The human race is suffering from success. Our own ingenuity, our capacity to keep inventing and innovating, means that almost all of us live not just geographically but more importantly technologically a million miles away from the “EEA”: the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.
One reason why modern, wealthy societies struggle with rising obesity, say, is that the human body is built for hunter-gathering. Place us in an environment of abundant, tasty food and comfy chairs and we put on weight. Obesity, along with atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, certain cancers, type two diabetes and other conditions are sometimes dubbed “diseases of modernity”.
Of course, being very far from the environment we evolved for is a fantastic deal for essentially all human beings. Being exceptionally morbid, I sat down and worked out when, in past centuries, I would have shuffled off the mortal coil, even before you factor in my chances of being involved in some kind of violent crime or drafted into a war. At any point before the discovery of penicillin in 1928 the answer is that at best “I would have died at seven”, and the bacterial infection in particular was relatively contained and not that painful at the time.