Author: Brian D. Farrell

Asked to write about inequality in Latin America, an evolutionary biologist would naturally think first of human history. Systemic inequalities among groups of people has taken many forms over the centuries, since long before the colonial era. For at least as long as there have been cities, there have been inequalities in access to resources, in the form of housing, employment, education and even food and freedom itself. These historic and continuing injustices are widely-recognized. What I wish to write about is the much less visible, but more pervasive, impact of a source of inequalities—the stress of experiencing discrimination—on health that is, perhaps surprisingly, an ancillary consequence of an even older human history of exposure to stress challenges in both our physical and our social environments.