The process of evolution is overwhelmingly driven by organisms being impelled to procreate in order to send their genes into the future. It's directly linked to an organism's stalwart drive to survive... to triumph over death; at least until procreation has occurred. For example, many insects, upon successfully mating and forming eggs for the following generation, succumb to death. Their job of passing their genes down the line is finished... they can expire. We humans like to last a little longer.
Over and over again, animal behaviors can be explained by that deeply inherited drive to send genes into the future... including us. There are a couple of fascinating byproducts of this genetic drive: (1) the process doesn't “care” if we are comfortable or happy about it—if the cost of successful procreation is a little pain, so be it, and (2) some behaviors—especially for us humans—that once made sense from an evolutionary standpoint, no longer are relevant. An argument can be made that in today’s environment we need to improve them.
Once example of the second case is our propensity to eat high-calorie foods. Many millennia ago, when our deep ancestors struggled to get enough nourishment, it made evolutionary sense to locate and consume fruits with high-energy sugar. In today's world, sugars and fats are readily available—causing widespread obesity and health problems.
A second example of outdated behavior is the evolutionarily-created, fast-acting amygdala in our brain. Multiple threats in our hunter-gatherers' lives lurked everywhere—from poisonous snakes to ferocious, carnivorous beasts. They needed that hair-trigger amygdala to make them hyper-alert to danger and to immediately activate leg muscles to flee. Today, humans are the planet's dominant species. We have relentlessly eradicated many of our previous predatory enemies. Half of us now live in cities, where many ancient dangers are banished (other than other predatory humans), so our fight-or-flight urges are no longer as crucial. Yet we often overreact to things that startle us.
A third example of outdated behavior is our propensity to be tribal—our tendency to form closed groups, wherein we feel closely connected to others within the group, while feeling hostile to those of an outside group. This again was important in ancient bands that called for strong interdependence among the members of one's tribe, in order to survive. When a tight-knit group of hunter-gatherers encountered another band, they were likely to view them as alien—and not even human. This urge today causes us not to be much concerned about the welfare of people outside our immediate group, which, in a globally-connected society, can make us feel indifferent to the suffering of distant people; as well as animals. The current patriotic fervor sweeping the world is a particularly troublesome behavior of this kind.
These three examples of evolutionarily-caused ancient responses that no longer are necessary are illustrations of how cultural evolution moves at a far faster pace than does biological evolution. While the latter typically occurs across millions of years, cultural evolution acts over centuries and even decades. Thus, we carry around a hunter-gatherer's mental and emotional behaviors in a world where cultural demands have greatly changed. We no longer need many of those outdated behaviors. They can even be dangerous.
So what can we do to ameliorate those archaic responses and react in a more appropriate manner? A first step is what I have described above: to recognize that our behaviors can be problematic and want to do something about them. Unfortunately, many people accept poor food habits and tribalism as inevitable, or practice these behaviors without even noticing the dangers. A second step is to listen to the message from evolutionary psychologists who just in the last couple of decades have described the problem and thus pointed toward solutions... the most important one being education. Yes, we seem to be hard-wired by evolution to commit these actions, but through education and some persistent work, we can counter evolution's unhelpful urges.
More on our cultural evolutionary problems next time…
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