Human biology has never been a fixed blueprint — the species has always bent to circumstance, climate, and culture, producing the diversity visible across populations today. Herman Pontzer, a professor of evolutionary anthropology and global health at Duke University, makes that argument in precise biological terms in his new book.
The book, Adaptable: How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Our Biology Unites Us (Penguin Random House, 2025), traces how local environments interact with genetics to generate human variation — and what that variation actually means when examined honestly. According to the announcement, it is a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, which recognizes excellence in nonfiction across the physical and biological sciences. The winner receives a $10,000 cash prize at the Literary Awards Ceremony on March 31.
Pontzer draws heavily on fieldwork with the Hadza, a contemporary hunter-gatherer community in Tanzania, to reconstruct how pre-agricultural lifestyles functioned and why the departure from those patterns — for much of the world’s population — is generating measurable health consequences.
The intellectual engine behind the book, Pontzer says, was conversations that followed his previous work. His 2022 book on metabolism, Burn, revealed how poorly the public understands fundamental biological processes. “It became very clear to me that when you move outside of the ivory tower and start having these conversations more broadly, that there’s just a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about just how the body works in general,” he said. Metabolism, he notes, functions as a catch-all concept that people invoke without grasping its mechanics — a problem Adaptable tries to correct across the full body, not just one system.
Adaptability, in Pontzer’s framing, is the defining trait of Homo sapiens. “That’s why there’s 9 billion of us and not 9 billion of some other primate,” he said.
Among the specific biological details Pontzer highlights, the kidney stands out as consistently undervalued. The organ filters 180 liters — roughly 47.5 gallons — of water per day, performing the detoxification functions that supplement marketing regularly claims to replicate. He connects this capacity directly to evolutionary history: humans developed a distinct approach to water regulation compared to other apes because the species evolved in an arid environment, making fluid balance a survival-level adaptation rather than a routine function. He extends the same logic to the spleen, which serves as a reservoir for red blood cells alongside its immune functions — an organ most people, he says, cannot describe at even a basic level.
More Read
Both examples serve the book’s broader method: using specific, often overlooked biology to challenge the misinformation that fills the gap left by poor scientific communication. For Pontzer, the goal is not just accuracy but utility — giving readers the foundation to evaluate claims about their own bodies with appropriate skepticism.
Photo by Europeana on Unsplash
This article is a curated summary based on third-party sources. Source: Read the original article
