Evolving Health: The Origins of Illness and How the Modern World Is Making Us Sick

Human illnesses can be understood as damage to those adaptations that we took on at various stages in our evolution from pre-life molecules to modern Homo sapiens. Preventing these illnesses entails avoiding what causes the damage — which too frequently are the everyday hazards of twenty-first-century life, as the chart below shows:

Level of Evolution / Cause of adaptive failure / resulting disease or problem

Pre-life / Environmental poisons / Certain birth defects

Single cell (bacteria and...