The winds of an evolutionary mismatch
This is not the world we were meant for. That fact hurts some more than others.
It's common knowledge that we were evolved for a very different world. The deal we signed with our genes upon conception was admission to small, nomadic community with strong kinship bonds, sustained by the constant search for sustenance in a marginal environment.
The Terms of Service included a high likelihood of death in your first weeks, and a short difficult life regardless, but who reads the ToS. At least our genes were aligned with and shaped by our situation, however inadequately. An intelligent designer could have done better, but at least we didn't carry a burden of specifically counterproductive adaptations of our own creation.
(Foreshadowing.)
The world you and I were born into profoundly violates our genetic agreement. Instead of small, uniform bands of mostly related people in a natural environment to which we were shaped, we find ourselves packed together with millions of diverse strangers in artificial environments, moving around at high speeds, assaulted with information (including knowledge of disasters around the planet), shaken by clickbait headlines, exposed to virtual social networks far beyond our ability to process, seduced by unlimited highly processed high-calorie high-sugar foods, stripped of community. These are neither good nor bad in isolation: Knowledge, calories, diversity, mobility, social connection, and a little alone time can be beneficial. But taken to extremes and piled together, they create an unbearable mismatch with the world reflected in our genes.
Two-speed evolution
We got to this unfriendly place by way of two kinds of evolution, biological and cultural, happening at two very different speeds.
Picture a line graph. The horizontal is time since "behavioral modernity," about 100,000 years ago. The vertical represents change. A black line representing biological evolution runs from left to right, essentially flat against the time axis. No substantive change to our genetics and morphology in that time. We are still what we were then.
This is as good a point as any to call the beginning of cultural evolution — the accumulation of those externalities, both behavioral and material, that make up the world we now live in: abstract thinking, planning, the use of symbols and tools, and more.
From 100,000 to 12,000 years ago, the red line of culture rises moderately — faster than the biological, but nothing compared to what follows. We get syntactic language, cave paintings and complex jewelry, stone blades and barbed harpoons, dog domestication.
Around 12,000 years ago, the culture line takes off. This is the mixed blessing of the Neolithic Revolution — agriculture, settled communities, domesticated livestock, textiles, metallurgy, irrigation — followed by a parade of greater accelerations including the Urban Revolution, Axial Age, Hellenistic period, Islamic Golden Age, European Renaissance, and the Scientific and Industrial and Digital Revolutions. Each acceleration pushes us away from the Pleistocene —our "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" — and further into environments that confound and alienate the instincts built for that place and time.
All along the way, technology in the broad sense — the application of knowledge, tools, techniques, and systems to solve problems, enhance capabilities, and manipulate the environment — has been both problem and solution, write anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending in The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. The modern world presents a barrage of instinctual miscues and triggers, exposing us to new threats and instabilities to which we are psychologically vulnerable. It creates the alienating gap, but it's also how we bridge the gap, how we make ourselves feel secure in an alien world.
More solutions, more problems
We've developed technologies to make us more comfortable amid all that change, like agriculture, education, medicine, sanitation, transportation, money, social morality, contraception, elevators, artificial lighting, refrigeration, insurance, social safety nets, mental health care, and climate-controlled buildings. All of these, even education, money, and morality, are technologies, as much as a knapped flint ax head or an iPhone. Many have specifically solved problems related to modern life. They help bridge the gap between lagging biology and rocketing culture.
Evolutionary psychologists like Kristina Durante at Rutgers note that many of the solutions create new evolutionary mismatches, even as they solve others. Agriculture and refrigeration decrease starvation but drive obesity and diabetes. Sanitation attacks disease and extends lifespan but also decreases exposure to antigens, driving severe allergies and depressing our immune response.
Perhaps a greater challenge emerges from the fact that the adaptations we create, these solutions to the modern world, imperfect though they are, are not available to everyone. This creates a growing chasm not just between present and past, but between groups of people who are alive today, a chasm that will inevitably widen into the future. The wind on the other side of that chasm, the wind of the mismatch, is intense.
A lot of the problems of modern life — poverty, crime, racism, mental illness, obesity, anxiety, gullibility, addiction, social ills that conservatives tend to blame on individuals and liberals blame on systems — are at least partly rooted in unequal access to protective technologies like education, medicine, and money.
One US political party has mastered the pushing fear buttons among those standing in the wind, including our evolved fear of difference and attraction to categories. The other party continues to run on Hope! and Joy! while failing to even slightly recognize or account for or strategize around our evolved fear of difference and attraction to categories.
Finding the fix
An evolutionary perspective, one that recognizes the challenge presented by our wiring and our situation, could lead to better-informed public policy. Whether humanity thrives or plummets in the years to come depends in part on how we manage the widening gap in access to these protective technologies.
Socialism of various types and degrees can be seen as an attempt to shrink the gap, providing more equal access to the technologies that mitigate the effects of our evolutionary mismatch. Socialized medicine and public services, social safety nets for the elderly, unhoused, poor, and infirm, and attempts to close the income gap (such as Universal Basic Income) are meant to diminish vulnerability and improve equitable access to the things that make life more bearable for everyone standing in this wind.
If statistics like mental health, peace, safety, and overall happiness are to be believed — all signs of a better fit between ourselves and our situation — they might be on to something.
