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1st Place Award Winner!

Non-fiction:

Science - Health and Fitness

For greater well-being, we must adapt our modern lifestyle and live more in harmony with our natural and evolutionary selves.

While giving many benefits, aspects of modern society can also be harmful to our physical, mental, and cultural health. We can overcome many of these detriments if we better understand and express our primal selves which is largely encoded into our DNA.

On the Origin of Being outlines the misalignments between our genetic design and modern lifestyle that reduce our well-being and even cause disease. Jenny Powers, PhD in immunology, and Luke Comer, author and producer, pay homage to Charles Darwin by investigating the evolution of many human behaviors. They identify the origins of these behaviors in the single-cell organisms of billions of years ago and then trace them through primates, hominoids, and up the evolutionary chain to modern humans. They then demonstrate how to realign our behaviors to enjoy more vital, loving, and robust lives here and now.

Book one of this three-part series addresses four behaviors that are most significant to our health—sleep, nutrition, work and rest—and our relationship with nature.

READ EXCERPTS

Our bodies and minds were designed through eons of evolution. So, should we not listen to them to reveal our innate wisdom about how to live? By studying the evolutionary origins of human behavior, we can rediscover the secrets of living our best life and apply them in the modern world.

Why should we delve into the past to learn how to live today?

Our world is changing exponentially. Our modern cities and cultural behaviors would seem utterly alien to our Paleolithic ancestors. Have our genes kept up with the changes? An argument has been made that we haven’t had enough time or selective pressure to completely adapt to the modern lifestyle, so our genetics and environment are mismatched. Consequently, we are maladapted, and our physical, mental, and social health are suffering. Many life philosophies instruct humans how to live a good life, but with this fundamental mismatch, do any of them work?

On the Origin of Being presents a new life philosophy based firmly in science. In the eyes of science, humans are merely biological organisms designed through the process of evolution over billions of years. By understanding how certain traits evolved and expressed themselves over time and in diverse organisms, especially our Paleolithic predecessors, we will understand the primal motivations behind our behaviors. When we can identify where the rifts between our genes and our modern world are causing us distress, we can act to close them. By learning about our evolutionary past, we can restore our health and vitality and learn how to live our best lives today.