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Transcript:
The other day I happened upon a science news headline I found very interesting: We’re evolving too slowly for the world we’ve built, according to science, published November 19th for New Atlas. I found it via the Science subreddit, where it accumulated nearly 20,000 upvotes and hundreds of popular comments that basically amounted to “Well, duh.” For instance, the top reply as of this recording is, “I mean, just look at the concept of a gym. Our bodies evolved to get exercise, which we naturally got through hunting gathering activities. But now that we’ve optimized that out of our daily lives, we have places filled with weights that we can move for the sake of moving them just to get the stimulus.”
So true! Obviously this “gym” phenomenon wouldn’t be so much of a problem if our bodies would just hurry up and evolve, I don’t know, the ability to build and maintain muscle and bone density by sitting in front of a computer all day. Hi, it’s me, a person who loves science and definitely understands evolution.
Okay, so the New Atlas piece is based on this paper: Homo sapiens, industrialisation and the environmental mismatch hypothesis, published in early November in Biological Reviews and available to all, open access. This isn’t a study, per se–it’s actually the researchers in question building a hypothesis and proposing possible ways to test it. Their hypothesis is that industrialization has created an “environmental mismatch” in humans, in which our species has drastically changed our environment far too quickly. For tens of thousands of years, aspects of our environment like the climate changed slowly enough that humans and their ancestors were able to adapt: developing the ability to sweat, for instance. But over the past few hundred years, we have changed the air we breathe, how we spend our days, how we interact with our community, how much artificial light we experience, and on and on. A species can’t adapt within a handful of generations, and so, they argue, industrialization has severely damaged our evolutionary fitness. They specifically point out five aspects of this: decreased fertility thanks to things like pesticides; impaired immunity thanks to things like air pollution; impaired cognitive function thanks to air pollution again; impaired physical fitness thanks to a more sedentary lifestyle; and an increase in stress, which they argue with data like this decade-long Japanese study that showed significant stress differences after just 15?min in industrialised versus natural environments.
I see why people had a kneejerk acceptance of this proposed hypothesis. After all, we fucking hate our lives, right? Everything is stressful, and wouldn’t it be nice to go live in the woods?
But I think that that’s a naive, and even romanticized way to look at the past. One of the two authors of this study told his university press that “In our ancestral state, we were well-adapted to deal with acute stress to evade or confront predators. Fight or flight. The lion would come around occasionally, and you had to be ready to defend yourself – or run,” Shaw explains. “The key is that the lion goes away again.”
These days, he says, “Our body reacts as though all these stressors were lions. Whether it’s a difficult discussion with your partner or your boss, or traffic noise, your stress response system is still pretty much the same as if you were facing lion after lion after lion. As a result, you have this very powerful response from your nervous system, but no comedown.”
On the one hand, yes, I do think humans are overly stimulated and stressed out. But also I think I’d be pretty fucking stressed out all the time if I were living somewhere where a fucking lion might leap out of the night and eat me at any moment. Or if I saw 75% of the population die from infections and the rest get brutally murdered by other people, and the occasional lion I guess.
I’m not saying their lives were without any joy or relaxation. I’m not even saying I’m happier than the average woman who made it to her 40s 10,000 years ago. I’m just saying that it’s tough, if not impossible, to prove that I’m actually worse off mentally than the average 45-year old woman 10,000 years ago. We know that mental health issues exist in current hunter-gatherer populations, and even in other species with higher cognition like chimps and whales. And we also know that those mental issues get worse when we, you know, torture those other animals. Like, put them in cages, or force them to do physical labor against their will, or take their family and friends away from them.
In the past several decades, researchers and activists have publicized the plight of orcas, or killer whales, that are kept in captivity. They experience damaged immune systems, an inability to reproduce, chronic stress, behavioral problems, and other adverse effects that has created an “environmental mismatch” in which their evolutionary fitness is drastically harmed.
But no one says that Shamu isn’t evolving quickly enough. No one suggests, as the authors of the paper about humans suggest, that the orcas can fix this by “rethinking their relationship with nature.” No one suggests, as the authors do, that we design “healthier, more resilient” fishbowls. We acknowledge that we took an incredibly intelligent animal out of its environment and stuck it in a bowl so it could slowly die while some humans get rich selling tickets to Sea World. The problem isn’t the speed of the whale’s evolution or how the whale thinks about its captivity or whether we’re exploiting it in the nicest possible way. The problem is the exploitation. The problem is greedy humans.
Humans survived for this long in large part because we evolved to be intelligent and social. We connected with each other and protected each other and trusted each other. A minority of humans had the wrong balance of “intelligence” and “pro-social tendencies,” and they manipulated their friends and family and community members to get ahead. Then they kept taking more and more, and they helped their offspring take more and more, and they set up the rules and the entire system that purposely exploits the very trait that made humans successful, in order to instead make the majority of humans miserable so that they can get richer. It’s not an accident, and it’s not a natural byproduct of living in a “modern” society. We can have cities and medicine and public transit and delicious food and we can do it without 60-hour work weeks and chronic illness and abject poverty.
We can wait ten thousand years to evolve an immunity to bullshit or we can start taxing billionaires. Whichever.
