The story of life on Earth is a story of starvation ash, from massive volcanoes and asteroids block out of the sun,

killing the planets which then killed most everything else.

As Darwin pointed out, though, from this war of nature from famine and death,

the most exalted object that we are capable of conceiving a rose, namely us.

We are particularly well adapted to prolonged fasting, evolving inving in a context of scarcity is believed to have shaped our exceptional ability

to store large amounts of calories when food is available.

Of course, now our ability to easily pack on the pounds is leading to modern diseases,

like obesity and type 2 diabetes, but without the ability to store so much

body fat we may not have made it to tell the tale and it's not just asteroids

millions of years ago all of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger

region inscription on an Egyptian tomb from about 4,000 years ago, to such degree that everyone

had come to eating his children.

Or just hundreds of years ago.

Parents killed their children, and children killed their parents and ate them.

The bodies of executed criminals were eagerly snatched from the gallows,

wiping out as many as two-thirds of the population of Italy, one-third of the population

of Paris, so we don't have to go back to ancient history. Even the most secure and

affluent populations of today need only trace their history back a short distance. For

example, nearly 200 famines in Britain over the last 2,000 years.

Now, we tend to be suffering from too much food, which carries its own problems, but might

there be any negative consequences to not ever starving? This was a question raised 50 years

ago. I mean, if our physiology is so well tuned to periodic starvation,

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