Everything about civilization is changing. Why aren’t our bodies evolving?

Human life has changed so much in modern times

If someone could parachute in from, say, 1800 to the modern day

it would be a bewildering experience in so many facets, whether it's how we make our food, transportation, energy, disease, medicine

enormous transformation of how we live. And our lives have changed a lot by really gaining control over nature

If you consider nature vulnerability to the elements, which includes things like drought and famine, which are going to affect the abundance of food and water, infectious disease, wild animals, etc

Almost all that has changed for most people on the planet. And so that's really changed fundamentally the quality and quantity of life

And central to a lot of these changes are, for example, the science of biology

By discovering more and more about how nature works. and that knowledge has been power

For example, we didn't know about viruses and bacteria until the last 150 years

and we didn't know much about how to manage them until probably the last 70 to 75 years

In the 19th century, a very large percentage of Americans had TB

Now we would think about that disease as, where did that go? In the 1960s, in the United States

there was a rubella outbreak. We don't hear the word rubella much because it's the R and the MMR

vaccine. Smallpox, which killed tens and tens and tens of millions of people, not only has been

controlled, it has been eradicated from the planet. From every nook and cranny of the planet

smallpox is gone. So the advent of vaccines, of antibiotics, of antivirals, and of better

has dramatically reduced what people deal with. And with respect to agriculture and food production a remarkable statistic is that around 1900 perhaps 40 percent of the United States labor force was involved in farming and agriculture in some way

That's now 2 percent. And that 2 percent is providing a lot more food for a lot more people than it ever did

And, of course, exporting around the world. So the efficiency of agriculture, the productivity of agriculture is remarkably different

Some of that is due to automation, but a lot of that is due to discoveries about better seeds, better ways of nourishing crops, better ways to fight off plant diseases

You know, now we enjoy a much more secure food supply than we did 100 years ago

So these are important biological impacts on us, but I often get the question, you know, is our species evolving

and that i don't have a really clear picture of that if if you go back in time say 60 000 years

ago when humanity left africa when the first migration of homo sapiens out of africa happened

and this was going to lead to the settling you know of of humans on five more continents

if we had sort of stayed as isolated populations unconnected not able to travel the seas not able

to go across land bridges and things like this. Then you would have essentially these sophisticated

you know, human populations in different places, but not sharing genes, not sharing culture

That sets up the situation for evolution. I mean, isolation is sort of, you know

evolution's laboratory. This is why the Galapagos finches are such an example of evolution

is that isolation factor gives the opportunity for speciation to occur. But because now we are

so connected as a species, sharing genes and culture across the globe, that's going to

work against sort of whatever biological evolution might be underway because of how we've changed

our food supply and changed our relationship to infectious diseases and things like that And of course you can see in certain human populations that have specialized to high altitude or certainly across different latitudes in terms of how much sunlight they get

You know, obviously, northern Europeans and equatorial Africans, we all look differently

because those are actually local adaptations, but those aren't fundamentally, you know

speciation events happening. So anatomically and physiologically, I would say I don't think

we've evolved much. You know, cultural evolution can be very, very, very rapid, but our biological

evolution is relatively slow. So there's a lot of mismatches like our physiology, which was wired

to seek out various nutrients that might've been very hard to get as a hunter gatherer

but are now very easy to get at the grocery store means that, you know, our diets are so radically

different than what had evolved, you know, by 10,000 years ago, that's showing up as all sorts

of syndromes in humanity. And perhaps that's one of the things that overwhelms us

is that biology is not evolving as rapidly as culture. Hey, big thinkers

One of the things discussed in the video we just watched is that humanity produces much more food

than it did 100 years ago. But not all the food that we produced gets used

Food waste is still a huge problem. Relying on a single source

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