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The human race is suffering from success
The Straits Times
|October 23, 2024
Treating today's mental and physical conditions may be a challenge, but their prevalence is actually a good sign.
The human race is suffering from success.
Our own ingenuity, our capacity to keep inventing and innovating, means that almost all of us live not just geographically but more importantly technologically a million miles away from the "EEA": the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.
One reason why modern, wealthy societies struggle with rising obesity, say, is that the human body is built for hunter-gathering. Place us in an environment of abundant, tasty food and comfy chairs, and we put on weight.
Obesity as well as atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, certain cancers, Type 2 diabetes and other conditions are sometimes dubbed "diseases of modernity".
Of course, being very far from the environment we evolved for is a fantastic deal for essentially all human beings.
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