While most of us look forward to the hope of tomorrow, its implicit promise that life will continue to improve, there are some for whom progress, in all its forms, is anathema. For these unchanging few, the world as it was is how it should be today, a place where man lives in harmony not only with the land but with himself and the countless generations that preceded him. There is value in this philosophy; after all, it is within our nature to be reckless, to adopt both technologies and social systems with an eagerness that defies both prudence and patience. The instinct to fall back, re-group and re-trench is one that should be cherished as inherited wisdom. But sadly, too often, this becomes an excuse to eschew progress, to continue forever as we were, out of some outmoded deference to tradition. This is not wisdom. It is wishful thinking. And that truth Marlene Zuk makes wonderfully clear in this engaging examination of humanity's past.
There can be no doubt that man is getting fat. As machines increasingly take up the burden of manual labor, and as our food continues to be charged with fats and sugars, there seems little hope for the expanding waistlines of humans the world over. Dieting offers some recourse to slimming down, but selecting the right one from the sea of options can be both daunting and aggravating. And even then, often the diets fail to yield the desired results. While most accept this as a fact of both existence and genetics, others see it as an outgrowth of a deeper problem. After all, if humanity has lived one way for hundreds of thousands of years and then, over the span of no more than a few millennia, suddenly revolutionizes every aspect of his traditional existence, from food to running, from society to population control, is it not possible that our physiological ills, from cancers to obesity, are outgrowths of this radical change? Evolution is surely too slow to make the adjustments we need to harmonize with our modern, agricultural, technological environment.
Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist, begs to differ. Deploying examples of notable evolutionary changes that have required only a few thousand years to become mainstays of human genetics, she strongly goes to bat for evolution, arguing that the proof of its swiftness lies in the very creatures with whom we share a planet. Insects, for instance, require sometimes only 20 generations to adopt or discard fundamental traits. Translated into human years, this would represent a mere five centuries, well within the window of time with which humanity has lived the very agricultural lifestyle that is supposedly so harmful to all and sundry. Perhaps the problem is within our minds and not within our pasts.
Adopting a lighthearted tone that does little to damage its credibility, Paleofantasy is an excellent takedown of the atavism that underpins fads like the Paleo Diet. And it is the thinking that is Ms. Zuk's target, not the diet itself. For such dieters are basing their assumptions of the effectiveness of their methods on what they consider to be scientific truths about humanity and evolution which the author argues are patently untrue. Throughout these 300, breezy pages, Ms. Zuk systematically disassembles the contentions of these paleoists, leaving little doubt in the minds of all but Paleo's most staunch supporters that, whatever it is, whatever it does, it is not scientific. Which takes us to the work's subtle but enduring theme.
Just because we can reason our way to a sensible conclusion doesn't mean the conclusion is right. On the contrary, history is littered with ironclad frameworks of logic that proved to be completely false, eugenics being both the most obvious and the most supposedly scientific example. Science, nay life in general, is strewn with false positives whose truths either contain so much beauty, or so much obviousness, that they simply had to be right. In fact, this is the very reason why science exists and is so important to the human endeavor. For if our instincts and our guesses were correct far more often than they were wrong, then we wouldn't need the scientific method to understand the truths around us. We could simply arrive at them through reason. This is clearly not the case.
This is not some mean-spirited polemic seeking to ravage the spirits and the hopes of those seeking answers. If it were, it would be no better than those it aims to discredit. No, it is an attempt to warn people that wanting to believe something is true doesn't make it so. And on the way, it is an excellent introduction to evolutionary biology, its fascinations, its glories and its frustrations. Excellent and engaging work... (4/5 Stars)
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