Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 364 of Roderick Floud’s, Nobel-laureate Robert Fogel’s, Bernard Harris’s, and Sok Chul Hong’s fascinating 2011 book, The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World since 1700:

We are taller, healthier, heavier, and longer lived than our ancestors; our bodies are sturdier, less susceptible to disease in early life and slower to wear out. These changes have occurred in all parts of the world and are continuing to occur, though not all at once and not all at the same speed; they have accumulated, generation by generation, and together constitute a major and surprising change to the human body. It is not as dramatic as the evolutionary changes that produced Homo sapiens, but it has occurred far more rapidly, within the course of about twelve to fifteen generations, from the beginning of the eighteenth century.