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The exhibition Evolution Health Connection, at The New York hall of
Science, explores the proximate and the ultimate causes of some of our
health issues and the trade offs that occurred over the millions of years
of our evolution. It covers issues of:

upright posture and structural difficulties that we I've with because of
our evolution from quadrupeds to bipeds, evolution of our huge brain and
the effects this has on our birthing;

obesity and the results of the feast or famine live we led many, many years
ago and the super abundance of high fat, high sugar foods (and the
addictive nature of these foods (
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all
,);

lactose tolerance and the rise of animal domestication; and
the loss of skin pigmentation due to migration to areas of Earth will less
UV radiation and risks of severe sunburn and skin cancer as well as vitamin
D deprivation. The impetuous for this exhibition funded by NIH was Why We
get Sick by Randolph Nesse and George Williams.

This month at the annual AAAS meeting in Boston there was a session
entitled the Scars of Evolution alluding to these "detrimental"
evolutionary advances. See Human Evolution: Gain with Pain
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/02/human-evolution-gain-came-with-p.html
 .

*Humans are the most successful primates on the planet, but our bodies
wouldn’t win many awards for good design. That was the consensus of a panel
of anthropologists who described in often-painful (and sometimes personal)
detail just how poor a job evolution has done sculpting the human
form<http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2013/webprogram/Session5714.html> at
the annual meeting of AAAS. Using props and examples from the fossil
record, the scientists showed how the very adaptations that have made
humans so successful—such as upright walking and our big, complex
brains—have been the result of constant remodeling of an ancient ape body
plan that was originally used for life in the trees. “This anatomy isn’t
what you’d design from scratch," said anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva of
Boston University. "Evolution works with duct tape and paper clips."*

The session was based on an influential 1951 article by Wilton Krogman,
titled, "The Scars of Human
Evolution"<http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v185/n6/pdf/scientificamerican1251-54.pdf>.
In honor of the session, *Scientific American* has made the article available
for download<http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v185/n6/pdf/scientificamerican1251-54.pdf>
for
a short time. In fact Bruce Latimore a leading scientist in elucidating the
evolution of upright posture literally limped to the podium after back
surgery. He remarked that our bodies (i.e. our backs) are good for 40 -50
years and then . . .

Martin
-- 
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Martin Weiss, PhD
Senior Scientist
New York Hall of Science
mweiss at nyscience.org
cell   347-460-1858
desk 718 595 9516

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