Research Catalog

Title

Mismatch : why our world no longer fits our bodies / Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson.

Author

Gluckman, Peter D.

Publication

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2006.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

Hanson, Mark A.

Description

xi, 285 p.; 25 cm.

Summary

• "This book is about a growing and dangerous mismatch affecting the developed world: a mismatch that originates in our evolutionary history; that is influenced by development processes in the womb, and takes its toll as we grow to adulthood." "Our evolution designed us for a world very different from that which we have constructed for ourselves. Within a mere instant, in evolutionary terms, we have transformed our environment. But the widening mismatch between our biology and our environment has its costs. And we cannot evolve our way out of the problem." "In a narrative that begins with the Sherpa in Nepal, Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson, both leading medical scientists, draw on the latest research, bringing together concepts from evolutionary biology, developmental sciences, medicine, anthropology and ecology to describe the nature of this mismatch, its consequences, and how we may counter them."
• "Our basic design is informed by genes largely selected and adapted for life in our Pleistocene past. But our individual design is fine-tuned by information about the environment picked up by the fetus via the placenta, which affects our development and sets our metabolic levels and life strategy. One impact of our growing mismatch is that these tuning mechanisms increasingly fail to make us well adapted to modern life. The cost appears as obesity, early-onset diabetes, and other health problems. There are broader consequences too for societies, such as the falling age of puberty, with its attendant mismatch with psychosocial maturity, and at the other end of life, the implications of increasing longevity."--Jacket.

Subject

• Genetic Variation
• Environment
• Genotype
• Ecology
• Genetics, Population
• Ecological genetics
• Evolution (Biology)
• Genotype-environment interaction

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 213-266) and index.

Contents

Our comfort zone -- Where have we come from? -- When we were very young -- Things ain't what they used to be -- Constrained by our pasts -- Coming of age -- A life of luxury -- Four score years and ten -- Match and mismatch.

ISBN

0192806831 (alk. paper)

LCCN

• ^^2006019107
• 9780192806833

OCLC

69021964

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library