Human illnesses can be understood as damage to those adaptations that we took on at various stages in our evolution from pre-life molecules to modern Homo sapiens. Preventing these illnesses entails avoiding what causes the damage — which too frequently are the everyday hazards of twenty-first-century life, as the chart below shows:

Level of Evolution / Cause of adaptive failure / resulting disease or problem

Pre-life / Environmental poisons / Certain birth defects

Single cell (bacteria and amoeba-like) / Viral infection / Colds/flu/HIV

Morula (sponge-like) / Cellular stress / Cancer

Chordate / Physical stress / Back pain

Fish / Excess dietary salt / Hypertension/heart disease

Amphibian / Tobacco smoke / Lung cancer/emphysema

Lower primate / Excess dietary sugar / Diabetes mellitus

Higher primate / Vitamin C deficiency / Scurvy

Ape / Excess dietary protein / Gout

Homo sapiens / Reduced dietary variety / Nutritionaldiseases/food allergies

NOEL BOAZ, Ph.D., Biological Anthropologist, is the founder and Director of the International Institute for Human Evolutionary Research and Professor of Anatomy at Ross University School of Medicine. He is the author of more than fifty scientific papers, the leading textbook in biological anthropology, and two popular science books, Quarry and Eco Homo.