Harnessing Evolutionary Insights: Key Highlights from 'A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century
As someone who is constantly reading, there is a ton of information to retain from every book. I soon learned the best way to remember key or interesting points was to highlight passages and write the chapter and page number of the highlight on the inside cover. Doing this allows me to pick up the book at any time to reference an idea or fact I want to recall. Especially if I’m going back a year later, it saves me the time of having to thumb through chapters to find that key point or idea.
As I’ve been doing this for a while, I will start to share some of my favorite highlights from books that align with ReWild America's ideas.
A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century is a book I highly recommend if you want the perspective of evolutionary biologists on how our modern world is affecting us physically, psychologically, socially, and environmentally. Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein do a fantastic job of calling attention to how our hyper-novel world has outstripped the capacity of our brains and bodies to adapt.
Below I picked one of my favorite highlights from each chapter. I tried to choose the most impactful one, but it was hard to determine because the book has so many great passages.
Chapter 1: The Human Niche
(Pg 10) The sucker’s folly: the tendency of concentrated short-term benefit not only to obscure risk and long-term cost, but also to drive acceptance even when the net analysis is negative.
Chapter 2: A Brief History of the Human Lineage
(Pg 37) We are experiencing changes across the full spectrum of our experience: to our bodies, our diet, our sleep, and so much more. Many of these changes have come so fast and furious that we should not be surprised when they create damage that is difficult to undo.
Chapter 3: Ancient Bodies, Modern World
(Pg 43) Carpentered corners create greater susceptibility to certain optical illusions. Over reliance on chairs creates all manner of negative health outcomes. What, then, might deodorants and perfumes have done to our ability to smell the signals emitted by our bodies? What might lives filled with clocks have done to our sense of time? What have airplanes done to our sense of space, or the Internet to our sense of competence? What have maps done to our sense of direction, or schools to our sense of family?
Chapter 4: Medicine
(Pg 68) Combine a tendency to engage only proximate questions, with a bias towards reductionism, and you end up with medicine that has blinders on. The view is narrow. Even the great victories of western medicine - surgery, antibiotics, and vaccines - have been over extrapolated, applied in many cases where they shouldn't be. When all you have is a knife, a pill, and a shot, the whole world looks as though it would benefit from being cut and medicated.
Chapter 5: Food
(Pg 78) Reductionism in our approach to food fails us, as our bodies are not static, simple systems, nor do all individuals have the same needs. There is no universally best diet for humans. There can’t be.
Chapter 6: Sleep
(Pg 99) indoor lighting is typically brighter than either moonlight or firelight, and far bluer than, but not as bright as, daylight. This has the potential to interfere with circadian rhythms and hormonal cycles.
Chapter 7: Sex and Gender
(Pg 122) Keep contaminants away from fetuses and children. In several species of frogs, there is an established relationship between exposure to common environmental contaminants, like atrazine (an herbicide), and an increase in hermaphroditic individuals. While sex determination in frogs is different than humans, we will not be surprised if it turns out that some of the modern confusion around sex and gender ends up attributable to widespread endocrine disrupters in our environment.
Chapter 8: Parenthood and Relationships
(Pg 142) All too often moderns try to protect children from grief. For instance, we have known parents who would not allow their children to attend their grandparents’ funerals, for fear that it would scare them, or harm them. This fear and anxiousness in raising children, in turn, creates fearful and anxious children.
Chapter 9: Childhood
(Pg 147) Stealing childhood from the young – by organizing and scheduling their play for them, by keeping them from risk and exploration, by controlling and sedating them with screens and algorithms and legal drugs – practically guarantees that they will arrive at the age of adulthood without being capable of actually being adults.
Chapter 10: School
(Pg169) Because memory and recall are easy to assess and measure, they can easily become the metric that is being chased, by students and teachers and schools alike. Far harder to teach and to quantify – and at least as valuable, if not more so – are critical thinking, logic, and creativity.
Chapter 11: Becoming Adults
(Pg 207) Define your fights for whom and what you love, rather than against whom and what you hate. If a mob ever comes for the people you know, people whom you consider friends, stand up and say, “No, you’re wrong.” Be honorable and courageous when bullies move in. Speak up for what you know to be true, even if it makes you a social pariah.
Chapter 12: Culture and Consciousness
(Pg 215) Be the person who never conforms to patently wrong statements in order to fit in with the crowd.
Chapter 13: The Fourth Frontier
(Pg 237) Chasing growth as if it is always there to be caught is a fool’s errand. Sometimes the opportunity exists, and sometimes it doesn’t. The expectation of perpetual growth is in many ways similar to the pursuit of perpetual happiness – it is the route to a host of miseries.
Conclusion
The passages above are just the tip of the iceberg; the entire book contains thought-provoking perspectives that shed light on the often-overlooked harm we face from subjecting our bodies and minds to the exponential change of our modern environments.
Call it a gut feeling, intuition, or a combination of both; the topics discussed throughout the book, the problems brought to light, and the ease of solving them by looking at them through an ancestral lens makes sense to me.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about our ancient roots and how our modern social ills affect our minds and bodies. What I love the most about this book is that the authors offer solutions at the end of each chapter that are easy to implement.
To purchase this book or learn more about the author's work, check out the links below.