WHO PAYS THE PIPER?
Are we simply too clever for our own good? We’ve harnessed nature to feed a growing population with increasingly energy-dense foods, and now many of us are obese. We’ve invented antibiotics, but many bugs are now resistant. Our dependence on digital technology has been linked with mental ill-health.
Our ingenuity, say scientists Distinguished Professor Sir Peter Gluckman from the University of Auckland and British Heart Foundation Professor Mark Hanson from the University of Southampton, has not only changed the world, it has changed us. Their new book, Ingenious: The Unintended Consequences of Human Innovation, sounds a warning about the pace of that change and how we can continue to function well in the world we’ve created. It’s the seventh book the pair has co-authored or co-edited, through their shared research interest in the developmental origins of non-communicable diseases.
Gluckman founded the Liggins Institute in Auckland, which researches maternal, fetal and neonatal health, and was the first person appointed as chief science adviser to the Prime Minister.
Ingenious, however, focuses on our future survival. When humans first invented a new tool 20,000 years ago, says Gluckman, the pace of change was slow, but since the industrial revolution, it’s accelerated exponentially. “When considering the rapid developments in technology that have taken place during the young lives of the ‘millennials’ and are shaping even more the lives of today’s children – Generation Z – from the internet to smartphones, fast food to Facebook, we realised the battle between man and his nature is still very much raging,” they write in Ingenious.
“The tacit assumption is that, because through our ingenuity we have invented these brilliant new technologies, we are winning. But the more we looked, the more it appears that we are, at the same time, losing – whether it is the
