Unfit for Purpose: When Human Evolution Collides with the Modern World

Stress, obesity, poor mental health, drug addiction, bowel diseases, violence and fake news; a stark checklist of modern world problems and every one of them is an echo of our evolutionary past.

In Unfit for Purpose, biologist and broadcaster Professor Adam Hart explores the mismatch between our fundamental biology and the modern world we have created. In each chapter Adam reveals the many ways in which biological adaptations that evolved to help us survive and thrive now work against us. For example, in the modern world stress is a killer but how did 'fight or flight' turn from life-saver to life-taker? Obesity might be a disease now but is it really just a troublesome side-effect of our complex evolutionary past? Whether it's the derailing of microbes in our gut, the rise of gluten and lactose intolerance, the problems of social media, the curse of fake news, the scourge of violence or the horrors of drug addiction we always seem to have one foot in the modern world and the other firmly in our evolutionary past.

Throughout the book Adam probes deep into our evolutionary legacy, exploring the science, archaeology, medicine, genetics, sociology and more, to show how, in a modern world of our own making, we find ourselves 'unfit for purpose'. But all is not lost! By unpicking the evolutionary causes of many of our current woes Adam reveals some secrets of evolutionarily-informed treatments, from fecal transplants to changing the way we think about ourselves and our future.