Evolution was cruel when it invented puberty.

Think of a girl. She likes horses and fishing with her Dad and making mud pies and playing with trucks and tire swings in her back yard And then — wham — the poor kid starts growing in new places and starts worrying about her looks and her hair and whether she’s pretty.

Or a boy. He likes trucks and swimming in filthy ponds and getting dirty with dirt bomb fights and licking the bowl after his grandma makes brownies. And then — shazam — he wakes up with these tortured dreams of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit models. And from that day forth he doesn't care about anything aside from making that dream a reality.

How many stupid things did puberty make me do, like buying British Sterling cologne with paper route money and dousing myself in it in the hope it might help me attract women like Cheryl Tiegs? (Note to you young men out there: it didn't.)

I get that it’s a necessary human mating ritual. We have evolved to have these urges so that we pass on our genes.

That didn’t make it easy for me. The girl neighbor who went sledding with me one winter was suddenly curvy in her bathing suit the summer after, curvy in places I couldn't stop thinking about. I was so afraid that she knew all my bubbling, strange thoughts that I never spoke to her again. Not having any sisters, I don't think I had a full, normal conversation with a girl my age from the time I was 12 until I was 15 years old.

Nowadays, evolution is not just cruel but also lazy.

Evolution may have given us the urges that we need to propagate our species, but evolution hasn't kept up with the fact that we have an abundance of food. We no longer have to chase and kill our meat-protein or walk miles to gather our fruit and vegetables. We may not need hunger pangs to rouse our bodies up for the hunt, but our urge is still strong enough to get me off the couch and waddle over to the fridge at night, even after Carla makes a gorgeous dinner of prosciutto tortellini with gorgonzola cream sauce.

We have no famines, and our pancreas doesn't know what to do with all this abundance. Instead, it makes too much insulin, stores the food as fat, we become resistant to the insulin (hello, diabetes) and then store the fat in our hearts arteries (hello, heart attack). We wile away our days working behind a desk so our bodies don’t stay lean, strong and agile. We hunch over our computer screens, slouch on our recliners, and our disks herniate out of our vertebrae, and we can’t play catch with our grandkids.

It took me a few years to harness those pubescent urges that evolution forced on me. But I still have not figured out what to do with the hunger urges that evolution hasn’t realized yet that I simply don’t need. My wonderful wife was able to work with me towards advancing our species, and for that I am grateful, but she still feels the need to make this wonderful crostata all’albicoca (an Italian apricot tart) for dessert that does nothing for the species — other than make my belly grow.