Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 5 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:

[T]here is no doubt that from 1700 to 2000, over the course of some 12-15 human generations, all the features of this schema have been transformed in ways never seen before in human history. In the process, humankind has gained equally unprecedented control over its environment – even if it has sometimes misused that control – through the invention and application of new forms of technology. One sign of that control is that, in most if not quite all parts of the world, the size, shape, and longevity of the human body have changed more substantially, and much more rapidly, during the past three centuries than over many previous millennia. There were, of course, evolutionary changes to our bodies during those past millennia, but the change that has occurred in recent times is of a different character. It has come about, within a timescale which is minutely short by the standards of Darwinian evolution, through the application of technology, in particular to food production and distribution and to the development of means of combatting disease.