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Zusammenfassung von A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century

Name: A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century
Rating: 3.8 (412 reviews)
Author: Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein

Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

3.8 (412 Bewertungen)

18 Min.

Themen

Change & Evolution Alternative Perspectives The Human Condition Political Philosophy

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A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century
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What’s in it for me? Embrace your ancestral past.

The modern world has brought us more wealth and convenience than ever before, and yet so many of us are miserable. Despite our prosperity, we find ourselves becoming lonelier, less healthy, and more dissatisfied with our lot in life.

How can this be?

The answer lies in our ancestral past. These blinks are here to explain how our bodies and minds, shaped by millions of years of evolution, are often mismatched with our present-day environments. From our medicine to our food to our childhoods, you’ll discover why we have evolved as we have, and how dangerous it can be when we neglect our evolutionary heritage.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how screen time is stopping our children from growing up;
the evolutionary purpose of sleep; and
why we reproduce sexually.

WEIRD people grow up surrounded by unnatural geometry.

Can you tell whether two lines drawn on a page are the same length or not? You may have seen the optical illusion in which two lines, of identical length, both have arrowheads at either end, going in opposite directions. Due to this difference, you perceive one line as being longer than the other. But not everyone falls for this illusion.

Interestingly, people who grow up in hunter-gatherer societies, such as the San Bushmen of Southern Africa, have no problems seeing that the two lines are identical. However, for people who grow up in WEIRD countries – that is, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic – it’s almost impossible.

The key message here is: WEIRD people grow up surrounded by unnatural geometry.

Unlike the San Bushmen, people in industrialized nations use sawmills to create timber with perfectly straight edges and precise corners. This might explain why we have trouble interpreting different line lengths – because we’re deprived of seeing more organic forms, we lose some of our visual abilities. This is just a theory, however, and it’s worrying that experts can’t say for sure that this is why we struggle with this sort of illusion. But one thing that does seem clear is that modernity is undermining our natural abilities in ways that we don’t fully understand, or often even realize.

Our ignorance of how our environment affects our bodies manifests in other ways, too. For example, many people in WEIRD countries will suffer from appendicitis, a dangerous inflammation of the appendix, at some point. People in developing countries, however, rarely deal with appendicitis.

Why?

Experts now believe that the appendix acts as a breeding ground for the good bacteria and microorganisms that live in our guts and help us digest our food. When we suffer from diarrhea and stomach upset, a lot of gut bacteria from our digestive tract gets flushed out of our bodies. But the appendix doesn’t lose its bacteria, and so can grow more of them to repopulate the tract. People in developing countries are exposed to more germs and different bacteria than those in WEIRD ones. We might think this is a bad thing – but our bodies are designed to go through this cycle of stomach upset and bacterial regrowth in the appendix. With our overly sterile and hygienic modern homes, we no longer suffer frequent digestive upsets, and so our immune systems and our gut bacteria get out of balance, ultimately leading to appendicitis in some people.

So whether it’s our overly clean homes or the perfectly straight lines that surround us, the modern world is having an effect on our bodies and minds to which we’re not paying enough attention.

There is no ideal universal diet for human beings.

What’s the best diet for you? Many so-called experts say we should be eating the foods that our ancient ancestors ate. This might involve a raw-food diet, consisting only of foods that don’t require cooking, or a paleo approach, in which foods that were unavailable to our ancestors, such as grains and dairy, are rejected in favor of meat, fat, and vegetables. But what does evolutionary history have to say about our eating habits?

Here’s the key message: There is no ideal universal diet for human beings.

Sexual reproduction makes sense in an unpredictable world.

Human sex and reproduction are costly operations. Not only must you find someone you want to mate with, you then have to persuade that person to mate with you. Once you do reproduce with another human, your own genes take a big hit. After all, if the goal of reproduction is to spread our genes, then it seems inefficient that we spread only 50 percent of them in mating with another person.

Wouldn’t it be a lot simpler if we did as Komodo dragons and certain species of frogs do and reproduce asexually? That way we could cut out the partner and pass on 100 percent of our genes to every child we have.

To mature into adults, children must be allowed to explore and discover during childhood.

Humans have the longest childhoods of any species, but we’re not the only ones who take a long time to grow up. When a baby orangutan learns to swing from tree to tree through the forest, he’ll whimper when he gets to a gap that’s too big, and his mother will come back and teach him to cross it. Similarly, after ravens leave their parents, they gather with other adolescents and spend years being teenagers together, as they learn how to relate to each other.

In essence, childhood is the time when we learn about ourselves, how we should behave, and who or what we might become.

Sleep is our body’s answer to a very specific problem.

Have you ever felt as if you could accomplish so much more if you didn’t need to sleep? Like humans, nearly every other animal sleeps, too. What's more, if there is intelligent alien life somewhere out there in the universe, then it's highly likely that those aliens also need to sleep. To understand why, let’s look at the evolutionary purpose of sleep.

Here’s the key message: Sleep is our body’s answer to a very specific problem.

Scientists take a dangerously reductionist approach to health.

What’s the real cure for what ails you? In 2009, one of the authors was suffering from recurring bouts of laryngitis. When she visited her doctor, she was advised to start taking strong pharmaceuticals to treat it, as well as more drugs to counter the side effects of the first drugs.

But the author didn’t take his advice, or the drugs, because she knew something that many doctors and scientists overlook: When it comes to putting new substances into the human body, the cure can often be worse than the disease.

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Worum geht es in A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century?

Hunter Gatherers (2021) explores the mismatch between our evolutionary tendencies and our modern environments. It outlines how seemingly innocuous aspects of contemporary living are harming us, and stifling our true nature and potential.

Wer A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century lesen sollte

Psychology buffs looking for fresh insights
Anyone interested in evolutionary biology
Fans of natural history

Über den Autor

Heather Heying is an American evolutionary biologist specializing in evolutionary ecology and consciousness. Bret Weinstein is an author, academic, and podcaster. He was formerly a professor of biology at Evergreen State College.

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