#Daniel lieberman the story of the human body summary full
Exercise is an absurd delusion, but nonetheless, it is an essential one.Įxercised is full of quirky facts on the history of working out, which I’m sure I’ll retain in some inane perversion for future repetition. We move as if these efforts will ensure our immediate survival, which they won’t, but in a larger way, they will. As Lieberman puts it: “Exercise - despite its manifold benefits - requires overriding deep, natural instincts.” Now that we no longer need to lift a great weight over our heads or swim to shore to ensure our survival, we have to pretend we need to lift great weights and swim to shore. In certain corners of the world, modern humans now regularly hand over their wealth for someone to tell them to run or carry a heavy burden. So people had to invent exercise, even though it’s very weird to do. We’ve accidentally created a great contradiction regarding our bodily needs: We don’t need to move a great distance to fetch water for our survival, yet we do need to move our bodies or else we will atrophy and worse. A sedentary day has become not only possible, but unavoidable. Normal, ingrained, clever, practical.īut, as Lieberman notes, he’s currently studying a population of humans with a big surplus of energy to expend. It’s the most normal thing to avoid exertion that isn’t absolutely required of us, Lieberman reassuringly argues.
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So if humans struggle with not wanting to do any physical activity at all, it’s because we’ve evolved to avoid it. And there were constant, necessary ways that the energy needed to be spent: building a fire, finding your food. This is because, as Lieberman writes, “all animals should be as lazy as possible.” Until very recently, from an evolutionary standpoint, energy was hard won for most people. It turns out, our desire to drape ourselves over a soft surface is an incredibly evolved, very wise, strategic behavior.
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And Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, a new book from Daniel Lieberman, a human evolutionary biology professor at Harvard University, is 440 pages of assuring affirmations about our impulses to laze around. I love to be flattered, especially when the compliment is both unexpected and enabling.