Paleofantasy

[Tamrin]

On my wish list:-

PALEOFANTASY: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet and How we Live:

An exposé of pseudoscientific myths about our evolutionary past and how we should live today.

We evolved to eat berries rather than bagels, to live in mud huts rather than condos, to sprint barefoot rather than play football—or did we? Are our bodies and brains truly at odds with modern life? Although it may seem as though we have barely had time to shed our hunter-gatherer legacy, biologist Marlene Zuk reveals that the story is not so simple. Popular theories about how our ancestors lived—and why we should emulate them—are often based on speculation, not scientific evidence.

Armed with a razor-sharp wit and brilliant, eye-opening research, Zuk takes us to the cutting edge of biology to show that evolution can work much faster than was previously realized, meaning that we are not biologically the same as our caveman ancestors.

[Tamrin]

From New Scientist, 23 March 2013, No.2909 (pp.28/9):

The Lure of the Stone Age

The idea that we have not evolved to cope with modern lifestyles is driving numerous "paleo" trends. Biologist Marlene Zuk tells Alison Geoge why she's on a mission to debunk myths about our evolutionary history

What is driving the tendency to idealise the way ancient humans lived?

There is this caricature that organisms evolve until they get to a point when they're perfectly adapted to their environment, then heave this big sigh of relief and stop. Anything that happens to them after that is disastrous.

You see this attitude in what can be referred to as "paleo-nostalgia" — the notion that we were all better off before agriculture, or civilisation or the industrial revolution. It's not to say life has been unmitigatedly getting better. But it's more helpful and accurate to see that all organisms are constantly evolving. There has been no point in our past when we were perfectly adapted to our environment.

[Tamrin]

Marlene Zuk (born 20 May 1956) is an American evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist. She worked as professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) until she transferred to the University of Minnesota in 2012. Her studies involve sexual selection and parasites.