Book Review: "A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life"
Authors: Dr Heather Heying and Dr Bret Weinstein
Through The Lens of a Chronic Illness
Six years after a diagnosis of an idiopathic [of unknown origin] and incurable [no known solution] form of chronic illness, I had hit rock bottom. I realized, if I was to survive, I could no longer outsource my knowledge to a medical system that was quite content to live with such unknowings.
So I began to draw on the research skills I'd developed from a career as an academic and as a scientist to seek out my own answers, to help myself. I devoured and synthesised knowledge from many different fields and joined the applicable dots. So began a journey of recovery.
Along the way, I read things which were literally life changing, that left me enhanced with new pragmatic insights - texts which provided answers to my fundamental questions:
"what happened to me?";
"who am I?";
"how do I get a better?".
Books such as Stephen Porges' "Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory", Gabor Mate's "When the Body Says No", Heller & LaPierre's "Healing Developmental Trauma", Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary" all left their indelible marks on me. Each added a new lens with which to construct a more panoramic view of my inner world and with my embedded relationship within culture and society.
[For the complete list of the books which I recommend for folks with chronic conditions and trauma, see:
and for specific examples of how some of these authors have informed my thinking and approaches to life, try…
Dr Iain McGilchrist:
Dr Gabor Mate:
Dr Laurence Heller:
].
These books all gave me new tools with which to reconfigure myself and my life in to more healthy states, allowing me to build a new pragmatic toolkit of self-knowledge and understanding, with which I slowly, but surely, began to progressively reduce my symptoms. These books not only made be better, but also made me a better person, through a deeper understanding of, and compassion for, the human condition.
The New Lens
“The Hunter Gatherer's Guide to The 21st Century”, by Heather Heying and her husband Bret Weinstein, is, for me, most definitely the next chapter in the evolution of pragmatic knowledge about myself and my fellow humans, the rightful inheritor to the series of life changing books I've read that altered my perspectives forever, and provided me with much needed actionable insight.
In particular, The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide broadens out the answers to my fundamental questions to:
"what happened to US?";
"who are WE?";
"how do WE become better?".
It has added another lens to my toolkit of self-knowledge and understanding.
The book also provides further, deeper lessons for becoming better, both in the sense of healthier, more robust and fulfilled, and in the sense of better homo sapiens - how to be more kind and compassionate, more understanding, and more forgiving of the foibles of our shared human condition too.
Perhaps even more so than the others texts I've read, this book is also purposefully empowering and aims to be highly pragmatic, setting out to provide an applied toolkit with which the reader can analyse problems for themselves. It codifies the authors’ lens via a flow of relatively simple questions, such as their "Omega Principle", "Three-part Test of Adaption" and "Precautionary Principle".
In particular, the book answers questions which I have been musing on for some time about the origins of the rise and rise of [idiopathic] [incurable] chronic illnesses, namely whether it is our brains and bodies which have become so maladaptive, or whether we have created an environment for ourselves that is toxic to our own biology, and which we are continuing to change too fast for biology to keep up.
The book comes firmly down on the side of the latter. In fact, the authors' coin a term for this:
“hypernovelty”.
The authors' illustrate the application of their method by turning it to several hypernovel issues we face in modern life, under the themes of:
medicine;
food and nutrition;
sleep;
sex and relationships;
parenting;
childhood;
school & growing up;
consciousness;
culture.
They do not harken back to a mythological golden age, but seek to make sense of the modern world and navigate a better way forward. As well as the illustrative analyses, they share their own actionable solutions which they have applied to their own lives at the end of each chapter, via a section called "The Corrective Lens".
The book is written in conversational, narrative style, highly accessible, easy reading and without scientific jargon. The case studies are illustrated with stories from history, nature and science, as well as lessons from the authors' own life experiences. Key points are clearly broken out from the text with bullet point boxes and diagrams.
Private Q & A
My relationship with this particular book didn’t end just when I finished it. The authors also make themselves available for two hours once a month in order to interact with their readers via a private livestream, which you can access by joining Heather’s Patreon. I joined this group as soon as I had finished the book, and have been interacting with the authors that way ever since.
As part of my diligence in writing this article, I went back and read all the questions I had submitted to those monthly private Q & A’s. In doing so, and, apart from in a couple of cases, Heather and Bret’s answers are not public, I felt it would be still interesting to include a selection of my submitted questions here, not least to help illustrate some of the wide ranging thoughts that the book provoked in me.
A Selection of My Questions
Q.
Can you tell the story of how Bret came to be on DeSantis's round table panel, and what your role will be in the future? Also, was it me or did you visibly bristle when the other panel members said the vax was safe and effective for older people, and that other childhood vaccines have a one in a million side effect profile?
Q.
Your explanation about the reason for peacock tails in last months private Q+A, was an "a ha!" obvious-in-hindsight moment. Without necessarily providing the explanations, what are some of your other favorite evolutionary explanations or "just so" stories you are holding up sleeve, that the rest of the field are currently getting wrong?
Q.
I was wondering if you ever read the article on Jackson Labs website about telomeres in their mice. They seem to be trying to rebut Bret's work about all the mice being broken, without actually referencing his work, The article begins "Telomere length in animals is not significantly affected by inbreeding and domestication. It varies across strains and sub-strains of mice, as does lifespan, and there is no direct correlation between telomere length and longevity within a population" and they have even created an animation. Is this sophistry? I would love to hear Bret's rebuttal to their rebuttal. My understanding of Bret's work is that it doesn't equate telomere length with longevity per se because they would die from cancers if the telomere got too long?
Q.
Do you think "the obesity not being lifestyle driven but biological factors" item you read from the American Paediatrician society might also be driven by the covid agenda/narrative? It is well known that obesity is the biggest co-morbidty for covid, and hence lifestyle changes [not requiring pharma] would be more effective at protecting from serious illness than anything else. This has been a major hole in the covid/vax narrative from the start, e.g Joe Rogan is always saying this. Could this actually be an attempt to close that open door in the minds of people?
Q.
Why is it unacceptable (as it should be) for white folks to dress up in black face due to it being racist and presenting a demeaning caricature of black people, yet it is perfectly acceptable, and now even celebrated and promoted for male "drag queens" to dress up as and present deeply misogynistic and grotesque exaggerated caricatures of women?
Heather expanded on the private Q&A answer in her substack article:
and Heather and Bret also talked about in this clip from their public 148th episode of their podcast:
Q.
“Would love your comments on the following hypothesis:
Combining the ideas of Mattias Desmet [author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism] and Iain McGilchrist, I propose “mass formation” works via a form of hypnosis which literally puts peoples right brain hemisphere to sleep.
Many of McGilchrist’s predictions of what a society full of people without a fully functional right hemisphere looks like seem to be highly predictive and explanatory of Desmet’s descriptions of mass formation.
Then the “waking up of the masses” becomes the task of literally waking up the right hemispheres of people under the spell of mass psychosis. This cannot be simply achieved by argumentation with facts and logic, because this just feeds the left hemisphere over-activation, but must be done by appealing to the right hemisphere via re-connection to love and common humanity, through metaphor, comedy, poetry, music, awe and beauty.”
A.
I felt that Heather and Bret’s wider response to this was so important and profound, that I requested to Heather to clip it and make it public, which they did, and so I’ve included it here:
Q.
“In Non-WEIRD [Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic] and traditional societies, there are lots of things which tend to get passed on from parents, quite stably over many generations (vertical spread, or across time).
Examples of things which tend to get ”inherited” are:
religion, denomination, sect;
language, accent, dialect;
diet, disgust at certain foods, table manners;
morality, values, taboos.
Is there a form of “cultural hypernovelty”, namely social and technological changes which destabilize these patterns or break these vertical chains, and, indeed, could a working definition of excessive progressivism be the purposeful sabotage and determined destruction of these stable patterns within a single generation?”
Q.
“Twelve years ago, I was diagnosed with Early Onset Parkinson's Disease. Six years ago, after hitting rock bottom, I started taking responsibility for my own health, and ever since, contrary to the medical narrative, I have been progressively reducing my symptoms.
The single-most impactful modality I've found is a self-care fascia release technique. I recall Heather mentioning benefitting from fascia release therapy after her boating accident, so wondered what your thoughts are on the evolutionary purpose of fascia, and which hypernovel factors may be having greatest negative impact on fascia health?”
Q.
“What are your thoughts on the potential environmental/climate impacts of the global pandemic strategy? For example, what are we going to do with all those billions of contaminated used syringes, bottles, masks, etc? Then there is the massive extra energy/chemical cost in producing, shipping and transporting them around the world, not to mention the presumably enormous energy required for the deep refrigeration of billions of bottle being stored?”
Q.
“It is often said that viruses tend to evolve towards more infectious but less dangerous variants, and eventually fizzle out by this mechanism, like Spanish Flu and Sars-Cov-1 apparently did. However, it doesn't make much adaptive sense for a virus to just evolve itself out of existence.
If we consider lineage level adaptation, would it make more sense that our immune systems not only have programs for improving individual survival against viral attack, but also programs for helping the survival of the wider lineage too? I believe this would look like a mechanism for signalling to other immune systems the information about the wild virus ahead of infection, preparing their systems for the attack.
Perhaps our immune systems collaborate to create natural herd immunity programs by generating and selecting strains which are faster to transmit but are less harmful than the wild virus - that it is actually some wisdom inherent in our adaptive lineage level biology which is selecting the virus out of existence?”
Q.
“I recently read two reports which were both disturbing in different ways:
a UNICEF report on significant side-effects, for both mother and baby, from the ubiquitous use of Synthetic Oxytocin as a drug during medicalized births in the US;
a Save-the-Children report that claims that traditional infant care practices in Tajikistan are harmful, including the use of gahvoras that you mention in the book.
What are your thoughts on this juxtaposition of the abandonment of the precautionary principle, and a total disregard for traditional wisdoms, when it come to birth and infancy in the WEIRD world?”
Q.
“In the book, you mention how gibbons communicate through song. This reminds me of the hypothesis, I think from Iain McGilchrist, that song may have also appeared before speech in the human lineage. What are your thoughts on this idea?
I am also gathering and synthetizing everything I’ve learned along the way of my own journey of recovery into an practical online course to help other folks who suffer from chronic illness or trauma, and caregivers and therapists:
I’ll add these to my list, Gary, thank you for the suggestions.
Very comprehensive! You are also consistently so thorough. Thank you for the suggested readings. I intend to delve in!