Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live

"I love this book. Again, it’s written in a very readable style. If anyone has been rubbed up the wrong way by the thought that there is one true way that we’ve evolved to be—and that if we just went back a little bit in time, we’d all be happier, thinner, healthier—this is definitely the book for them. Paleofantasy is a really informed look, by an evolutionary biologist, at the ways we imagine the past would have been, and the lies we tell ourselves today about what we evolved to do. So one particular example from the book that I really like is the takedown of this idea of a ‘paleo diet’, which is a particular bugbear of mine, bearing on teeth as it does. In certain segments of the internet, particularly, there is a quest for a perfect evolutionary lifestyle. This must be accompanied by a perfect evolutionarily adapted diet. So people look at research about what our species would have eaten in the past, and try to re-engineer this diet. People say, ‘Oh, well, it would have been all lean meat, no carbohydrates.’ It’s just patent nonsense. It’s just not true but it has a hold on the imagination. Paleofantasy takes these ideas of ‘the one true way’ and puts them in context. It explains how while it may have been a great idea to eat a lot of lean meat when we were essentially tree shrews, that’s not what we’ve adapted to do today. She looks at some theories like ‘paleo parents’, how you should parent a baby. It’s another one of these prescriptions for having a happy, healthy baby. It’s a pretty understandable reaction to the incredible amount of advice that new parents get about how to raise a baby. As any new parent can tell you, all you want is a happy, healthy, preferably quiet, baby, maybe sleeping. There are all sorts of debates around things like whether you should carry your infant close to the skin with you at all times. She looks at some of the evolutionary arguments that people have made for what are pretty demanding things, especially for the mother, like breastfeeding on demand and never putting the infant down. She looks at why those may have existed in the past, but why they may not be suited for actual living human beings. No, the store is all out of mammoth protein bars. Those are no longer available."