Adverse Interactions Between Natural Selection and the Modern Environment

Our species evolved to perpetuate itself in a very different environment from the one we find ourselves in now. We are clearly far better off as individuals: lives are a good deal less nasty, brutish, and short than was the case for our distant ancestors. Technological progress has conquered a sizable slice of the death and disease of childhood and early adult life, to a degree varying by the wealth of any given region of the world. The worst half of infectious disease is controlled, but chronic age-related diseases remain poorly managed, and the incidence of these diseases rises inexorably as people live longer due to continued incremental improvements in medicine - but also as people become sedentary and overweight, the evolved human response to technologies of transport and abundant calories. We might ask to what degree this situation can be considered a mismatch between environment and evolved adaptation. Is widespread age-related disease a problem that emerges with technology and its consequences because that technology has arrived over a short time frame, and thus previously evolved characteristics and biochemical mechanisms are square pegs faced with a suddenly round hole? We might think of our need for exercise to maintain health and function, coupled to a civilization in which ever fewer people are running down game animals or otherwise engaged in earnest physical activity day in and day out. Alternatively, is this a preexisting problem that is now exac...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs