Survival: Evolution and the Exercise Dilemma | Daniel Lieberman

Everyone knows that exercise promotes health, but the lens of evolution is necessary to address why exercise is so vital for health and wellbeing, and why so many people today avoid exercise despite its benefits. An evolutionary perspective not only explains why inadequate exercise accelerates aging and contributes to many diseases, but also predicts that to help more people exercise in the post-industrial world it is important to make exercise both fun and necessary.

This talk is part of the Survival symposium, a fascinating series of talks focusing on evolution and the challenges of building a better, safer and more survivable future.

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Survival was presented by The Leakey Foundation in partnership with Harvard University's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, NOVA, NOVA Labs, SMASH, and WGBH.

About the speaker:
Daniel Lieberman is professor and chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences at Harvard University. His research is on how and why the human body is the way it is, with particular foci on the origins of bipedalism, how humans became superlative endurance runners, and the evolution of the highly unusual human head. His latest books are "The Evolution of the Human Head (Harvard University Press, 2011), and “The Story of the Human Body” (Pantheon, 2013).