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Book Review: Throwing Out the Mismatch Baby with the Paleo-Bathwater

In many respects, our lives today are vastly different than anything our ancestors experienced. Think antibiotics, laser surgery, social networking, GPS mapping, jet airplanes, baby monitors, drone strikes, supermarkets, and ultra-productive farms requiring almost no manual labor. The scientific knowledge and technological systems that brought such changes have also yielded increasingly detailed information about our evolutionary history: We know that our lives today are not merely much different from those of our great grandparents; they are extraordinarily, almost unimaginably, different from those of the hunter-gatherers living in the paleolithic. If one takes natural selection seriously, these facts suggest that our bodies and brains may be largely adapted to deal with historical challenges that differ substantially from contemporary ones. This mismatch perspective serves as an indispensable lever for scholars aiming to illuminate human nature and for practitioners and policy makers attempting to improve lives. In the new book, Paleofantasy, Marlene Zuk offers a sharp rebuke to mismatch proponents, especially those holding to singular views of human lifestyles in the paleolithic. Zuk is no anti-evolutionist: She is a distinguished evolutionary biologist who has made seminal contributions, especially in the field of sexual selection. The arguments in Paleofantasy deserve careful consideration, but they ultimately fail to support the book's thesis, at least the strong version we will consider here, namely that a mismatch perspective is unproductive.