A stolid, occasionally interesting book that helps readers apply evolutionary theory to better navigate modernity. It focuses on a standard theme you'll find in many pop biology/pop evolution books these days: that humans weren't built for the accelerating change and hyper-novelty of the modern era.
A reader can learn from this book. One central idea is what the authors call the Omega Principle (see below for a fuller discussion), which posits that any long-lasting and "evolutionarily costly" trait should be presumed to be adaptive. This is a critical concept that gives readers a navigational heuristic for modernity, which I think we can boil down to five words: be skeptical of the new.
You'll also see plenty of recycled Dawkins, basic fundamentals of Darwinian theory and examples of evolutionary psychology here, and so this book helped me groove insights from books like The Selfish Gene, Thinking Fast and Slow, Stumbling on Happiness and even The Origin of Species. No harm in that obviously!
Notes:
Introduction:Hyper-novel: humans are well adapted to change, but not change at the rate we're facing now.
The authors tell an arresting example of epistemic arrogance when a Costa Rican villager warns them to stay off a beach (the nearby river was about flood it, treacherously). It illustrates how we can be dangerously overconfident in environments we don't know, but that we think we understand.
The naturalistic or "is-ought" fallacy: assuming that because something is a certain way, that it should be that way.
The concept of our "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" (EEA): for humans, for example, the African grasslands where our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Further, consider the EEA of our "ancestor species" which gave us manual dexterity, visual acuity, or other mammalian/animalian traits.
p xv: "If we don't figure out how to grapple with the problem of accelerating novelty, humanity will perish, a victim of its success."
Chapter 1: The human niche
Many ideas here recycled from Dawkins: humans are under-specialized: evolutionarily speaking, we are jacks of all trades, masters of none.
Reify: to make something (usually an abstraction or a concept) real
Examples of collective intelligence/collective cognition: humans sharing ideas, wolves hunting in a pack. Shared consciousness is far more effective than unshared consciousness.
"The human niche is niche switching."
Clade: a group of organisms believed to have evolved from a common ancestor, according to the principles of cladistics, (e.g "the great ape and human clade")
Also: cladistics: a method of classification of animals and plants according to the proportion of measurable characteristics that they have in common. It is assumed that the higher the proportion of characteristics that two organisms share, the more recently they diverged from a common ancestor.
Lineages compete, not just species.
Genes are not the only heritable information, see culture, which "evolves in tandem with the genome." Thus cultural traits are adaptive just as eyes are.
Distinguishing between individuals and populations for evolutionary fitness.
Epigenetic: "above the genome" (e.g.: culture, which regulates genome expression)
The Omega principle
1) epigenetic regulators, such as culture, are superior to genes in that they are more flexible and can adapt more rapidly.
2) epigenetic regulators, such as culture, evolve to serve the genome.
One concept derived from this principle is that any expensive and long-lasting cultural trait (such as a tradition passed down within a lineage for thousands of years) should be presumed to be adaptive. This gives readers a helpful lens to think about religion, long-lived dietary traditions, or any of various seemingly "wasteful" rituals humans have performed over extremely long time periods. Often we don't even understand the true underlying reason why we do certain things, only that we do them because we have done them, and that the doing of these things somehow makes us more evolutionarily fit, either on a population level or on the individual level.
We can extrapolate from this and make a compelling argument that the modern era has made us mentally, physically, and socially unhealthy because there is too much novelty, and also because we are too quick to throw off those seemingly wasteful aspects of our cultural and physiological heritage, when it is their very "wastefulness" that should be a cue for us to maintain them.
Chapter 2: A Brief History of the Human Lineage
Decent run-though here of evolution through to humans. "We are all fish" and "we are all eukaryotes."
Chapter 3: Ancient Bodies, Modern World
Idiosyncrasies of modernity, why can we be fooled by a "set of lines"? ".. modernity is doing something to us at a deeply fundamental level, and the fact that we don't understand it is alarming."
"Lactase persistence" as a more accurate term than "lactose intolerance": borne of particular environmental conditions, but then moved to the genetic layer where it now lives.
The precautionary principle: consider the risk of engaging in any particular activity, recommend caution when the risk is high or when the risk is unknown. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
Chesterton's fence vs modern arrogance: "I see a fence here, it doesn't appear to have a reason to be here, thus I will take the fence down." The idea is to be humble in the face of something that has been here for a while, it may have a valuable purpose you don't yet see. Examples: Vestigial organs like the appendix, tonsils, etc, which shouldn't just be "taken out" because they have no purpose. Vestigial really should mean "we don't know what the function is."
The hygiene hypothesis: 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... Our immune systems are not functioning as they are evolved to do because we have clean cleansed our environments too thoroughly."
Types of tradeoffs:
Allocation tradeoffs: obvious costs
Design constraints: less obvious
Remapping our olfactory world according to new signals (rotten milk vs cheese, toxic modern chemicals that smell "good" like nail polish remover, even CO2 vs CO, etc).
Be a skeptic of novel solutions to things, watch for Chesterton's fence.
Chapter 4: Medicine
[This chapter is required reading for anyone who has high confidence in modern medicine.]
"The treatment of the vast majority of medical complaints with drugs, rather than with actual diagnosis, weakens the ability of the medical system even to do diagnosis. It also pollutes the data stream: who knows who is sick with what, and from what origin, if so many people are on pharmaceuticals with unknown side effects."
Hayek and scientism.
Human hubris and human technical capacity combine to get us into trouble over and over again.
Reductionism: Vitamin D in place of sun, shelf stable foods, sunblock, taking vitamin pills or fish oil pills instead of eating the diverse foods containing these things, etc.
Many examples where the author criticizes "studies show science" findings with still more "studies show science." This is a yet another trap of modernity, a very ironic one to see in this book!
Putting broken bones in casts as an interesting example of using a "proximate approach" solving a problem (automatically putting the person in a cast for 6 weeks), rather than an "ultimate approach" (thinking about how our ancient ancestors would have managed broken bones).
Likewise muting pain with medication interferes in our body's feedback system, making it harder for us to know what we should or should not do.
Since we live in a hyper-novel world with "dueling experts" telling us what to do, many of us crave simple, immovable rules with which to navigate our lives, we want to set-and-forget our rules. This in itself is reductionist thinking! What we need instead is flexible, logic-based, evolutionary thinking to help us navigate.
Chapter 5: Food
The authors are strawmanning paleo eating here, saying that it implies that there is a fixed and universal answer to what one should eat, when paleo eating is merely a lens for how to think about eating, and there's nothing fixed and rigid about it. The authors then go on to advocate "we should be eating real food" seemingly unaware that that is precisely what paleo eating is all about.
"The 20th century saw the dismantling of Chesterton's cuisine." Migrating from whole foods to hyper-processed hyperpalatable modern preserved foods.
On fire, cooking, and "persuading" wild foods to team up with us (e.g., plants, agriculture, animal husbandry), such that the genes of those beings spread much further than they otherwise would. Coevolution of humans with these plants and animals.
Occasional bouts of Michael Pollan-esque writing: ("riverine fishing" in place of river fishing, "on the haut plateau" of Madagascar, or "There are diurnal dik-diks, nocturnal nightingales, and crepuscular capybaras." Three examples that stood out to me over a few successive pages in this chapter).
The epistemically humble idea that if you see something that is a paradox, keep digging. Wherever you think you see waste in biology or an evolution there is likely some long-term strategy that is not visible to you.
Chapter 6: Sleep
Here the reader will find another unfortunate example of scientistry/scientism and reliance on "studies show science" that in this case was later debunked: the authors quote the disgraced author Matthew Walker and his debunked book "Why We Sleep." Curious readers should explore this well-regarded fisking: https://guzey.com/books/why-
An evolutionary explanation of sleep: it saves energy, diurnal animals are not adapted to night, night is dangerous to diurnal animals, this is a useful synergy of using dormancy and avoiding danger and saving energy all the same time. Sleep also helps us process our experiences (REM/dreaming), prune out redundant information and fix memories, and repair the body (slow wave sleep).
Modern novelties that hinder our sleep: electric lights, air travel, noise pollution, the 24-hour economy.
Blue spectrum electric light versus Red spectrum fire light.
This is weakest chapter so far in the book.
Chapter 7: Sex and Gender
The authors are struggle in this and the next few chapters to lecture readers without lecturing us. We also get fed certain logically incontinent and circular ideas: like Traditional gender norms are not all regressive--just the regressive ones.
"Asexual reproduction is only a win for you and your offspring if the future looks exactly like the past." But conditions don't stay the same. Therefore mixing up your genotype with someone else's (sexual reproduction) can be a much better fit for your offspring.
Two types of gametes, one sessile (the egg or female) and one mobile (sperm, mail, or pollen in plants).
Sex versus "sex role" (gender or gender expression).
Division of labor between men and women. sexual strategies: why women prefer wealth and status in their mates well men prefer youth and beauty. Youth and beauty as a proxy for fertility, wealth and status as a proxy for resources to raise children. Likewise evolution of jealousy and mate guarding as proxies for certainty of paternity.
Discussion of sexual strategies evolving into more short-term in the modern era.
Pornography as a proxy for sex which is often mistaken for the real thing, another example of reductionism in modernity. Porn causing "sexual autism," displaying repetitive behavior, atypical sensitivity to sensory inputs and background emotional context.
Chapter 8: Parenthood and Relationship
Genetic history of lactation, time spent with the mother during that lactation in nursing, helplessness of hatchlings and newborns which is allowed by close care and protection by parents, can allow more cultural transmission and more plasticity, which allows for more rapid behavioral evolution, faster than genetic change would allow for.
Altriciality: helplessness in newborns and hatchlings. In biology, altricial species are those in which the young are underdeveloped at the time of birth, but with the aid of their parents mature after birth.
Monogamy, why birds have it fairly commonly, and why mammals have a harder time evolving stable monogamy. Key reason: It has to do with certainty of paternity.
The human feedback loop of helplessness in babies, extended childhood, making the bond between co-parents tighter and tighter, manifesting in love.
Monogamy is more eucivic, polygyny as more dyscivic. Polygyny tends to drive an increase in sexually frustrated young men willing to take big risks for the possibility of gaining a mate, leading to militarism, theft or "transfer of resources" (read: theft) between tribes or societies, etc.
[The book is devolving a little bit into lecturing boys to grow up and stop being cads, and lecturing girls to grow up and stop sleeping on the first date.]
Elders and senescence: the quest to stop human aging; the value of elders and their wisdom, also the paradoxical value of skepticism of elders' wisdom.
Interesting and helpful advice on "turning the sound down on your conversations, and watching the actions" of the people around you. Acting like an animal behaviorist, interpreting interactions between people around you. You can get past the "deceptive layer of language" this way.
Chapter 9: Childhood
"Humans are not blank slates, but of all the organisms on earth, we are the blankest."
Plasticity, how we are drugging and hypermanaging kids' lives, children should be more "free range."
Fetishizing metrics like at what age does a child say his first word or walk. Confusing these reductionist metrics with actual accomplishment.
Chapter 10: School
Modern formalized schooling as something with costs, not just benefits. School is the mother of all reductionist activities, fetishizing facts, memorization and regurgitation as proxies for learning and critical thinking.
School as "outsourced parenting" or the commodification of parenting, as it teaches quiescence and conformity. [What follows here standard criticisms that have been made better elsewhere: see Christopher Lasche's The Culture of Narcissism for much more on this, see also Nicholas Taleb's discussion of the ludic fallacy in The Black Swan and Antifragile.]
The "adaptive landscape" metaphor: think of water bubbles under an uneven ice surface--a water bubble always finds as high level as it can find, but it might be constrained by certain things. For example, an air bubble might find its way to the highest peak it has access to, but it cannot find its way to the highest peak in the entire landscape if getting to that peak involves moving downwards against buoyancy. This is a metaphor for evolution: fitness can be improved but their might be situational or path-dependent constraints that can't be reversed, which may limit the species' ultimate "fitness peak" in the adaptive landscape.
I'd argue that this could also be a metaphor for plasticity or adaptiveness over your own life path. For example: whether it's possible to retool your backhand late in a tennis career, or learning a totally new way of doing things after a lifetime of grooving a different way. You might be stuck with the path dependent choices you've already made.
Chapter 11: Becoming Adults
In the developed world there is a lack of "rituals" that demarcate transitions from childhood to adulthood. Compare to traditional cultures.
The authors criticize postmodernism here (the easiest of low-hanging fruit for criticism!). I feel a little bit like I'm reading Jordan Peterson all of a sudden.
"Lawyers have not gone through the environments we'll be traveling in and made them safe." A helpful metaphor for the difference between the ludic environment of modernity and the nonludic environment of, say, the Amazon jungle.
The controversy at Evergreen College, and lack of "adults" taking responsibility in the face of an SJW attack: I would have liked to have heard much more about this (especially as the authors apparently consider this event important enough to include in their book cover bios!), but the reader is directed to a footnote and some YouTube videos.
Chapter 12: Culture and Consciousness
The unmooring of ancestral wisdom in an era of hypernovelty and rapid change
Cultural traditions and ancestral wisdom that is "literally false but metaphorically true" and highly useful, often for reasons unknown or different from reasons believed.
Religion and religiosity are evolutionarily costly, therefore we should assume they are adaptive. "Chesterton's gods"
Interesting metaphor of the sacred versus the shamanistic in culture. Sacred things as low-mutation, low corruption, that change infrequently; shamanistic things as high-mutation, high error rate, mostly poor ideas, challenges to orthodoxy and that which is sacred, but occasionally valuable. A cultural epiphenomenon.
Chapter 13: The Fourth Frontier
This chapter lectures the reader on sustainability, good regulation, how both parties (left and right) are wrong and prone to category errors, etc., and it is filled with predictable calls to action: "We are hurtling towards destruction." Or: "We are in the throes of a sustainability crisis." A limp finish to the book.
To read:
Escaping the Progress Trap by Daniel Brian O'Leary
The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession by Chandler Burr
Yellow Wolf: His Own Story by Lucullus Virgil McWhorter
The Biology of Moral Systems by Richard D. Alexander