Richard Manning

We are designed to be wild, and by living tamely we make ourselves sick and unhappy.

There is no ambiguity in the fossil record, in paleoanthropology or anthropology, in everything we know about the human condition, past and present. Humans are hunters and meat eaters. There is no such thing as a vegetarian society in all the record. Eating meat is a fundamental and defining fact of the human condition, at the gut level and bred in the bones.

Exercise in nature is exercise squared.

The result was a clean, stair-stepped relationship: the more fitness standards a student met, the better the test scores.

Companies like Google, Nike, Proctor & Gamble, and Cisco Systems have begun allowing employees to take naps at work as a way to enhance both productivity and creativity. Business consulting firms have capitalized on the research to show that sleep is essential to success.

The effects of the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age pale in comparison with the effects of the advent of agriculture, the single greatest change in two million years of hominid history.

The meditative practice does not tell the subjects they should be more empathetic or equitable or compassionate or just. It does not offer skills for doing so. It simply quiets and tunes the mind. Once cleared of clutter, the mind reverts to its default mode set by evolution, which is empathy.

What we need to understand from this is that our happiness is greatly dependent on our biological well-being, and the conditions of that well-being have been laid down by the imperatives of survival, of evolution. All of this means we need to pay attention to the conditions of human evolution to ensure happiness. But the problem is, we don’t.

The prima facie case is we have become carbovores as a result of our domestication of grain. This is the carbovore’s dilemma: we exist for the most part on a substance that our bloodstream treats as a toxin.