ABSTRACT
We are so frequently concerned with how we get sick that we often neglect to ask why we get sick. Not simply why we get sick compared to our colleagues or younger selves, but why we get sick at all. Although this might be posed as a deeply philosophical question about the human condition, it can also be considered empirically. An anthropologist might point to the norms and politics of socio-cultural institutions; a geneticist may look to family trees and hereditary mutations that persist between generations; a physician might cite the pathophysiology of disease and curious cases from clinical experience. This chapter is about the evolutionary biologist, who tells a different story: we get sick because we are evolved beings, riddled with evolutionary trade-offs and maladapted to modern lifestyles. In the light of evolution, so the story goes, sickness and health need to be reinterpreted.
