Evolutionary Mismatch: Nomadic Apes Sitting Inside on iPhones
Three Point Essay #46 | The root causes of anxiety and other problems + ways to combat
I.
Surely you’ve heard about ancient civilizations. Greece. Egypt. Mesopotamia. But what about the countless generations of earlier humans? People who lived before civilization itself?
Humans only started living together in towns and cities around 10,000-20,000 thousand years ago. Before that a long line of our ancestors, going back hundreds of millions of years, lived quite different.
For eons, humans were a hunter-gatherer animal. They spent most of their time outside, moving around, and forming social connections. They had to fight often. They had sex often. They ate meat and plants. They likely believed in some type of god.
Let’s contrast this with a caricature of the modern lifestyle: creatures spending the majority of their day inside, sitting down, looking at a screen. Many social connections are not face-to-face. There's rarely a need for a fight—many even go most days without a single physical challenge! They look at pornography more than they have sex. They eat foods made out of a factory. And oh yeah, widespread atheism.
This is not how mother nature designed us to live.
Evolution is a slow process. And in the last 500 years, science and technology have exploded—outpacing evolution. Our fundamental nature as a species has not changed. But because of rapid human progress, our environment (and thus our culture and habits) are radically different. This has significant effects on our emotions and behavior.
As such, Evolutionary Mismatch’s basic claim is that “humans are adapted primarily for life as hunter-gatherers living in the Savanna and woodlands of Africa. That’s the world in which we spent most of our evolutionary history, and therefore that’s the world we’re designed to inhibit.”
Steve Stuart-Williams put it well in his book 'The Ape That Understood The Universe' saying "we’re not adapted to the strange world we’ve created for ourselves - this world of straight lines, right angles, and strict schedules, of cars, shaved faces, and designer jeans, of mirrors, cameras, and cities.”
Evolutionary mismatch is one reason why all the material comfort and ‘luxury’ in the world often doesn’t always make people happy. We evolved struggling, in a constant state of discomfort. Humans are naturally social, curious, horny apes. We thrive when forming deep relationships, doing work we find meaningful, and exerting physical effort. But today, society perniciously sucks those qualities out of people (often without them even realizing) leaving them depressed, anxious, and without a sense of purpose.
Stuart-Williams also observes the idea that “life for our ancestors was a camping trip that lasted a lifetime.” and that "we live in cities and suburbs and watch TV and drink beer, all while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter-gatherer population."
II.
One of the most obvious negative outcomes of this dynamic is the obesity pandemic. For millions of years, if a human was lucky enough to find a supply of sugar or carbs, the sensible thing to do would be eat it all right away. Finding food was always a challenge, and you wouldn’t want other competing animals or tribes to steal it. Thus saying no to this in-built part of our genes is impossible when you walk into your kitchen and see 4 bags of chips and 3 bars of candy. Your monkey subconscious screams eat it! eat it ! eat it! eat it!
Another negative effect of evolutionary mismatch is a very modern problem: ADHD. Psychologist Gabrielle Principe notes:
No animal other than modern humans- our hunter gatherer ancestors included- suffers ADHD. But plenty of today’s elementary school children, who spend 8 hours a day jammed inside a classroom, do. The American psychiatric Association considers it a mental disorder. But it is exactly what you’d expect if you put any juvenile (insert species here) behind a desk, made it do seatwork, told it to concentrate, and didn’t let it out to play.
(Elementary schools should have more recess!) This is why, although school is important for many reasons (primarily forming relationships), following your own curiosity and intuition is a better form of learning.
But the most dangerous consequence of evolutionary mismatch is mental. The world is full of randomness and complexity. There are more things we don't know or understand than things we do. But our access to unlimited information makes us forget the limits of our brainpower. Nassim Taleb calls it ‘false pattern detection:’
Counter to the common discourse, more information means more delusions: our detection of false patterns is growing faster and faster as a side effect of modernity and the information age: there is this mismatch between the messy randomness of the information-rich current world, with its complex interactions, and our intuitions of events, derived in a simpler ancestral habitat. Our mental architecture is at an increased mismatch with the world in which we live.
For most of existence, we never had to deal with so much information. In an ancestral environment, the patterns were simple; that bush near the camp has poison berries, don’t eat. People who wear lion-heads are a hostile tribe, stay away.
But today the patterns are complicated. Super complicated. We have iPhones and social media injecting the entire worlds emergencies, breaking news, and statistics into our brains all day, every day. Trying to make sense of it all is impossible. But that doesn’t stop people from confidently telling you which global conspiracy theories are true and which aren’t, or the exact best way to manage the world economy.
Information abundance fosters false pattern detection—making people draw insane conclusions and believe falsities all while they convince themselves they’re smarter than they actually are. More information, more delusions.
III.
It can be tempting to extrapolate to extremes when you understand these ideas. But as always, nuance is important. Evolutionary Mismatch shouldn’t make one think that humans need to smash their computers and go be ‘in harmony’ with nature. The idea that we used to live in a utopian outdoor paradise with other animals is a fantasy.
In reality life for most humans—for most of existence—was short and painful. The animals you think are cute would kill you. The woods you think are idyllic would give you a fatal sickness. Comedian Tim Dillon points out that "these people who think life was better when we lived in nature are idiots. Go to Brazil, get bit by a bug the size of a bird, get a disease and die. All the good places are actually inside places. Like casinos."
The case is not that we should go back to living like our ancestors. The case is that having an awareness of Evolutionary Mismatch can help you better understand yourself and better navigate the modern world.
Today we have amazing technology, healthcare, and educational resources. With grocery stores and restaurants, food is available everywhere. With the internet, career opportunities are limitless. With global travel, you’re no longer limited to socializing and mating within the small area you happened to be born in. But you must respect how we evolved while taking advantage of these modern magics.
We are animals. Excess comfort kills the soul of a man because his ancestors were never comfortable. Not having an exciting challenge kills the soul of a man because his ancestors were always striving. Not walking outside kills the soul of a man because his ancestors were always walking outside. These aspects of our biology are deeply ingrained. It’s wise to not ignore them.
Excellent point of view and so accurate!
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