Skip to content
Spiral Staircase
Buy the book
Menu

Reference topic 5: The Idea of Mismatch

Who proposed evolutionary mismatch? The idea and its history

42 sources0 graded recommendations

Published Updated

In 1983 Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan, finally got up the nerve to tell some evolutionary biologists his theory of aging. At Michigan, Richard Alexander and his graduate students met weekly for what Nesse remembers as "riveting seminars," and the evolutionary theorists Bill Hamilton and George Williams "came by often."1 He had once argued in a paper that aging might have evolved "to speed up the evolution of a species."1

Nesse's account of the response is short. "They laughed and laughed. Hadn't I ever read Williams, 1957? Didn't I know about the problems with group selection?"1

What this topic covers

  • ·Stone Agers in the Fast Lane
  • ·The Dawn of Darwinian Medicine
  • ·The Midwife's Ledgers
  • ·Too Much, Too Little, Too New
  • ·Putting Mismatch on Trial
  • ·Six Reasons a Body Stays Vulnerable
  • ·How to Read a Mismatch Card

The practical version is in the book: Chapter 2, What Your Body Expects, and How to Trust This Book.

The skeptic's corner

The case against this topic, from the research itself.

Evolutionary explanations are easy to invent. In 1979 Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin faulted the adaptationist program, the habit of explaining each trait as an adaptation, for accepting speculative tales on plausibility alone.37 Konner and Eaton recalled saying from the start that their evidence "could only suggest testable hypotheses."9 Lieberman's own table of about 50 conditions, from acne to flat feet, lists "suspected" mismatch diseases.24 Suspects are not convictions.

Some early assumptions have not survived. The 1988 paper's claim that "our genes have hardly changed" collides with a 2007 genomic analysis concluding that selection had "accelerated greatly during the last 40,000 years" (Topics 37 and 45).638 Barker's developmental mismatch holds up as an association, but a modest one. In a pooled analysis, each extra kilogram of birth weight went with a 10-20% lower risk of ischemic heart disease. Even if the link is causal, the authors judged, raising birth weight would be unlikely to reduce heart disease materially.39 Gluckman and Hanson's adaptive explanation has fared poorly in human tests. A study of parish records from preindustrial Finland found no sign that survival and reproduction were highest when conditions in early and later life matched.40 And among the Turkana, being born somewhere more urban predicted poorer metabolic health whatever the adult environment.29

Knowing the story is not a cure. In one small randomized trial, 60 overweight or obese adults got either a web program framed around mismatch or a minimal control. Differences in activity and eating were small and "did not reach significance" (Topic 43).41

What would change the picture? Gene variants that help in traditional settings and harm in modern ones, found in populations now in transition, would move specific mismatch claims from probable to strong.27 Failures to find them weaken the case. A 2025 analysis of genetic data from hundreds of thousands of people found no support for thrifty genes behind rare single-gene obesity (Topic 13).42

Terms this topic defines

Sources cited above

  1. 1.Nesse, R.M. (n.d.). Remembering George C. Williams, 1926-2010. https://www.randolphnesse.com/nessays/remembering-george-williams (Nesse began puzzling over aging in 1968 as a Carleton sophomore; Williams died on 8 September 2010, aged 84: "It was Alzheimer's disease that took him")
  2. 2.Williams, G.C. (1957). "Pleiotropy, natural selection, and the evolution of senescence." Evolution, 11(4), 398-411. https://doi.org/10.2307/2406060
  3. 37.Gould, S.J., and Lewontin, R.C. (1979). "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 205(1161), 581-598. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1979.0086
  4. 9.Konner, M., and Eaton, S.B. (2010). "Paleolithic nutrition: twenty-five years later." Nutrition in Clinical Practice, 25(6), 594-602. https://doi.org/10.1177/0884533610385702
  5. 24.Gurven, M.D., and Lieberman, D.E. (2020). "WEIRD bodies: mismatch, medicine and missing diversity." Evolution and Human Behavior, 41(5), 330-340. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.04.001
  6. 6.Eaton, S.B., Konner, M., and Shostak, M. (1988). "Stone agers in the fast lane: chronic degenerative diseases in evolutionary perspective." American Journal of Medicine, 84(4), 739-749. https://doi.org/10.1016/0002-9343(88)90113-1
  7. 38.Hawks, J., Wang, E.T., Cochran, G.M., Harpending, H.C., et al. (2007). "Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution." PNAS, 104(52), 20753-20758. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0707650104
  8. 39.Huxley, R., Owen, C.G., Whincup, P.H., Cook, D.G., et al. (2007). "Is birth weight a risk factor for ischemic heart disease in later life?" American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 85(5), 1244-1250. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/85.5.1244 (18 studies, 147,009 people; the authors judged that raising birth weight would be "unlikely to reduce the incidence of IHD materially")
  9. 40.Hayward, A.D., and Lummaa, V. (2013). "Testing the evolutionary basis of the predictive adaptive response hypothesis in a preindustrial human population." Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, 2013(1), 106-117. https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eot007 (parish records 1751-1877)
  10. 29.Lea, A.J., Martins, D., Kamau, J., Gurven, M., et al. (2020). "Urbanization and market integration have strong, nonlinear effects on cardiometabolic health in the Turkana." Science Advances, 6(43), eabb1430. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abb1430 (traditional Turkana get about 62% of calories from milk and another 12% from meat, fat or blood; no pastoralist met criteria for obesity or metabolic syndrome; 6.4% had hypertension)
  11. 41.Grey, E.B., Thompson, D., and Gillison, F.B. (2019). "Effects of a web-based, evolutionary mismatch-framed intervention targeting physical activity and diet: a randomised controlled trial." International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 26(6), 645-657. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-019-09821-3 (correction 2023: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-023-10169-y) (12-week web program)
  12. 27.Lea, A.J., Clark, A.G., Dahl, A.W., Devinsky, O., et al. (2023). "Applying an evolutionary mismatch framework to understand disease susceptibility." PLoS Biology, 21(9), e3002311. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002311 (correction 2025: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003465) (a team of 21 researchers)
  13. 42.El Kouche, S., and Meyre, D. (2025). "Natural selection signatures of 65 syndromic and 8 monogenic obesity genes in 7 ethnic groups do not support the thrifty genotype hypothesis." Metabolism, 171, 156353. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.metabol.2025.156353 (genetic data from 807,162 people)

This topic carries 42 notes in the research manuscript; the 13 above are those behind the material on this page. Full source register.