Okad a. Welcome to Healthy Ish. I hope you are feeling well healthy today, not the ish. I am your host of Felicity Hawlen, of course, this is the daily podcast from Body and Soul. I'm joined today by award winning science journalist and author of new book Why Are We Like This? Zoe Keane. We're discussing how evolutionary history shapes our current health behaviors and why understanding it all can help boost well, not only your health, but also
your wellbeing. Now, we keep our Healthiest episodes quite short, so if you want to hear a longer chat with Zoe where we take a deep dive into aging, search for our sister pod, Extra Healthy Ish, where we get your podcasts. Hey Zoey, thanks for coming on healthy Is today.
Gooday, thank you for having me.
And well done on your I'm calling it fascinating new book.
I love that.
Now talk to us, how can evolutionary biology, well, what can it teach us about our health today?
Well, there's a bit of a saying among evolutionary biologists, and I spoke to a lot of them for this book, that nothing in biology makes sense outside of the light of evolution, and essentially that's because we all got here
with an evolutionary story. Every single thing that is alive on this planet has this amazing legacy of generations going back and back and back and surviving in different contexts, and that history changes the way in which we turn up in the world today and changes the way our body works and influences everything from how we sleep, how we eat, how we experience emotions and love. Everything that we experience as living being things is a consequence of
this history. And that doesn't take away from our own individual experience or how important important our lives are to us, but it is this incredible legacy, and it really helps us untangle some of the trickier questions we've faced in life.
I think when you, I mean I've delved into it a bit too, you know, the past couple of years, into how we've evolved and you know as to who we are today, and it really does help you appreciate how well not just your body functions, but how we relate in the world. Your book is cut up into different chapters, you know, sleep, care, sex, lives. Talk to us a bit about sleep, you know, and where how that has perhaps developed over the years, and well how
we can sleep better today, That's what I want to know. Yeah, Well, so every chapter kind of focuses on this, this crunchy issue in evolutionary biology that doesn't quite make sense with a kind of first pass idea of you know, traits that are selected for that help us survive and then have more offspring, and those offsprings. Sleeps a bit of a weird one because it's strange to completely lose consciousness in a dangerous world. Right when we go to sleep, we're vulnerable, And so how has.
Something that has made us vulnerable continued? And of course it's continued because it's incredibly healthy for us, or we've kind of offloaded a lot of biological functions into the sleep time that we need to survive and we can't survive without sleep. Interestingly, one of the things I found when I was researching this book and this kind of bucks the trend a little bit is that modern humans are probably sleeping better than we ever have.
Oh and I know, actually that is lovely to hear.
It is, isn't it, because we've got so much anxiety around sleep. I spoke to this wonderful researcher, David Sinclair, and he's been doing a lot of research around this is based in Canada and Toronto, and he was saying, in our culture, one of the things that we do is really problematize sleep. And of course, you know, I've just enturing my book I'll sleep deprived for a bit
of that. And it's horrible when you're sleep deprived, and there are periods in your life, say when you're raising up kids, that you are sleep deprived, and it's awful and it impacts you physically, it impacts your health. But compared to the history of life on Earth, we're probably doing okay. And that can be a really comforting thing to know because we kind of hear these dire headlines about sleep loss, epidemic and all this type of thing.
But essentially, you know, I did also encounter some things that we can do to make our sleep better, and that is really get in touch with our circadian rhythm. So it's like really the basic stuff. You know, make sure that you're seeing the light in the morning, seeing the light in midday if you're working in an office block, you know, just trying to get out for lunch and then seeing the light at the end of the day. So you know, actually going outside can be really helpful.
And of course, one of the big things that we can do to help sleep is to help each other live better, less stressful lives. So a huge impact on everybody's sleep is you know, we might have heard the term social determinants of health, but if your life is hard, if you're living in danger, so you know, if you're living in a dangerous neighborhood, you have worse sleep compared
to someone who's living in a safe neighborhood. And if you're living in, say a situation where you know there's worry and anxiety around, then that obviously affects your sleep. And we feel that on a personal level when we're stressed, it's harder to sleep. But also that's a larger cultural thing. So you know, you can help people sleep by just checking in on a mate and making sure that your
friends and family are safe. And we often get individual advice, but community advice is a really big one for sleep, because just community safety can really help with our sleep. One chapter that I've found perhaps reassuring more than ever right now with all that's going on in the world is why we care and.
Whales and wolves and humans. You know, you link these two and you talk about the survival depending on acts of kindness.
Talk to us about this, yeah, I mean, one of the kind of frustrations I have about evolutionary biology is often when people talk about it, they emphasize this kind of raw and rugged individualism where everybody's out for themselves. Dog eat dog, the dog eat dog. It's that kind
of world. And actually, one of the beautiful things about us as humans and animals like dogs, elephants, and whales especially is that our survival is completely dependent on our community, and so we have evolved to be incredibly caring and incredibly altruistic, and this means that we will sacrifice ourselves to help out our neighbors, our friends, our offspring. And I investigated this looking at human baby but also looking at different species, so mainly pilot and sperm whales, because
they're incredible examples of very caring communities. So pilot whales and sperm whales they babysit for each other, so they'll look after each other's kids when they're you know, off diving hunting for squeeeds, I know, and in some sperm whale groups, because sperm whales, like humans, they have different cultures and so some sperm whales have some babysitting arrangements
that differ to other sperm whales, which is incredible. You know, some if you're in one community of sperm whales, you might be more likely to be looked after by a family member, whereas you might be more likely to be looked after by a more distant relation in another one. It's fascinating. And sperm whales will even suckle each other's young, so you know, they'll share real physical resources with each other.
And this is an incredible way that helps them survive in the world, and it helps them live lives.
That thrive and yeah, in a very.
Dangerous place in the open ocean. But it does have this kind of other side effect, which means that sometimes their social relationships can make it hard when they're, say in a mass stranding event, because it can be very hard to get whales off the beach if they've got their loved ones still on the beach. Sense. Yeah, and with humans, you know, we're the same. We will, you know, go into danger to look after those that we love.
And one of the really heartening things I found in the book found researching the book, and it's a fairly well known thing, but I think it's always worth repeating, is that in times of crisis, so say after a bush fire or you know, after some catastrophic event, levels of pro social behavior so people helping other people increase massively, And we're often told to kind of worry about things like looting or crime, but actually when things are tough,
that's when our really, really good behavior comes out. And that's an incredible thing to know about humanity because things can look a bit dire sometimes, so it's I think really important to look at our legacy of care and how community care and caring for those that were related to and those that we're not related to has helped us survive and look to that past for inspiration, but
also to understand ourselves as caring beings. And there are some fantastic researchers that are looking at that how that's operating now in species like whales, but also in human cultures, so you know, all the way from Massi warriors in Africa and Kenya to ranchers out in the US who are looking after their neighbors, and the kind of similarities in the way we care for each other that are very interesting cross culturally.
So Thank you for coming on.
Healthy Is No Worries.
Well, if you want answers to some of life's big questions, like some of the ones we just chatted about, grab Zoe's book. It is called Why Are We Like This? It is out now. Make sure listening to her on Extra Healthy Ish anything else. Head to Body andsoul dot com. That are you can follow us on social media. You can grab me at Felicity Harley as well. Make sure you check out our print edition which is annually called
Sunday Paper. Thanks again for tuning into this podcast, and of course stay healthy.