Primate Change: How the World We Made Is Remaking Us - Vybarr Cregan-Reid

. .

Résumé :
Our DNA evolved expecting a different environment to the one we made in the last few centuries. Our bodies expect to be tasked with different work, our teeth and jaws expect different food, our feet expect to be used, our glutes want to be upgraded from their use as carry-cushions, our hands expect variety, and when they don't find it, they respond, they try to adapt, and they change leaving billions of with mismatch diseases.

This is the road from climate change to primate change.

In the last two hundred years, humans have made such a tremendous impact on the world that our geological epoch is about to be declared the 'Anthropocene', or the Age of Man. But while we have been busy changing the shape of the world, the ways of living that we have been fashioning have, as if under the cover of darkness, been changing our bodies and altering our DNA, too.

We overindulge in the wrong diets; we are over-stimulated by technology; our lifestyles have become ever more sedentary; we are in a chronic cycle of stress... Primate Change navigates the path of destruction that the way we live now has wrought on our ancient human bodies.

PRIMATE CHANGE EXPLAINS WHY:
- more than 150 million people in the US have flat feet
- there are billions more chairs on the planet than there are humans
- we have grown 5 inches in the past 200 years
- 70% of Americans are on prescription drugs, the pills popped each year, laid end-to-end could orbit the planet twice
- by the time you've finished reading this catalogue, two people will have died of poor air quality

Biographie:
Vybarr Cregan-Reid is an author and academic. He is Reader in English & Environmental Humanities in the School of English at the University of Kent. His most recent book is Footnotes: How Running Makes us Human (Ebury 2016, paperback June 2017), which reviewers called 'delightful', 'impassioned and energetic', and 'a blazing achievement'. He has written widely on the subjects of literature, health, nature and the environment for the BBC, the Guardian, The Independent, The Big Issue, The Telegraph, The Mail, The Washington Post, The I Newspaper, Wanderlust, Literary Review, New Zealand Herald and he has appeared on Radio 4 and Sky News.