
Natural selection can be broken down into three separate – but interlinked – components.įirst, there’s variability. Because of that, they survive and go on to reproduce. This simply means that the best-adapted members of a particular species are “selected” by nature. Centuries of religious ideas about the history of humanity were turned on their head.Īccording to Darwin, the driving force behind evolution is natural selection. Between its covers was a theory that shook the world. why the birth of agriculture was both a blessing and a curse.Ĭharles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859.why posture can shape the fortunes of an entire species.

how natural selection interacts with environmental changes.In this summary of The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman, you’ll learn The Story of the Human Body helps us do just that.Ī far-ranging evolutionary history of homo sapiens, it charts the development of humanity from its origins in central Africa millions of years ago right down into our office-bound present. If we want to change that, Harvard-based paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman argues, we have to understand what the human body really is and where it came from. Obesity, diabetes and osteoporosis are on the rise in the wealthiest and most advanced nations. That’s created a mismatch between our prehistoric bodies and the modern world we inhabit. Today, life is an embarrassment of riches. The development of the human body is a story millions of years in the making.īut social history and deep biological time stopped moving in tandem during the age of industrialization. It measures time in millennia rather than centuries.
