Content area
Full Text
Taylor Jeremy , Body by Darwin: How Evolution Shapes our Health and Transforms Medicine (University of Chicago Press , 2015). Cloth and E-Book, $30.00ￂ andￂ $18.00, pp.ￂ 304, ISBN:ￂ 978022605988.
Book Review
The field of evolutionary medicine, in its modern guise, can be said to have emerged in 1995, with the publication of Evolution and Healing by the psychiatrist Randolph Nesse and the anthropologist George Williams. Their book's American title, in 1994, was Why We Get Sick. Only the title was changed for the British edition, evolution being then (and now) an emotive word in the United States.
Since Nesse and Williams, a number of authors have developed the subject, of which Jeremy Taylor's fine volume is the latest example. Taylor pays due attention to Nesse and Williams (and Nesse provides a puff for this book). There is one curious feature of all the many volumes in this genre: none of these authors takes seriously the...