’t come cheap. Our evolutionary path began the moment our ancestors stopped scrabbling around on all fours and started walking upright. What sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom – is it, for example, our large brains or perhaps our unique opposable thumbs? These help both the original organism and its offspring thrive.Ī good example of a large-scale environmental change which triggers this kind of evolutionary adaptation is climate change.Īnd that’s Darwin’s theory of evolution in a nutshell! In the following book summarys, we’ll dig a bit deeper and explore how the history of the human body fits into all this. This describes how an individual develops new heritable traits that help it adapt to new surroundings. Well, when dramatic environmental changes occur, natural selection uses a different tool – adaption. Organisms without significant new heritable traits come out on top. Negative selection, therefore, favors the status quo. That’s because, like humans with hemophilia, these organisms would be less likely to survive – if it weren’t for modern medicine! These traits lower chances of reproductive success.Īn organism with negative traits is less likely to produce offspring than competitors which don’t have them. A good example in humans is the genetic disorder hemophilia.
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That’s when an organism has “negative” heritable traits. Natural selection is usually driven by negative selection. That’s a mouthful, right? What it means is that different organisms will produce a different number of offspring that go on to reproduce in their turn. Then there’s differential reproductive success. Every organism passes genetic traits on to its offspring. By that Darwin meant that each individual organism is different from other members of the same species. Natural selection can be broken down into three separate – but interlinked – components.įirst, there’s variability. Because of that, they survive and go on to reproduce. This simply means that the best-adapted members of a particular species are “selected” by nature. Centuries of religious ideas about the history of humanity were turned on their head.Īccording to Darwin, the driving force behind evolution is natural selection. Between its covers was a theory that shook the world. why the birth of agriculture was both a blessing and a curse.Ĭharles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859.why posture can shape the fortunes of an entire species.how natural selection interacts with environmental changes.In this summary of The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman, you’ll learn The Story of the Human Body helps us do just that.Ī far-ranging evolutionary history of homo sapiens, it charts the development of humanity from its origins in central Africa millions of years ago right down into our office-bound present. If we want to change that, Harvard-based paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman argues, we have to understand what the human body really is and where it came from.
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Obesity, diabetes and osteoporosis are on the rise in the wealthiest and most advanced nations. That’s created a mismatch between our prehistoric bodies and the modern world we inhabit. Today, life is an embarrassment of riches. The development of the human body is a story millions of years in the making.īut social history and deep biological time stopped moving in tandem during the age of industrialization. It measures time in millennia rather than centuries.