Why modern fitness culture misunderstands human bodies | Daniel Lieberman

Become a Big Think member to unlock expert classes, premium print issues, exclusive events and more: https://bigthink.com/membership/?utm_... For most of human history, movement was inseparable from survival. Deliberately burning energy for no immediate purpose would have made little sense in a world where calories were scarce and bodies were costly to maintain. Seen through an evolutionary lens, exercise stops looking like a personal shortcoming and starts looking like a cultural invention we’re still learning how to live with, says Daniel Lieberman. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About Daniel Lieberman: Daniel Lieberman is Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences and a professor of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He received degrees from Harvard and Cambridge, and taught at Rutgers University and George Washington University before joining Harvard University as a Professor in 2001. He is a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Lieberman loves teaching and has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers, many in journals such as Nature, Science, and PNAS, as well as three popular books, The Evolution of the Human Head (2011), The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease (2013), and Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding (2020).