Paleofantasy (Marlene Zuk)

Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live
Marlene Zuk
W. W. Norton and Company
Nonfiction, Science
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: From "paleo" diets to barefoot running to "natural" child-rearing and family structures, countless modern trends look to our ancestors as the ideal model of human lifestyles and behaviors. Surely, the argument runs, the environment we evolved to fit in for hundreds of thousands of years is a better fit for us than all this newfangled agriculture and city-dwelling, which must be to blame for most (or even all) of our modern stresses and ills. Back then, we were perfectly suited to our place in our world, and it in turn was perfectly fitted around us - right?
Not so, says evolution.
Since the first single-celled organisms started reproducing and passing on genes, life has been less of a spiritual quest for harmonic perfection than an eternal ad-hoc balancing act of survival, every competition won bringing one up against new challenges, every innovation fraught with unintended consequences. Humans are no different from other lifeforms in this respect, and our past was no less full of problems than our present, if different problems than some we face today. Author Marlene Zuk explores and explodes the myth of a golden paleo past, as well as the notion that we humans are somehow beyond the processes of natural selection and evolution that brought us to where we are today.

REVIEW: I've always been a little skeptical of these trends that claim all the answers to our ills lie beyond a golden, conveniently opaque curtain of time: how things were invariably and universally happier, healthier, and better X generations ago, or Y ages ago... even the notion that life on Earth was perfectly peaceful and harmonious until Z event. It strikes me as the evolutionary equivalent of the old saying that nostalgia is remembering yesterday's prices while forgetting yesterday's wages; it's easy to just look at one side of things through rose-colored glasses and imagine (or handwave) away the less appealing sides lost in the shadows.
Zuk cites numerous researchers and studies as evidence that the answers to the world's ills are not to be found by regressing to a previous era. Indeed, the era that many are envisioning as ideal - often pegged sometime in pre-agricultural Paleolithic times - was likely nothing at all like popular culture imagines it, as indicated by archaeological evidence and studies of modern pre-industrial cultures. That's not to say there aren't numerous problems created by modern life, but that pretending we were perfectly adapted for a world that no longer exists is not only not helpful, but ignores our cultural and genetic history, not to mention blinds us to actual and practical solutions. Zuk has a particular bone to pick with the paleo diet fads, particularly the idea that Homo sapiens has not had adequate evolutionary time to adapt to eating grains or consuming dairy products; numerous studies and genetic evidence show that evolution works much faster than some people seem to think, within a few thousand years in the case of several genetic adaptations, well within the timeframe for agriculture's development. She can get a trifle overbearing on these points, clearly frustrated by how people seem to fetishize a Paleolithic world that's more Flintstones than actual science. (The idea that modern lifestyles alone are responsible for diseases like cancer is its own source of obvious irritation.) The chapters can sometimes feel a bit long, and now and again the tangents into genetics feel thick for an undereducated layperson like myself, though there are numerous footnotes and an extensive chapter-by-chapter bibliography for further research and reading.
On the whole, Zuk effectively makes her points about how mythologizing prehistory does little good, and might even do actual harm, while cheapening the remarkable truth about human origins and the ongoing, marvelous mechanism of evolution itself.

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