Misguided nostalgia for our paleo past

The following is an edited excerpt.

It’s hard to escape the recurring conviction that somewhere, somehow, things have gone wrong [with human evolution]. In a time with unprecedented ability to transform the environment, to make deserts bloom and turn intercontinental travel into the work of a few hours, we are suffering from diseases our ancestors of a few thousand years ago, much less our prehuman selves, never knew: diabetes, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis. Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that for the first time in history, the current generation of children will not live as long as their parents, probably because obesity and associated maladies are curtailing the promise of modern medicine.

[But] to think of ourselves as misfits in our own time and of our own making flatly contradicts what we now understand about the way evolution works.

View the original article here: Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past

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