A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
Last read October 7, 2021
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59 highlights.
Our species’ pace of change now outstrips our ability to adapt. We are generating new problems at a new and accelerating rate, and it is making us sick—physically, psychologically, socially, and environmentally. If we don’t figure out how to grapple with the problem of accelerating novelty, humanity will perish, a victim of its success.
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Consciousness is valuable for problem-solving, but it isn’t so good for execution. The gymnast, the virtuoso, and the warrior all succeed by taking what they have discovered consciously and learning to apply it without explicit deliberation.
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This model implies a few important things. When times are good, people should be reluctant to challenge ancestral wisdom—their culture. In other words, they should be comparatively conservative. When things aren’t going well, people should be prone to endure the risks that come with change. They should be comparatively progressive—liberal, if you will.
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Humanity is the master of every trade. If we were machines, we would be ones that are compatible with many software packages. The Inuit hunter knows the Arctic, but has few of the skills needed to function in the Kalahari or the Amazon. Humans can be good at almost anything, given the proper tools and software, and human populations can be good at many things by virtue of a division of labor, but each individual person will either have to limit themself or accept the costs that come with being a generalist.
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This is a hard pill for many to swallow, but the truth is that culture exists in service to the genes. Long-standing cultural traits are as adaptive as eyes, leaves, or tentacles.
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Culture sits “above” the genome in the sense that it shapes the way the genome is expressed. Genes describe proteins and processes that construct a body. Culture—in those creatures that have culture—has a powerful influence on where bodies go, and what they do. In this way, culture is a regulator of genome expression.
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Omega Principle Epigenetic regulators, such as culture, are superior to genes in that they are more flexible and can adapt more rapidly. Epigenetic regulators, such as culture, evolve to serve the genome.
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From the Omega principle we derive a powerful concept: any expensive and long-lasting cultural trait (such as traditions passed down within a lineage for thousands of years) should be presumed to be adaptive.
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It is likely that our highly geometric homes and playgrounds, which make up so much of what we see during early childhood, calibrate our eyes such that we suffer from such illusions
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Asking “Nature or nurture?” isn’t wrong simply because the answer is nearly always “both,” or because the categories themselves are flawed, but also because once you understand that there is one common evolutionary goal, getting precise about mechanism is less important than understanding why a trait came to be.
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When faced with a question of innovation, the Precautionary principle considers the risk of engaging in any particular activity, and recommends caution when the risk is high. In circumstances where the degree of uncertainty about the outcomes of a system is high—when it is not clear what negative effects might result if society engages in, say, carpentering corners or powering our electrical grid with nuclear fission reactors—the Precautionary principle suggests that changes to extant structures should be engaged in slowly, if at all.
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Three-part Test of Adaptation If a trait is complex, has energetic or material costs, which vary between individuals, and has persistence over evolutionary time, then it is presumed to be an adaptation.
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The hygiene hypothesis posits that because we live in ever-cleaner surroundings, and are therefore exposed to ever fewer microorganisms, our immune systems are inadequately prepared, and so develop regulatory problems, such as allergies, autoimmune disorders, and perhaps even some cancers.
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The fact that you probably have not been really hungry—indeed, you likely have access to more food than would be ideal—makes it hard to intuit just how precious food typically is. We moderns have a hard time imagining the risks worth taking to find more food, the lengths one might reasonably go to protect what they have, and the value that might accompany technological innovations that allow people to stretch the value of food they have already acquired.
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There has evolved, therefore, a secondary system that allows us to remap foods according to empirical information that may be picked up from kin (via culture), or perhaps discovered in hunger-driven desperation (via consciousness). We are constantly remapping foods based on their actual value, rather than on our initial reactions. We may acquire a taste for coffee because it stimulates us, and for beer because it carries the nutrition of bread without the short shelf life.
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Before propane and natural gas are piped into your home, or delivered to a tank outside of it, they have tert-Butyl mercaptan added to them. This compound gives these otherwise stealthy gases a unique sulfurous smell—like dirty socks or rotten cabbage—that we easily recognize, and with guidance now find alarming.
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Become skeptical of novel solutions to ancient problems, especially when that novelty will be difficult to reverse if you change your mind later. New and audacious technologies—from experimental surgery, to the cessation of human development using hormones, to nuclear fission—may be wonderful and risk-free. But chances are, there are hidden (and not-so-hidden) costs.
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Anything with a simple biochemical switch would almost certainly have been “solved” by selection by now, if it were possible without triggering unacceptable trade-offs, and if the “problem” being solved were really a problem.
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The concept of scientism was introduced by 20th-century economist Friedrich Hayek.4 He observed that, too often, the methods and language of science are imitated by institutions and systems not engaged in science, such that the resulting efforts are generally not scientific at all.
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Why, for instance, do the attachment points of muscles never vary between individuals of the same species, but there can be large differences in circulatory anatomy, such that even major vessels like the jugular veins can travel different paths? Because while the function of a muscle changes if it is connected to a different end point, so long as a circulatory vessel gets where it’s going, the particular route is not critical.
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Muting pain with medication interferes with the feedback system in our bodies, making it much harder for us to know what we should, or should not, do. Similarly, eradicating swelling in the wake of an injury means that you are much more likely to injure yourself again, in the same place. Swelling after an injury is uncomfortable and cumbersome, and often adaptive; it immobilizes a limb like a dynamic cast. If you let your body communicate with you—with pain, swelling, heat, more—you are far more likely to get back in the game, whatever your game is, sooner, and more safely.
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Listen to your body, remembering that pain evolved to protect you. Pain is information about the environment, and how your body is responding to it. Some injuries require professional treatment, but some can be monitored without intervention. Pain is both unpleasant and adaptive; think twice before shutting down its message.
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Humans do not just need protein and potassium and vitamin C. We generally need those things in the food context in which our ancestors ate them. We also need culture and connection. When we sit down to eat a meal together, especially when we are breaking bread that we have ourselves made, we gain far more than calories.
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Of the food that we eat, which of it has an interest in being eaten? That is, what foods were produced by the organism with the expectation that their product would be eaten? Milk, fruit, and nectar. That’s all.
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Extending the evolutionary logic further, we predict that cultivated organisms will gain an adaptive advantage by taking on traits that benefit us. In other words, selection should favor traits in cultivated species that benefit humans, even if the humans that cultivate them are oblivious to it. Food for thought, if you are skeptical of the mutualistic relationship between humans and the organisms we have teamed up with.
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During slow-wave sleep, our brains fix memories in place—as do the brains of great apes, including chimpanzees.5 Our brains also prune out old and redundant information during slow-wave sleep and gain mastery over skills that we learn while awake—typing, skiing, calculus. Hence the adage to “sleep on it.” REM sleep, the newcomer in evolutionary time, provides us our dreams. During REM sleep, we engage in emotional regulation, reflect on what has happened, look forward to what might be possible, and imagine both possible pasts and futures. REM is a creative state; it is sleep’s explorer mode.
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True statements about populations do not manifest in all individuals in those populations; believing otherwise is falling prey to the “fallacy of division” (first described by Aristotle).
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We are and should be equal under the law. But we are not the same—despite what some activists and politicians, journalists and academics would have us believe.
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To ignore our differences and demand uniformity is a different kind of sexism. Differences between the sexes are a reality, and while they can be cause for concern, they are also very often a strength, and we ignore them at our peril.
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What it would be foolish to do—and what many WEIRD people in the 21st century are doing—is to pretend that sex equals gender, or that gender has no relationship to sex, or that either sex or gender is not wholly evolutionary.
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Gender is more fluid than sex, and has many more manifestations, but “acting feminine” (gender) is not the same as “being female” (sex).
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Whereas most animal species exhibit male-male competition and female choice of mates, a species with partial sex-role reversal, such as we have, will also show competition between females and male choice of mates.
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And although average intelligence is the same between boys and girls, the variability in intelligence is not: there are more boy geniuses, and more boy complete dullards, than there are girls in either category.35
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Among populations that have come of age on a steady diet of porn, women are far more likely to report being asked to engage in anal sex, strangling, and other violent “games” that are represented on-screen,47 even though few real women want these things in life.
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If the most complete human sexuality is, as we argue, an emergent property between whole individuals—bodies and brains, hearts and psyches—porn reduces sex to commodity, to acts, to mere bodies.
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Avoid sex without commitment, including sex for hire. Cheapening sex by seeking it everywhere and at all times renders it more difficult to form a stable bond with one individual, which is the best predictor of a relationship of equals, in which neither partner feels chronically subservient or undervalued.
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Recognizing that we are, on average, different is the critical first step to building a society in which all opportunities are truly open to everyone.
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You do need school to learn to read and write. Or rather, most people need instruction. Reading and writing are so new that we need an educational supplement in order to learn it. School is also useful to learn cell biology, written history, and all but the most basic math. Literacy, like math and thinking from first principles, is like an adaptive foothill, though, and once you’re literate (or numerate, or adept with logic), you can teach yourself many things without requiring further school.
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Because memory and recall are easy to assess and measure, they can easily become the metric that is being chased, by students and teachers and schools alike. Far harder to teach and to quantify—and at least as valuable, if not more so—are critical thinking, logic, and creativity.
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Humans are antifragile; exposure to discomfort and uncertainty—physical, emotional, and intellectual—is necessary.
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Congratulations, society, you have successfully produced self-satisfied whiners who are accustomed to getting what they want, who are good at school but not at thinking, and who are, in fact, neither smart nor wise.
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By inculcating in children the sense that order is always better than chaos, and that being easily counted and prioritizing doing things that are easily counted is the honorable way to go through school (and therefore life, many would extrapolate), society creates adults who bristle at the unexpected and the new.
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There are new things under the sun, but it is the fate of every generation to think that it arrived too late, that everything is understood, and that the best response is to fall into nihilist disarray.
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Across cultures, rites of passage therefore provide clear signals to you, the individual, about how far along you are and what society can expect from you. Without these markers, we are more likely to end up with widespread confusion—thirty-year-olds who are effectively children, unfamiliar with responsibility, and eight-year-olds who are granted adultlike status with regard to their ability to determine, for instance, what sex they truly are.
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The primary modality of advertisers is to create dissatisfaction, along with the impression that others are more satisfied.
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You can fool a person, and they can fool you, but you can’t fool a tree or a tractor, a circuit or a surfboard. So seek out physical reality, not just social experience. Pursue feedback from the vast universe that exists beyond other human beings. Watch your reactions when the feedback comes in. The more time you spend pitting your intellect against realities that cannot be coerced with manipulation or sweet talk, the less likely you are to blame others for your own errors.
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Explicitly aim to be an adult.
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Revive, or create, rites of passage in your life. Celebrate not just the passage of time (birthdays, holidays), but also developmental transitions. Honor graduations and marriages, births and deaths, but also career and job changes and promotions, the completion of important analytical or creative tasks, and the ends of eras, when they are recognizable as they end.
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In times of stability, when inherited wisdom allows individuals to prosper and spread across relatively homogeneous landscapes: Culture reigns. But in times of expansion into new frontiers, when innovation and interpretation, and communication of new ideas, are critical: Consciousness reigns.
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It is important to know what the group thinks, but that is not the same as believing or reinforcing what the group thinks. In a time of rapid change in particular, then, it is important to be willing to be the lone voice. Be the person who never conforms to patently wrong statements in order to fit in with the crowd. Be Asch-Negative.
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it is beyond reason to believe that a passel of angry gods is the reason for tsunamis, yet among the Moken, those who believe in those gods survive at higher rates than those who don’t.
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We predict that those taboos that have lasted the longest are most likely to be hiding an important cultural truth in plain sight. Beware Chesterton’s fadys—the old ideas may have hidden truths, and those truths may be difficult to recover once they have been dismissed.
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Geographic frontiers are inherently zero-sum: there is a finite amount of space on this planet of ours, and we will reach the end of it. Technological frontiers are the creation of resource through human ingenuity. Technological frontiers are temporarily non-zero-sum—specifically, positive-sum—and this can appear to be a permanent state. But there are physical limits: a single electron is the theoretical minimum needed to flip from one state to another in a transistor, for instance. Transfer of resource frontiers are theft of resource from other human populations. Like all frontiers, transfer of resource frontiers are ultimately zero-sum.
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Humans are obsessed with growth because it engenders bigger populations that, if nothing else, have farther to fall before going extinct. But large populations also pose a hazard to themselves if the resources that enlarge them are finite or fragile. In such cases, moderation is the key, but it only works if our drive for growth, our individual perception of it, is sustainably satisfied.
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Once again: The human niche is niche switching, and consciousness is the answer to novelty. Living sustainably on a finite planet is a hard sell, but we can, and we must, find a way. We have no choice. These problems of novelty require humanity’s urgent attention, and cannot be solved by the goodwill or hard work of individuals.
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We face some significant obstacles. Humans, like other creatures, are obsessed with growth, and we are capable of driving ourselves extinct in the pursuit of it. Even though it is logically obvious that we must accept equilibrium, we are not built to be satisfied with it because being unsatisfied has been an excellent strategy for the last several billion years.
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We ought to strive to create a system that: Liberates (that is, that frees people to do rewarding, interesting, awesome stuff), Is antifragile, Is resistant to capture, and Is incapable of evolving into something that betrays its own core values. In the technical language of evolution, we need a system that is an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy, a strategy incapable of invasion by competitors.
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Removing functional organs because we can’t tell what they’re for is not wise. It’s tempting therefore to laugh at those doctors who once proposed to take out people’s healthy large intestines, but what similar mistakes are we making now?
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The COVID-19 pandemic is itself a symptom of another disease entirely. In the pages of this book, we call that disease “hyper-novelty.” It is caused by a rate of technological change so rapid that transitions in our environment outstrip our capacity to adapt.
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