Why there are no bad backs in Shakespeare

PRIMATE CHANGE by Vybarr Cregan-Reid (Cassell £16.99, 320 pp)

AT A conservative estimate, there are 50 billion chairs in the world. That’s at least seven for each of us. In the past two centuries, we have become a sedentary species — which we were never meant to be. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors roamed the savannah.

Today, technology makes loafers of us all. But smartphones, computers and the internet are not only changing the ways we work and play, they are changing our bodies.

The author raises (and answers) some unexpected, offbeat questions. Why are Sardinians shorter than other Europeans, but live longer? Why are there no bad backs in Shakespeare’s plays?

And why was it that it was ‘only once we started to sit down in chairs that we realised we really ought to get out of them’?

BLUEPRINT by Robert Plomin (Allen Lane £20, 288 pp)

THE job of predicting a child’s future is about to get much easier. Thanks to what Robert Plomin calls the DNA revolution of the past 20 years, the ways in which our lives are shaped by our genetic inheritance are being revealed. It’s not just characteristics such as eye colour that are influenced. So, too, are psychological traits, our ability to remember faces, the likelihood of suffering insomnia, how much coffee we consume.

These are all affected by our DNA. Even the number of hours of TV we watch may be down to the genes we inherit. The TV habits of adopted children correlate with those of their birth mothers, even when the mothers haven’t seen their children after the first week of life. As Plomin puts it: ‘Genetics is the major reason why people differ in personality, mental health and illness, and learning and cognitive abilities.’

But, he assures us, genes are not destiny. We can change — but it’s best to work with the genetic grain, not against it.