San Francisco
1885 Map Reveals Vice in San Francisco’s Chinatown and Racism at City Hall
BY GREG MILLER 09.30.139:30 AM
The red blocks are joss houses, or Chinese folk temples.
I first heard about this map from David Rumsey, who has a copy of it in his collection (and online, where you can zoom in to see more detail). Rumsey recently invited me and Betsy over to his house to see his maps, and we’ll have much more to say about his collection — one of the largest private map stockpiles in the world — in future posts.
My first reaction to this map was: Chinatown was a lot more fun back then. These days it’s overrun with tacky souvenir shops and touristy restaurants. It’s not my favorite part of town. But then Rumsey told me about the nefarious scheme behind the map.
Legend of the 1885 San Francisco Chinatown map. (David Rumsey Map Collection)
It was basically part of a plan by the city supervisors to push Chinese immigrants out of the city.
To get some historical background, I called up Susan Schulten, a historian at the University of Denver, who recently blogged about the Chinatown map herself.
Anti-Chinese sentiment was running high throughout the West in the latter half of the 19th century, Schulten said. Government policies in the mid-1800s encouraged Chinese immigration to help build the transcontinental railroad. Then, around the time the western end of the railroad was wrapping up, a huge financial crisis hit: the Panic of 1873. Suddenly there were a lot fewer jobs.
The notion that the immigrants were taking jobs away from Americans started to take root and grow. “The Chinese in particular were seen as a menace because they would work longer and harder for lower wages,” Schulten said. This led to resentment and racist policies intended to stem the perceived threat. (Good thing we’ve put all that behind us…)
To illustrate what was going on at that time, Schulten emailed me a list of discriminatory laws passed in the 1870s. Here are just a few:
Sidewalk Ordinance of 1870: prohibits people who use poles to carry merchandise from walking on the sidewalk (non-Chinese used wagons and carts).
Cubic Air Ordinance of 1871: requires all adults to have more than 500 cubic feet of living space (San Francisco’s Chinatown was severely overcrowded, and hundreds of Chinese were jailed for breaking this ordinance).
Laundry Ordinances of 1873 and 1876: mandates high licensing fees from anyone who carried laundry without a horse-drawn wagon
Then, finally, came the surprisingly bluntly named federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigration. Chinese immigration to the U.S. dropped from 40,000 in 1881 to 10 — that’s right, ten — in 1887.
Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, the city’s board of supervisors sent a special committee to Chinatown to investigate conditions there. They produced the map above and a report that accompanied it. ”They were trying to show how depraved the culture was in Chinatown,” Rumsey said. “It’s pretty frightening to read today because it’s so anti-Asian.”
Indeed it is. Here is a bit from the introduction:
Your Committee were at that time impressed with the fact that the general aspect of the streets and habitations was filthy in the extreme, and so long as they remained in that condition, so long would they stand as a constant menace to the welfare of society as a slumbering pest, likely to generate and spread disease should the city be visited by an epidemic in any virulent form. Your Committee are still of the opinion that it constitutes a continued source of danger of this character, and probably always will, so long as it is inhabited by people of the Mongolian race.
It goes on (and on, and on) about the filth and supposed moral turpitude in that part of town, and concludes by arguing for more regulation both at the municipal and federal level. “We have permitted the Chinese to become our masters, instead of asserting and maintaining the mastery ourselves,” the committee writes towards the end.
In his 2001 book Contagious Divides, historian Nayan Shah argues that the map and the allegedly scientific investigation that produced it helped define Chinatown as a civic problem and emboldened the city’s newly created Board of Health to intervene in the lives of its residents with surveillance, inspections, and especially vigorous enforcement of sanitary laws.
It’s interesting to contrast the Chinatown map with other maps from roughly the same time. Below, there’s a closeup of the Chinatown map and below that is the corresponding section of a 1905 Sanborn fire insurance map from Rumsey’s collection (it’s a rare thing — it survived the 1906 earthquake and fire and is a little worse for the wear). But while the color scheme of the Chinatown map was chosen to highlight vice, the Sanborn map is more neutral. Even so, if you look closely at the Sanborn map you can see some evidence of vice. It’s just a little more subtle, referring to “club gambling rooms” and “female boarding.”
The Chinatown map was made at an interesting time in the history of cartography, Schulten says. The mid-19th century saw the rise of thematic mapping. Previously, cartographers made reference maps to illustrate the topography of a region, and perhaps its roads and political boundaries and other features helpful for navigation. Now they began making maps that incorporated many other types of information about a place, about its climate and its people, for example (this is the focus of Schulten’s fascinating book Mapping the Nation, which came out earlier this year).
And given the political climate of the time, many of these maps dealt with things like race, immigration, and disease. In 1874 the U.S. Census Bureau produced a landmark statistical atlas based on its data from the 1870 census. The atlas includes maps on the proportion of foreign born to native populations, as well as maps on disease and illiteracy, encouraging readers to look for relationships between immigration and social ills.
The goal was to promote better governance and the welfare of society, Schulten says. But 19th century ideas about social welfare don’t always mesh with modern values. And as the San Francisco Chinatown map shows, maps can be made to promote bad public policy as well as good.
Men We Reaped
'Reaped' Is A Reminder That No One Is Promised Tomorrow
September 24, 2013 3:17 PM
After winning a National Book Award for her novel Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward has written a memoir that's framed by the deaths of five young men in her life. The cause of each death was different, but she sees them all as connected to being poor and black in the rural South:
Her younger brother, Joshua, was 19 when he was killed by a drunken driver who smashed into his car. That was in 2000. Over the next four years, her friend Demond was murdered after agreeing to testify against the alleged shooter in a drug-related case; another friend committed suicide; a third died of a heart attack at 23, probably brought on by cocaine and other drugs; and her cousin was killed when his car collided with a train on the tracks.
Ward's new book, Men We Reaped, also tells her story of growing up in DeLisle, Miss., where she escaped death at least a couple times herself — first when she was born prematurely with serious health problems, and then when she was mauled by a pit bull her father had purchased to use in dog fights. The book also explains how Ward managed to get a good education: At her mother's urging and thanks to a generous scholarship, she attended private elementary and high schools, and eventually received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan.
Ward is now an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama. She tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross about how her loved ones' deaths inspired her to write.
Interview Highlights
On her friend Demond dying in a violent drug-related shooting
I was shocked. I think we were all shocked. I don't think that it's something that anyone expected to happen because that kind of drug-related violence, I don't feel like we see that often where I'm from. It just doesn't happen and so when it actually happened it was a huge surprise.
Because everyone grows up together in my small hometown, everyone knows everyone else. And there are such large extended families that a lot of people are related to each other. And this is in the rural South, so, there's a familiarity there and a real sense of community, I think that's another reason why his death was so shocking, because it feels like that sense of community prevents that kind of violence from happening, but in this case it didn't.
On how the deaths affected her
I know that I've already forgotten things about us growing up, and [my brother's] not there to remind me or to verify things or to help me get things correct. It's difficult, but it's part of the reason why I wanted to write the book, too.
... I know it sounds trite when I say it, but [the deaths] made me realize that I don't have a lot of time and that I'm not promised tomorrow. I hear that all the time at home, I guess because everyone in my community has lost a young person that they love, you know? So everyone always says that all the time: You're not promised tomorrow; you don't have tomorrow. So it does, it sounds trite, but it's true. It made me feel that I wasn't promised some long life where I would die when I was 60 or 70 or 80 or 90. That's not a given for me, and so it actually brought me to writing.
... When I write about what was happening at the time, in the book, I can certainly see how I was suffering from that mindset too, especially during those years. I was reckless and I did a lot of drugs and I drank a lot and I did stupid things because a part of me despaired at that idea and did think, "What's the point?"
On how she ended up attending private school
My mother worked for a white family that lived in one of the mansions on the beach. The husband in the family was a lawyer; he worked for a firm in New Orleans. So when the lawyer was home my mother would have conversations with him about her kids, of course. And so at the time, in fifth grade, I was dealing with a lot of bullying in the public schools I went to — I went to two public schools that year and I was being bullied. My mother told her employer this and then he asked if she would be interested in sending me to the school that his children went to, which was a private Episcopalian school. She said yes and then he offered to pay for it, to fund it basically, as a scholarship. ... So from sixth grade on I was a student at that private Episcopalian school.
... My mom is the kind of mom — when ... we would go to a friend of the family's house and they would offer us something to drink or offer us something to eat, my mother would always say, "Tell them no." You could be starving, you could be dehydrated, but as kids we were supposed to tell the host, "No." And I think part of that was motivated by the fact that she's so proud and didn't want to be seen as needing anything. So I know it must've been problematic for her to accept something like [my scholarship] because tuition was fairly expensive.
Excerpt: Men We Reaped
PrologueWhenever my mother drove us from coastal Mississippi to New Orleans to visit my father on the weekend, she would say, "Lock the doors." After my mother and father split for the last time before they divorced, my father moved to New Orleans, while we remained in DeLisle, Mississippi.
My father's first house in the Crescent City was a modest one- bedroom, painted yellow, with bars on the window. It was in Shrewsbury, a small Black neighborhood that spread under and to the north of the causeway overpass. The house was bounded by a fenced industrial yard to the north and by the rushing, plunking sound of the cars on the elevated interstate to the south. I was the oldest of four, and since I was the oldest, I was the one who bossed my one brother, Joshua, and my two sisters, Nerissa and Charine, and my cousin Aldon, who lived with us for years, to arrange my father's extra sheets and sofa cushion into pallets on the living room floor so we all had enough room to sleep. My parents, who were attempting to reconcile and would fail, slept in the only bedroom. Joshua insisted that there was a ghost in the house, and at night we'd lie on our backs in the TV- less living room, watch the barred shadows slink across the walls, and wait for something to change, for something that wasn't supposed to be there, to move.
"Somebody died here," Josh said.
"How you know?" I said.
"Daddy told me," he said.
"You just trying to scare us," I said. What I didn't say: It's working.
I was in junior high then, in the late eighties and early nineties, and I attended a majority White, Episcopalian Mississippi private school. I was a small- town girl, and my classmates in Mississippi were as provincial as I was. My classmates called New Orleans the "murder capital." They told horror stories about White people being shot while unloading groceries from their cars. Gang initiations, they said. What was unspoken in this conversation — and, given the racist proclivities of more than a few of my classmates, I'm surprised that it was unspoken — was that these gangsters, ruthlessly violent and untethered by common human decency, were Black. My school peers would often glance at me when they spoke about Black people. I was a scholarship kid, only attending the school because my mother was a maid for a few wealthy families on the Mississippi coast who sponsored my tuition. For most of my junior high and high school years, I was the only Black girl in the school. Whenever my classmates spoke about Black people or New Orleans and tried to not look at me but inevitably did, I stared back at them and thought about the young men I knew from New Orleans, my father's half brothers.
Uncle Bookie was our favorite of my father's half brothers. He and his brothers had spent their lives in the neighborhoods my classmates most feared. Uncle Bookie looked the most like the grandfather I'd barely known, who'd died of a stroke at age fifty. He had a chest like a barrel, and his eyes closed when he smiled. On hot days, Uncle Bookie would walk us through Shrewsbury toward the highway in the sky, to a ramshackle shotgun house, maroon in my memory, that stood on the corner. The lady who lived in the house sold ice pops out of the back. They were liquid sugar, and melted too quickly in the heat. On the walk to her yard, he'd crack jokes, gather more kids, lead us over the melting asphalt like a hood pied piper. Once our ice pops melted to syrup in their cardboard cups, once Joshua and I had licked the sugar water from our hands and arms, Uncle Bookie would play games with us in the street: kickball, football, and basketball. He laughed when the football hit one of us in the mouth, leaving it sore and swollen, his eyes slit to the thin side of a penny. On some days he would take us with our father and his pit bull to the park under the highway. There, my father fought his dog against other dogs. The other men who watched or coaxed their dogs to savagery were dark and sweat- glazed as their animals in the heat. My brother and I always stood close to our uncle. We grabbed his forearms, holding tightly, flinching as the cars boomed overhead and the animals ripped at each other. Afterward, the dogs panted and smiled while they bled, and my brother and I relaxed our grip on our uncle, and were happy to leave the shadowed world and the threat of a dog lunging outside the fighting circle.
"Daddy ain't tell you no story about nobody dying in here," I said.
"Yeah, he did," Joshua said.
"You telling it," Aldon said.
When I was in high school, I could not reconcile the myth of New Orleans to the reality, but I knew that there was truth somewhere. My father and mother sat in the front seat of the car during those early nineties visits, when they were still married but separated, when they still had the easy rapport that years of marriage engenders, and they talked about shootings, about beatings, about murder. They gave the violence of New Orleans many names. We never saw any of that when we visited my father. But we listened to the chain- link fence rattle in the industrial yard next to my father's house and the night stretched on interminably, and we listened to my brother tell us ghost stories.
Yet we knew another New Orleans existed. We saw that when we piled into my mother's car and rode past the red brick projects scattered through New Orleans, two- story buildings with sagging iron balconies, massive old trees standing like sentinels at each side of the buildings, women gesticulating and scratching their heads, small dark children playing angrily, happily, sulking on the broken sidewalks. I eyed the young men through the car window. Men in sagging pants with their heads bent together, murmuring, ducking into corner stores that sold poboys shrimp oyster. I wondered what the men were talking about. I wondered who they were. I wondered what their lives were like. I wondered if they were murderers. At night on my father's living room floor, I asked Joshua again.
"What Daddy say happen?" I said.
"Said somebody got shot," Joshua said.
"What somebody?"
"A man," he said to the ceiling. Charine burrowed into my side.
"Shut up," Nerissa said. Aldon sighed.
When we left my father to go home to DeLisle, as we did every Sunday, I was sad. We all were sad, I think, even my mother, who was trying to make their marriage work, despite the distance and the years of infidelity. She'd even been contemplating moving to New Orleans, a city she hated. I missed my father. I didn't want to return to school in Mississippi on Monday morning, to walk through the glass doors to the large, fluorescent- lit classrooms, the old desks, my classmates perched on the backs of them, wearing collared shirts and khaki shorts, their legs spread, their eyeliner blue. I didn't want them to look at me after saying something about Black people, didn't want to have to avert my eyes so they didn't see me studying them, studying the entitlement they wore like another piece of clothing. Our drive home took us through New Orleans East, across the Isle Sauvage bayou, over the gray murmur of Lake Pontchartrain, through the billboards and strip malls of Slidell into Mississippi. We took I-10 past the pine wall of Stennis Space Center, past Bay St. Louis, past Diamondhead to DeLisle. Once there, we would have exited the long, pitted highway, driven past Du Pont, shielded like Stennis behind its wall of pine trees, past the railroad tracks, past the small wooden houses set in small fields and small sandy yards, trees setting the porches in shade. Here horses stood still in fields, munching grass, seeking cool. Goats chewed fence posts.
DeLisle and Pass Christian, the two towns where all of my family hails from, are not New Orleans. Pass Christian squats beside the man- made beach of the Gulf of Mexico alongside Long Beach, the Bay of St. Louis at its back, while DeLisle hugs the back of the Bay of St. Louis before spreading away and thinning further upcountry. The streets of both towns are sleepy through much of the barely bearable summer, and through much of the winter, when temperatures hover near freezing. In DeLisle during the summers, there are sometimes crowds on Sundays at the county park because younger people come out to play basketball and play music from their cars. In the spring, the older people gather at the local baseball field, where Negro leagues from throughout the South come to play. On Halloween, children still walk or ride on the backs of pickup trucks through the neighborhood from house to house to trick- or- treat. On All Saints Day, families gather around loved ones' graves, bring nylon and canvas folding chairs to sit in after they've cleaned headstones and sandy plots, arranged potted mums, and shared food. They talk into the evening, burn fires, wave away the last of the fall gnats. This is not a murder capital.
Most of the Black families in DeLisle have lived there as far back as they can remember, including mine, in houses many of them built themselves. These houses, small shotguns and A-frames, were built in waves, the oldest in the thirties by our great- grandparents, the next in the fifties by our grandparents, the next in the seventies and eighties by our parents, who used contractors. These modest houses, ours included, had two to three bedrooms with gravel and dirt driveways and rabbit hutches and scupadine vineyards in the back. Poor and working- class, but proud. There is no public housing at all in DeLisle, and the project housing that existed before Hurricane Katrina in Pass Christian consisted of several small redbrick duplexes and a few subdivisions with single- family homes, which housed some Black people, some Vietnamese. Now, seven years after Katrina, developers build two- and three- bedroom houses up on fifteen- to twenty- foot stilts where this public housing stood, and these houses fill quickly with those still displaced from the storm, or young adults from Pass Christian and DeLisle who want to live in their hometown. Hurricane Katrina made that impossible for several years, since it razed most of the housing in Pass Christian, and decimated what was closest to the bayou in DeLisle. Coming home to DeLisle as an adult has been harder for this reason, a concrete one. And then there are abstract reasons, too.
From Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward. Copyright 2013 by Jesmyn Ward. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA.
The Story of the Human Body
If you got sick, you probably wouldn't go to an evolutionary biologist to get treated. But Daniel Lieberman, professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University, says that his field can help you understand why you got sick, and make you more aware of healthy and harmful behaviors.
He joins Fresh Air's Terry Gross to talk about some of the noninfectious diseases that may result from our Paleolithic bodies not being well-adapted to modern conditions. It's a list of ailments big and small, including acid reflux, acne, anxiety, asthma, certain cancers, depression, Type 2 diabetes, flat feet, high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, lower back pain and osteoporosis. In his new book, The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease, Lieberman traces these troubles back to their origins
Interview Highlights
On "mismatched diseases"
Many of the illnesses that we confront today are what evolutionary biologists called "mismatched diseases": ... Diseases that occur because our bodies are poorly or inadequately adapted to environments in which we now live. An example would be eating large amounts of sugar or being very physically inactive leads to problems like diabetes or heart disease that then make us sick. So mismatched diseases are diseases that are more modern in the sense that they're more prevalent, or even novel or more severe, because we don't live in the way in which our bodies are adapted.
On our relatively "new," unfettered access to sweet foods
We evolved to crave sweet foods. Everybody loves sweet foods. But if you try to eat foods that hunter-gatherers eat or chimpanzees eat, you'd be surprised at how unsweet they are. Most wild fruits are about as sweet as a carrot. So we love sweetness, but until recently, pretty much the only food that we got that was sweet was honey, and honey of course was a special treat — honey was pretty much the only form of dessert in the Paleolithic. But now we have access to abundant quantities of sugar and simple carbohydrates, which we evolved to love because they're full of energy, but we don't have the metabolism. We don't have the bodies that are able to cope with those kinds of levels of sugar, and the result is that we get sick.
On why stress leads us to crave comfort foods
The hormone that gets elicited when you get stressed is cortisol. ... If you jump out of an airplane or something really bad happens — a loved one dies — our body goes into a fight or fright [sic] state; we're ready for danger. And cortisol plays an important role because it releases sugar into the bloodstream so you can run from that lion or deal with whatever that bad situation is. It makes you more alert. But it also exacts a toll. Cortisol makes us want to bring in more energy to cope again, with those energetic needs. So stress activates basic primal urges to eat calorie-rich food, which is, of course, useful to cope with those kinds of situations, from an evolutionary perspective. So people who have lives that contribute to higher basal levels of cortisol are more likely to suffer the ill consequences of that stress.
On the way the stress we experience today is different from Paleolithic stress
Stress creates this vicious cycle, this positive feedback loop. When you're stressed you crave unhealthy foods, but when you're stressed you also have a harder time sleeping, and when you have a harder time sleeping that elevates your levels of stress. It just sets off this chain reaction that keeps going on and on. Now normally, when we're stressed, the stimulus that causes the stress should be a short-lived one; that's what evolution predicted. ... So a lion chases you, that's a very stressful event, obviously, hopefully you managed to run away from the lion ... life goes on. But much of the stress we create today results from social conditions. If you think about the most stressful things we experience, they're often our lives — they're our jobs, our commutes, not having enough money, the list goes on. Those, of course, elicit chronic levels of stress. And when stress becomes chronic, then it helps feed a variety of mismatched diseases that make us ill, that make us depressed, that make us anxious, that make us overweight, which causes more stress and then keeps the cycle going.
On the evolutionary explanation for the rise in allergies and autoimmune diseases
Our immune systems evolved to be active. Just like our muscles and skeletons evolved to be used and stressed, our immune systems evolved to cope with all of those germs in the outside world. We've now created environments that are very sterile, that are extremely clean; we have very few pathogens that we have to deal with. And if we do get them, we nuke them with antibiotics. In so doing, we are now affecting how our immune system functions; it's still there, and it's primed and ready and waiting to attack all those germs and worms that used to make us sick, but now those pathogens are absent, so it sometimes by chance finds the wrong targets. So that's the hypothesis for why so many allergies and autoimmune diseases are on the rise — is that our immune systems are essentially not being used properly, and as a result they go into overdrive; they attack ourselves.
On cancer as "evolution gone wrong"
Cancer is a kind of natural selection that occurs in your body, because cancer cells are cells that have acquired a series of mutations. Usually it's more than one mutation that enable them to essentially out-compete other cells. So it's a kind of selection within the body, and cancer cells essentially start taking over the cells and other organs, taking their nutrients, which is what causes us to die from cancer. In a sense, we wouldn't have evolved cancer if we hadn't evolved multicellular life and if natural selection didn't occur.
On how we are still evolving
Evolution is always churning along. Evolution, after all, is just change over time and natural selection. ... So whether we like it or not, evolution is going on, but it's going on at a very slow pace. And really what's a more dominant form of evolution today is cultural evolution: It's how we learn and use our bodies and interact with each other based on learned information, and that's also a kind of evolution. It's not Darwinian evolution, it's not biological evolution, but it affects our bodies. We're evolving — we're evolving slowly through natural selection and rapidly through cultural evolution, and we need to think about those interactions as we plan to use our bodies better.
Excerpt: The Story Of The Human Body
PrefaceLike most people, I am fascinated by the human body, but unlike most folks, who sensibly relegate their interest in people's bodies to evenings and weekends, I have made the human body the focus of my career. In fact, I am extremely lucky to be a professor at Harvard University, where I teach and study how and why the human body is the way it is. My job and my interests allow me to be a jack-of-all trades. In addition to working with students, I study fossils, I travel to interesting corners of the earth to see how people use their bodies, and I do experiments in the lab on how human and animal bodies work.
Like most professors, I also love to talk, and I enjoy people's questions. But of all the questions I am commonly asked, the one I used to dread the most was "What will human beings look like in the future?" I hated this question! I am a professor of human evolutionary biology, which means I study the past, not what lies ahead. I am not a soothsayer, and the question made me think of tawdry science fiction movies that depict humans of the distant future as having enormous brains, pale and tiny bodies, and shiny clothing. My reflexive answer was always something along the lines of: "Human beings aren't evolving very much because of culture." This response is a variant of the standard answer that many of my colleagues give when asked the same question.
I have since changed my mind about this question and now consider the human body's future to be one of the most important issues we can think about. We live in paradoxical times for our bodies. On the one hand, this era is probably the healthiest in human history. If you live in a developed country, you can reasonably expect all your offspring to survive childhood, to live to their dotage, and to become parents and grandparents. We have conquered or quelled many diseases that used to kill people in droves: smallpox, measles, polio, and the plague. People are taller, and formerly life-threatening conditions like appendicitis, dysentery, a broken leg, or anemia are easily remedied. To be sure, there is still too much malnutrition and disease in some countries, but these evils are often the result of bad government and social inequality, not a lack of food or medical know-how.
On the other hand, we could be doing better, much better. A wave of obesity and chronic, preventable illnesses and disabilities is sweeping across the globe. These preventable diseases include certain cancers, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, heart disease, strokes, kidney disease, some allergies, dementia, depression, anxiety, insomnia, and other illnesses. Billions of people are also suffering from ailments like lower back pain, fallen arches, plantar fasciitis, myopia, arthritis, constipation, acid reflux, and irritable bowel syndrome. Some of these troubles are ancient, but many are novel or have recently exploded in prevalence and intensity. To some extent, these diseases are on the rise because people are living longer, but most of them are showing up in middle-aged people. This epidemiological transition is causing not just misery but also economic woe. As baby boomers retire, their chronic illnesses are straining health-care systems and stifling economies. Moreover, the image in the crystal ball looks bad because these diseases are also growing in prevalence as development spreads across the planet.
The health challenges we face are causing an intense worldwide conversation among parents, doctors, patients, politicians, journalists, researchers, and others. Much of the focus has been on obesity. Why are people getting fatter? How do we lose weight and change our diets? How do we prevent our children from becoming overweight? How can we encourage them to exercise? Because of the urgent necessity to help people who are sick, there is also an intense focus on devising new cures for increasingly common noninfectious diseases. How do we treat and cure cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and the other illnesses most likely to kill us and the people we love?
As doctors, patients, researchers, and parents debate and investigate these questions, I suspect that few of them cast their thoughts back to the ancient forests of Africa, where our ancestors diverged from the apes and stood upright. They rarely think about Lucy or Neanderthals, and if they do consider evolution it is usually to acknowledge the obvious fact that we used to be cavemen (whatever that means), which perhaps implies that our bodies are not well adapted to modern lifestyles. A patient with a heart attack needs immediate medical care, not a lesson in human evolution.
If I ever suffer a heart attack, I too want my doctor to focus on the exigencies of my care rather than on human evolution. This book, however, argues that our society's general failure to think about human evolution is a major reason we fail to prevent preventable diseases. Our bodies have a story—an evolutionary story—that matters intensely. For one, evolution explains why our bodies are the way they are, and thus yields clues on how to avoid getting sick. Why are we so liable to become fat? Why do we sometimes choke on our food? Why do we have arches in our feet that flatten? Why do we have backs that ache? A related reason to consider the human body's evolutionary story is to help understand what our bodies are and are not adapted for. The answers to this question are tricky and unintuitive but have profound implications for making sense of what promotes health and disease and for comprehending why our bodies sometimes naturally make us sick. Finally, I think the most pressing reason to study the human body's story is that it isn't over. We are still evolving. Right now, however, the most potent form of evolution is not biological evolution of the sort described by Darwin, but cultural evolution, in which we develop and pass on new ideas and behaviors to our children, friends, and others. Some of these novel behaviors, especially the foods we eat and the activities we do (or don't do), make us sick.
Human evolution is fun, interesting, and illuminating, and much of this book explores the amazing journey that created our bodies. I also try to highlight the progress achieved by farming, industrialization, medical science, and other professions that have made this era the best of all times so far to be a human. But I am no Pangloss, and since our challenge is to do better, the last few chapters focus on how and why we get sick. If Tolstoy were writing this book, perhaps he might write that "all healthy bodies are alike; each unhealthy body is unhealthy in its own way."
The core subjects of this book—human evolution, health, and disease—are enormous and complex. I have done my best to try to keep the facts, explanations, and arguments simple and clear without dumbing them down or avoiding essential issues, especially for serious diseases such as breast cancer and diabetes. I have also included many references, including websites, where you can investigate further. Another struggle was to find the right balance between breadth and depth. Why our bodies are the way they are is simply too large a topic to cover because bodies are so complex. I have therefore focused on just a few aspects of our bodies' evolution that relate to diet and physical activity, and for every topic I cover, there are at least ten I don't. The same caveat applies to the final chapters, which focus on just a few diseases that I chose as exemplars of larger problems. Moreover, research in these fields is changing fast. Inevitably some of what I include will become out of date. I apologize.
Finally, I have rashly concluded the book with my thoughts about how to apply the lessons of the human body's past story to its future. I'll spill the beans right now and summarize the core of my argument. We didn't evolve to be healthy, but instead we were selected to have as many offspring as possible under diverse, challenging conditions. As a consequence, we never evolved to make rational choices about what to eat or how to exercise in conditions of abundance and comfort. What's more, interactions between the bodies we inherited, the environments we create, and the decisions we sometimes make have set in motion an insidious feedback loop. We get sick from chronic diseases by doing what we evolved to do but under conditions for which our bodies are poorly adapted, and we then pass on those same conditions to our children, who also then get sick. If we wish to halt this vicious circle then we need to figure out how to respectfully and sensibly nudge, push, and sometimes oblige ourselves to eat foods that promote health and to be more physically active. That, too, is what we evolved to do.
Excerpted from The Story of the Human Body by Daniel E. Lieberman.
Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Lieberman. Excerpted by permission of
Pantheon, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this
excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from
the publisher.
