Book: 20250121 - 20250505，"The story of the human body" by Daniel Lieberman

20250123 - 1. Introduction

Natural selection is essentially the outcome of three common phenomena: variation(多样化), heritability(遗传), and differential reproductive success(变异).

Put crudely, adaptations evolve most strongly when the going gets tough. p12

Life went easy in the past 70 years, globally. Most people forgot how cruel nature is.

Mr Lieberman missed the Transition Eight: The Intelligence Revolution.(p20)
What would happen when AI take away most of the jobs? Will next generation lie down and play computer games all day long?

Part I: Apes and Humans
20250125 - 2: Upstanding Apes

Natural selection acts most strongly not during times of plenty, but during times of stress and scarcity. p40

What would happen if AI give us permanent abundance?

How important is it to walk longer distance and to free up our hands while walking? We can carry goods over long distance.
Compare this to lions. The adult lions have to bring cubs and pregnant female lions to the hunting place to eat! They(both parents) cannot go out for hunting for days, but hominin can, and so hominin can form tribes.

It's not just about potential tools. The advantages of location is critical.

20250208 - 3: Much Depends on Dinner

We only change/improve when under great pressure.
That's also the reason that we should not stay in comfort zone.

20250209 - 4: The First Hunter-Gatherers

How to Hunt Large Herbivores on the Plains Without Any Tools or Weapons?

A group of about ten people, carrying drinking water, should position themselves strategically. Around midday, they can drive large herbivores to run for 20-30 kilometers, preventing them from resting or entering shaded areas.

Before long, some animals will succumb to heat exhaustion and collapse. :-)

It costs the same number of calories to run five miles at a pace of either 7 or 10 minutes permile, a phenomenon many people find counterintuitive. p85

Interesting.

At the moment, our brains and guts are with similar weight, and consume similar energy. Compare to our ancesters, our brains are getting much larger and our guts are getting much smaller.
Thanks to the modern food and caesarean section, our brain will become larger and our guts will become smaller.

What does this mean? We will be smarter but more fragile.

20250302 - 5: Energy in the Ice Age

Such a strategy of minimal investment - live fast, die young, and breed profligately - make sense when resources are unpredictable and mortality is high. If life is chancy, go for quick, cheap returns. p95

Why fertility rate dropped so much globaly in the past 50 years? Because resources are predictable and mortality is low.

In the end, natural selection is about how to use energy. In current society, it's all about our brain.
The one with sharpest mind win. The one wasting their attention with screen lose.

The one who can pay attention all the time win.

20250303 - 6: A Very Cultured Species

Culture is actually pattern.
With the help of culture, The tribes of Homo Sapiens are more like multi-cell organism, and the tribes of Neanderthals are more like single-cell organism.
With the help of culture, Each Homo Sapien can learn quickly, while each generation of Neanderthals has to learn/create all pattern from scratch.

These and other dietary shifts helped fuel a population explosion. Soon after the Upper Paleolithic appears, the number and density of sites started to increase, even in remote and challenging places like Siberia. p136

This means that population alway incline to grow. The reason that population before upper Paleolithic didn't grow much, although most people only need to work a few hours a day, most likely caused by the Black Swans. That's miserable. That's the reason that farming replaced hunting-gathering. Agriculture produces much more food so people can go through dry/winter seasons.

Survival is all about energy/efficiency and the Black Swans.

Part II: Farming and the Industrial Revolution
20250317 - 7: Progress, Mismatch, and Dysevolution

This is the main goal of this book.

Too much calories takein, too less physical activities.

20250320 - 8: Paradise Lost?

A far more important factor that spurred on the origin of farming in different parts of the globe was population stress. p182

Why there was no such stree before that? I guess it's because we entered Neolithic Age.

Why we didn't enter Neolithic Age earlier? Climate change?
Ending of Ice Age surely helped. Is that the only reason?

Natural selection is powerful. Human coped most of those mismatch diseases with culture changes.

For example, we boil water to kill parasites, or add chlorine into water.

Is that the right solution for long term? I think so.

What's the side effect? The civilization becomes more fragile.

Will AI help?

20250323 - 9: Modern Times, Modern Bodies

Crunchy peanut butter is much better than Smooth peanut butter. The former contains more fibre, and takes more energy to digest.

Stature is a pretty good indicator for living condition, but it doesn't tell us the Black Swans.

Hunter-gatherers who survive childhood typically live to be old: their most common age of death is between sixty-eight and seventy-two, and most become grandparents or even great-grandparents. They most likely die from gastrointestinal or respiratory infections. p244

Big surprise! Cardiovascular diseases, cerebrovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer... these are all modern illnesses that are largely preventable for most people!

Part III: The Present, the Future
20250413 - 10: The Vicious Circle of Too Much

Eat less, especially simple carbohydrate(such as sugar, rice, cake, biscuit, juice, etc.)
Avoid smoking and drugs.

The feeling of hunger is good to our health.

20250414 - 11: Disuse

Because bodies are not engineered but instead grow and evolve, your body expects and indeed requires certain stresses when you are maturing in order to develop appropriately. p297

This is the reason that we should not let babies to grow up in excessive clean environment. That's bad to their immunisation system.

For the same reason that we need to do more physical exercise, or else our gene think strong muscle and thick bones are not needed.

This also means, potentially we can improve our body through mRNA injection, which make our gene to redistribute more energy to muscle, etc.

Too little stress causes inadequate or inappropriate capacity. p315

This "stress" could be anything. Any organism alive need stress to grow properly.

This also apply to our mind. We need mental painess and challenges of intelligence.

Life needs stress to go against entropy.
"No strain, no gain."

It's also the key to thrive in abundant society. If AI gives us everything we need, how can we live a good life?
We need to find a way to give ourselves stress.

20250503 - 12: The Hidden Dangers of Novelty and Comfort

For running on relatively hard surface, it's better to use forefoot strike. p324

It's disappointing to know that myopia and lower back pain are still mystery. I have some strange guess that myopia may caused by dry eyeball surface.

We need more physical activity. That means we need to grab all possibilities to climb stairs and walking.

20250505 - 13: Survival of the Fitter

Sugar tax is good idea, and it needs to be at least 200%!

This book missed an important part: our mind.
Most of people lost the capability to pay attention to our thoughts and actions.