Key ideas
Our brains evolved due to specific evolutionary pressures that were relatively consistent over millions of years. Those pressures have changed.
- Our brains adapted under specific conditions to help us survive. Fortunately, our ancestors were very good at their jobs of survival. If not, we wouldn’t be here today.
- However, the kinds of challenges our ancient ancestors faced differ greatly from the threats we face today. The complexity of the modern world entails multilayered, large-scale, and long-term problems that our ancestors would not have faced.
- According to Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two of the founders of evolutionary psychology, the brain is “composed of many different programs, each specialized for solving a different adaptive problem our ancestors faced.”
- While most of our modern problems don’t fit the conditions these mental programs evolved to navigate, one capacity offers a great deal of promise: our ancestors cultivated unprecedented skills for cooperation. Tapping into this skill will be essential for tackling our complex problems.
Transcript
Picture yourself on the African savanna. Wide-open fields of tall grass stretch to the horizon, with occasional trees breaking up the view surrounding you in 360 degrees. You hear rustling in the bushes behind a nearby tree. You freeze to listen. Is that a small animal that could be your dinner? Or is it a lion that might have you for dinner? What do you do?
Most of us have likely never found ourselves in a situation like this, so we probably don’t have a solid plan in place. Do you let out a furious roar and stand and fight? Or run for your life? Maybe just stay frozen in place until the predator moves on? Our instincts to fight, flee, or freeze would emerge without much thought. But the response we choose may —or may not — be the proper response in this situation. Each threat would likely require a different reaction.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced these kinds of survival threats regularly. They had on-the-job training in assessing life-threatening situations. They likely had a toolkit of threat responses deeply ingrained in their behavior. And which helped our ancestors survive and pass on their genes for hundreds of thousands of years.
As a species, though, we’re a bit rusty on these kinds of survival skills. We face an entirely different set of challenges in the modern world.
This episode is the fourth in a series looking at complexity, exploring some ideas from evolutionary psychology. I hope this exploration can shine some light on how our brains have evolved to help us solve problems.
Now, as a thought experiment, picture some of our hunter-gatherer ancestors dropped off in the middle of a modern city. Their environment, essentially the whole planet, transformed so much that it would be unrecognizable. Besides the noise, frantic motion, and near absence of plant and animal life, they’d be faced with a totally new set of threats, challenges, and opportunities.
How would they fare? Just my hypothesis, but I’d have to imagine they might suffer a mental breakdown. The overwhelming intensity of our hyperstimulating world would likely be too much. Our non-stop culture would potentially cause extreme anxiety, depression, hopelessness… because their brains and conditioning didn’t prepare them for this kind of environment. They thrive in the natural world, avoiding predators, finding mates, cooperating with small bands of other humans. But this crazy non-stop busyness is just too much.
The funny not-funny thing about this thought experiment is that it’s not entirely farfetched. Not that we can resurrect the IceMan — but rather that we are more similar to our ancient ancestors than we might think. In essence, our brains remain essentially unchanged from their brains. The same anatomy, same mental programs still occupying our grey matter. As such, many of us can probably relate to how this experimental hunter-gatherer felt when visiting the city. With its incomprehensible complexity, life in our modern society can cause even the best of us to feel anxious or hopeless at times.
Our brains adapted under specific conditions to help us survive. Fortunately, our ancestors were very good at their jobs of survival. If not, we wouldn’t be here today. Favorable adaptations in our brains arose due to specific evolutionary pressures, constantly repeated over millions of years. However, the complex world we’re in today definitely doesn’t resemble those conditions. The adaptations that have kept us alive all this time can struggle in the face of such vastly different challenges.
Throughout the history of Homo sapiens, many of the threats, challenges, and opportunities remained the same. This consistency over vast periods helped our brain to adapt. According to Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two of the founders of evolutionary psychology, the brain is “composed of many different programs, each specialized for solving a different adaptive problem our ancestors faced.” As Cosmides and Tooby describe, our ancestors were on a “camping trip that lasted a lifetime.” Since they lived in relatively similar conditions for hundreds of thousands of years, these cognitive programs had become wired deep within the brains of each generation. However, the success of those programs can depend on whether they’re executed in similar conditions.
Fortunately, we share some similar needs and activities with our ancestors. We still spend copious amounts of time finding mates, attaining and maintaining our status in our groups, cooperating with others, learning to communicate with the group, and avoiding infectious diseases. Or trying to, anyway.
However, many of the survival programs of early humans evolved based on very different needs. Their survival and success depended on evaluating plants to assess if they were edible or toxic. It depended on not getting eaten by predators. And given the small size of their groups, on avoiding incest. Luckily this is a problem that generations of written family record-keeping have eliminated. With regards to predators, no doubt we still face physical dangers, ranging from street crime to getting hit by a bus crossing the street. But evading lions and other predators is not a common threat these days for most humans.
Instead, we face a host of other challenges. On a personal level, paying the bills, finding decent work, and having a home can be hard enough. And then we have to contend with large-scale threats: climate change, extreme poverty, social and economic inequities, nuclear war, and global pandemics, to name a few. The scale of the challenges we face versus those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is like comparing apples to atom bombs. They primarily faced immediate threats and opportunities, while many of our threats and opportunities are long-term. They navigated relationships with groups of 20 to 200 people, while we navigate groups of 20 thousand to 200 million. We still face the challenge of learning grammar and communication with a group. But we have to do so with hundreds of millions of group members over social media platforms with ulterior agendas. We still face the challenge of attaining and maintaining status. But we have to do so in sprawling virtual networks of thousands or tens of thousands of people within complex organizations spanning the globe. The exponential growth in complexity of our threats, opportunities, and relationships has not been matched by an exponential growth in our brainpower.
I don’t really see a straightforward solution to this dilemma, but ultimately digging into this problem is the purpose of this podcast. One idea that comes to mind from this exploration of evolutionary psychology involves tapping into the brain adaptations that have kept us alive. For example, our ancestors cultivated unprecedented skills for cooperation — we would benefit from practicing and reinforcing this cognitive program. Likewise, they developed the skill to communicate better than other animals they competed against for resources. We can build on this program, learning increasingly better ways to communicate effectively with other humans, particularly improving our ability to truly listen to each other. Finally, just as they developed a skill to prioritize threats to survival, so must we — just on a much larger scale. Achieving this might mean finding ways to shrink the problems: focus on the immediate, smaller chunks that are more manageable. As powerful as they are, our brains are far better at solving immediate problems with clear actions.
But no doubt there’s a lot more we can and need to do to adapt to this new complexity. In future episodes of this podcast, we’ll continue to explore other strategies from other traditions and perspectives that might help us. The next episode will dive into some more insights from psychology, looking at Daniel Kahneman’s groundbreaking research. In the meantime, be sure to subscribe for more episodes. And please share this with a friend if you think it will be helpful to someone. Until the next time, be well!
References
- Evolutionary Psychology: New Perspectives on Cognition and Motivation by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, 2013.
- Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions by Cosmides and Tooby, 2000.
- Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology by Heather Scoville, 2020.
Podcast soundtrack credit:
Our Story Begins Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/