Bipedalism, Walking, and Us

This has been an extra busy week for a retired physician! I am taking a semi-break but wanted to throw out several books that will form a topic of writing for me. They all concern walking, something that most people never even think about as they do it. The first is In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration by Shane O’Mara, an Irish neuroscientist. I listened to this while doing my walks and it was delightful. Made me think and the narrator, Liam Gerrard, had the most satisfying Irish accent. The second book is one I am reading right now: Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, by Daniel Lieberman, a professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. The third is a book whose review I read today in the New York Times. The title is First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human by Jeremy DeSilva, an anthropologist at Dartmouth. I admit to a conceit that this feels to me a little like taking a course. Anyway, the topic of why and how humans evolved has always been fascinating to me, so please pardon this pitiful squib of a post. I will expand on it later.