Unfit for Purpose: When Human Evolution Collides with the Modern World
A friendly sort of commiseration that looks at all the ways our primitive bodies grapple with living a modern lifestyle
Personal existential malaise aside, it is a question often pondered upon by both scientists and by the media, who tell us repeatedly that our modern lifestyles are terrible for our bodies. Headlines inform us that sitting down for 14 hours a day with only the occasional vertical interlude to forage high fat, high sugar snacks will send us to an early grave. The constant consumption of fake news, real violence and the unsolicited opinion of strangers means we are mentally stimulated to the point of pathology.
It is exactly this physiological and psychological mismatch that Unfit for Purpose grapples with. Author Adam Hart explains to us that we really aren’t built for this after all. ‘The great gulf between what we are as people […] and what we were as animals is the central theme of this book,’ he writes.