Year: 2020
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The Surrealist painters were fond of an epigram penned by an obscure 19th century French poet."Beauty," they would say, is the "chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella."This was a celebration of the Surrealist's love of random, capricious events; of absurd, dislocating juxtapositions.The book that you are holding generates a different sort of epigram-"intensely interesting," it suggests, can be the outcome of the "chance meeting over a dinner table of an orthodontic scholar and an eminent evolutionist."Human cultural evolution has been one long string of examples of the law of unexpected consequences.We invent agriculture, which leads to food surpluses, which leads to job specialization, and before you know it, we've invented socioeconomic status, the most crushing way of subordinating the low ranking that primates have ever seen.We invent sedentary dwelling and permanent structures, and soon we're dealing with the public health consequences of something no self-respecting primate would ever do-living in high-density populations in close proximity to its feces.We domesticate wolves into being companions, and soon we're dressing up our dogs in Halloween costumes and buying Pet Rocks.The emergence of modern humans has generated some surprising twists and turns.Kahn and Ehrlich explore one of these unexpected consequences of human culture, sitting at the intersection of the expertise of this unlikely pairing of authors.Who would ever have predicted that the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Westernization of nursing patterns would have led to a distinctive orthodontic profile (in both the metaphorical and literal sense of "profile")?And who would have predicted that this orthodontic profile winds up being relevant to an array of aspects
Source: Stanford University Press eBooks
Author: Robert Sapolsky
Language: English
Subfield: Orthodontics
Field: Dentistry
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4229528661