Customer Reviews

Physician to the Gene Pool: Genetic Lessons and Other Stories

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Four stars because the book could have used some editing - the 457 pages are in relatively small print according to my memory of reading the book. I no longer own a copy.
The couple of fun facts which stuck in my mind are related to "poverty".
Somewhere in the book Neel remarks that at least in the rainforest-tribes he studied the women had a remarkable ability to RETAIN SALT, which is especially needed for making a baby. In the rainforest where our chimp ancestors evolved, minerals tend to be leached away, therefore salt is scarce. Fast-forward to present-day where of course the taste-arms-race oversalts everything, from Neel's viewpoint it is obvious why the organism doesn't quite know what to do with the superabundance.
I forget which tribe and it is possible that it might not have been this book( the salt-story I'm SURE about ), but someone also remarked on some "poor" tribe in which the men have this funny callus on their shoulder since their idea of a fun game is ultra-running with a 50-or-so-pound-log on their shoulder.
The take-home message is that the human body was optimized for a hunter-gatherer-amount-of-exercise and scarcity-of-food. I have a couple of Afghanistan/Iraq war books and the soldiers are typically remarking how the subsistence-farmer-natives can usually run rings around them - the "poor" natives have a healthier lifestyle !
Neel was also involved in follow-up-studies of the Japan A-bomb-survivors. This was before all the research on DNA-repair-mechanisms, so he reports on being puzzled about the relatively few obvious mutations in the next generation.