It came with both costs and one big advantage. Walking upright made humans what they are. 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 sections, 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. 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.Įvolution works according to the logic of natural selection and adaptation.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.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. 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. Human history from hominids to Homo sapiens.
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Anyone interested in nutrition and fitness.Anyone who’s ever wondered how we got from cave- to city-dwelling.Evolution, Health, and Disease - The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman Who is this book for