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1-Page Summary of The Story of the Human Body

Overview

Nature is slow. It takes millions of years to develop the human body.

During the Industrial Revolution, social history and biological time stopped moving together. We eat too much and exercise too little because of our abundance of food.

We’ve created a mismatch between our bodies and the world we live in. We’re becoming more obese, diabetic, and weak because of it.

In order to change the way we think about our bodies, Harvard-based paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman argues that we should understand where they came from. The Story of the Human Body helps us do just that by explaining how our bodies evolved and what makes them work.

This book explores the history of homo sapiens. It covers our evolution from central Africa millions of years ago to present day right down to our office-bound lives.

In this passage, you’ll learn about how natural selection interacts with environmental changes. You’ll also learn why posture can shape the fortunes of an entire species. Finally, you will discover why the birth of agriculture was both a blessing and a curse.

Big Idea #1: Evolution works according to the logic of natural selection and adaptation.

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. It was a book that challenged religious beliefs and shook up centuries of thinking about how humans came to be.

It says, “Think and Grow Rich”

Darwin believed that evolution was driven by natural selection. This means the best-adapted members of a species survive and reproduce, while their weaker counterparts die off.

The theory of natural selection can be divided into three parts. First, there is variability among individual organisms within the same species.

Genetics plays a role in the growth of organisms. Different species will vary in their reproductive success, meaning that some species will produce more offspring than others.

Natural selection is usually driven by negative traits. These are bad things that lower the chance of survival, such as hemophilia in humans. If an organism has a negative trait, it’s less likely to survive than organisms without those traits. This explains why people with hemophilia have fewer children than others since they can’t reproduce easily themselves and need medical assistance to do so.

Negative selection is a process that favors the current situation. It would rather leave things as they are than change them. Organisms without significant new heritable traits come out on top.

Biological processes are essentially biological. Environmental changes cause natural selection to use a different tool – adaption, which describes how an individual develops new heritable traits that help it adapt to new surroundings. These help both the original organism and its offspring thrive in times of dramatic environmental change such as climate change.

In this passage, the author summarizes Darwin’s theory of evolution. In the following key points, we’ll explore how it applies to human history.

Big Idea #2: Walking upright made humans what they are. It came with both costs and one big advantage.

Humans are the dominant species on earth. Our evolutionary path began when our ancestors stopped crawling around and started walking upright. That’s what made us so successful as a species. However, it came at a cost–we lost other abilities that chimpanzees have, such as strength and speed. In fact, chimpanzees are twice as fast and strong as humans despite being much smaller than we are!

Thus, we can see that walking upright was advantageous for humans. However, there were some drawbacks as well. For example, it caused our spines to curve and shortened our legs. That said, there are also advantages such as efficiency when adapting to rapidly changing environments because of the evolutionary process.