Tom's Life Bits

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Published Mon, Aug 23, 2010 05:36 AM
Modified Mon, Aug 23, 2010 06:19 AM
Author looks at the high cost of modern life

===== Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
 =====

By Spencer Wells. Random House. 256 pages.

Technological society exacts an exorbitant price: epidemics of obesity, stress, depression and a host of other ailments.

And disaffection may be incurable. We humans are undone by a manmade environment that's ill-suited for creatures specialized to function in a world that existed 50,000 years ago.

Spencer Wells, an anthropological geneticist at Cornell University and explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, is hardly the first to prophesy doomsday about the unintended consequences of modern life. The contrarian backlash against scientific progress goes back centuries.

But Wells bases his arguments on biological clues, contending that our teeth, metabolism and brain capacity seem ideally designed for hunters and gathers subsisting in groups of about 150 people.

"Ultimately, nearly every single major disease affecting modern human populations ... has its roots in the mismatch between our biology and the world we have created since the advent of agriculture," Wells writes in "Pandora's Seed."

The agrarian revolution spawned population booms, unsanitary living conditions, unbalanced diets and a fierce competition for scarce resources.

In our age of material plenty, that legacy has taken a dangerous new form. Today we face a molecular rebellion from within: obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and an alarming rate of mental illness. Our bodies are rejecting modernity like foreign tissue.

A skeptic might ask: Is not our quality of life immeasurably better than anything known before? Who'd want to go back to the daily struggle for survival of club-wielding cave dwellers draped in animal skins?

Wells is not a back-to-nature zealot urging a return to an idyllic past; rather, he draws on recent scientific developments to warn of imminent perils ahead.

The path leading from hunting-gathering to farming was booby-trapped with pestilence and bacteria. When humans cleared land for settlements, they created ideal conditions for breeding malaria and other contagions that thrive when people live near domesticated animals.

"People were not only dying younger, they were dying sicker," Wells writes. Hunter-gatherers were uncommonly robust and healthy, according to Wells, falling victim to wound infections and fatal accidents.

If Wells is to be believed, Stone Age man lived in a state of grace: small, egalitarian utopias largely free of disease and conflict.

"With modern medicine we've traded the scourges of trauma and infection for a threat from within our own bodies," Wells writes.
john.murawski@newsobserver.com or 919-829-8932

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