Living the paleofantasy?

Abstract

Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live, by Marlene Zuk. ISBN 978-0393-08137-4 New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. 328pp. H/b $27.95. My particular interest in this topic is my research focus on the evolution of human diets, and the “paleodiet” fad has made my research relevant recently. I’m always on the lookout for articles and books that communicate about prehistoric diets – and human evolution in general – to the general public. This book does a superb job. In fact, I’ve been asked by several people if and when I might want to write a book, and now I’ve been telling them that the book I’d want to write has already been written; this one! Dr. Marlene Zuk is a Professor in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota, studying how natural and sexual selection pressures shape the behavior, life history, and morphology of animals. Specifically, her lab investigates the conflict between natural and sexual selection in Pacific field crickets. While her core research may sound a bit dry, this book is absolutely drenched with witty, lively, accessible information about examples of past and present evolution as they pertain to the modern myth that we have not had time to evolve in response to modern pressures and circumstances. How can you not immediately be hooked by a book whose first sentence is “The first thing you have to do to study 4,000year-old DNA is take off your clothes”? In the introduction, and repeatedly throughout the book, Zuk elegantly breaks down this “paleofantasy” and dispels many myths on which it rests. Some of the main ones include the idea that at some idyllic point in the past, we were “perfectly adapted to our environments” (p. 7), when in fact organisms with seemingly flawless adaptations are actually “full of compromises, jury-rigged like all other organisms” (p. 8) that “we have trade-offs and “good