Obesity…big feet…cancer…cardiovascular disease. Can all of these be blamed on evolution?
A fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal raised the point that while evolution has worked wonders through the eons, protecting humans against all kinds of external threats, it has come at a price, including our being comparatively less equipped to cope with the effects of modernity.
The article underscores that while evolution provides a remarkable lesson in spontaneously ordered systems, it works with what is available – in our case, with our finite, frail bodies. In a unique way, it provides an equally fascinating insight into the limits of markets, another type of spontaneous order.
Our tendency to become obese especially underscores the constraints imposed on evolution. Evolution has equipped our bodies to derive the most out of sugar — a useful trait a few centuries ago but a potentially disastrous one now in the midst of all the cornucopia of processed food that has accompanied modernity.
The current epidemic of obesity also has prehistoric roots. Our hunter-gatherer forebears were tall, lean long-distance runners who subsisted on plants and protein. When populations shifted to agriculture about 10,000 years ago, a carbohydrate-rich diet became the norm. Early farmers had more calories but less nutrition, and average heights dropped from 5-foot-9 to 5-foot-3 for men, and from 5-foot-5 to 5-feet for women. Metabolisms adjusted over the millennia—but populations that shifted to agriculture more recently, like Polynesians and American Indians, have the highest rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes today.
No, this fact should not detract from the marvelous, efficient system that evolution is.
Even so, our respect for this spontaneously ordered system would not prevent any of us from seeking medical help if obesity or some other evolutionary effect resulted in our developing heart disease or diabetes.
Markets are spontaneously ordered systems that bear a remarkable resemblance to evolution. They work well using the resources available to them. Yet, many people, on the basis of some deeply ingrained Jeffersonian or libertarian principle, would refuse any sort of redress, even in cases in which the market effects are deemed harmful by many.
But why? If it’s a spontaneously ordered system operating within the same kind of constraints as evolution, why not seek remedies, much as we do when we visit a doctor?
Musings of an American Red Tory 