Further Reading

Lieberman, D.E. (2013). The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease. Pantheon. The single best map of the territory this book covers, from bipedal walking to the diseases of comfort, and the source of the term "dysevolution." The Prologue and Chapters 2, 3 and 9 draw on Lieberman's work.

Pontzer, H. (2021). Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy. Avery. The Hadza energy studies told by the scientist who ran them, including the finding that active foragers burn no more calories a day than office workers their size. Chapter 5 depends on that result, Chapter 3 draws on his Hadza activity studies, and the book explains both better than any paper can.

Nesse, R.M., and Williams, G.C. (1994). Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine. Times Books. The book that carried evolutionary medicine to general readers, built on one question: why would natural selection leave a body so open to disease? Chapter 13's smoke detector principle grows from the same question.

Zuk, M. (2013). Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. W.W. Norton. The case against a single ancestral environment that our bodies are frozen in, made cheerfully and at the right length. Chapter 2 treats it as the deepest objection to this book's frame and concedes most of it.

Hrdy, S.B. (2009). Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Harvard University Press. A primatologist's argument that humans are cooperative breeders, and that raising a child with many helpers is part of our design rather than an optional arrangement. Chapter 11 rests on it.

Gluckman, P., and Hanson, M. (2006). Mismatch: Why Our World No Longer Fits Our Bodies. Oxford University Press. An early book-length statement of the idea the Prologue calls mismatch, and the best route into developmental mismatch, the middle clock of Chapter 2: a body tuned in the womb for a world it never meets. Read it for the mechanism behind a word this book uses on almost every page.

Wrangham, R. (2009). Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Basic Books. The argument that cooking, more than hunting, built the human gut, jaw and brain. Chapters 2 and 5 draw on it and weigh it against the archaeological dates for controlled fire, which come later than the hypothesis needs.

Graeber, D., and Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Long, contrarian and hard to put down, it takes apart the idea that farming was a one-way door that humanity walked through once. The Prologue cites it as the strongest challenge to the gloomy verdict on agriculture.

Harari, Y.N. (2014). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harvill Secker. The source of the luxury trap, the pattern in which a luxury becomes a necessity and then an obligation. The Prologue borrows the idea, though not its verdict on farming, and Chapter 12 carries it into the age of the phone.

Konner, M. (2010). The Evolution of Childhood. Harvard University Press. Enormous and worth it: a synthesis of what childhood looks like when it is not organized around school and screens. Chapters 2 and 12 draw on Konner's work, with the caveat that it describes children's lives more than it measures outcomes.

Barrett, D. (2010). Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose. W.W. Norton. Tinbergen's oversized eggs, extended to junk food, television and games. Chapter 5's jewel beetles are the same idea in the wild. Read it as an argument rather than an experiment.

Ekirch, A.R. (2005). At Day's Close: Night in Times Past. W.W. Norton. A historian's account of what people did in the dark before electric light, and the source of the "first sleep" and "second sleep" divided by an hour of quiet waking. Chapter 8 sets the archives against the sleep-lab and field evidence, which support a flexible night more than a fixed two-part one.

Schüll, N.D. (2012). Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton University Press. Some fifteen years of fieldwork on how slot machines are engineered to hold a player in what gamblers call "the zone." Chapter 12 cites it for the design analogy with the phone feed, not for any claim about brain chemistry.

Sapolsky, R.M. (2004). Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Holt Paperbacks. Still the funniest serious book about the stress response, and the clearest account of why a system built for a lion attack misfires under a mortgage. Chapter 13 draws on Sapolsky's baboon research and quotes one of his talks; read the book for the digressions as much as the physiology.

Nesse, R.M. (2019). Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry. Dutton. Why anxiety and low mood can be defenses rather than defects, and why that is no argument against treating them. Chapters 13 and 14 draw on Nesse's work, and Chapter 13 uses his smoke detector principle for why false alarms are the price of never missing a real fire.