The term “evolutionary
psychology” was popularized in the 1990s but is really just the current label for
the longstanding argument that human behavior is as least as much nature as
nurture and that the nature is a product of deep evolutionary history. Cf. Carl
Jung regarding a newborn: “He is not born as a tabula rasa [clean slate], he is merely born unconscious. But he
brings with him systems that are organized and ready to function in a
specifically human way, and these he owes to millions of years of human
development.” This seems obvious to most people, and it is clearly the case in
all other species. Yet it is not obvious to academic sociologists among whom
the tabula rasa doctrine long has
been dominant; humans are different, they argue, and among humans culture
trumps nature. This is not as crazy as it sounds to most outside of academe. We
do have the mental capacity to choose to act against our natural predilections,
whether from personal choice or from indoctrination (submitting to which
arguably is also a personal choice), and I know of no major evolutionary
psychologist who dismisses nurture as irrelevant. But to say a slate can be
overwritten is quite different from saying that there is nothing to overwrite.
Also, slates never can be wiped entirely clean. Something shows.
The Savanna
Principle that underlies evolutionary psychology is very much in line with
Jung’s remark. The earliest hominid remains so far discovered date back
6,000,000 years. Anatomically modern humans have been around for some 200,000
years. For nearly all that time all of them were hunter-gatherers; a handful of
humans still are. People, initially in small numbers, switched over to
pastoralism and farming starting around 12,000 years ago. The very first cities
formed around 5000 years ago, though only in the 21st century has a
majority of the world’s population come to live in urban areas. The Savanna
Principle states that 12,000 years is not nearly enough time to alter humans
fundamentally. (It is long enough for trivial changes, e.g. adult lactose
tolerance in a minority of the world’s population, but not fundamental ones.) We
still have minds evolved for a Stone Age world. Adapted for life on the
savanna, we navigate Manhattan and Shanghai as best we can, which isn’t always
well.
Two books that
address this mismatch are Mismatch: How
Our Stone Age Brain Deceives Us Every Day and What We Can Do about It by
Dutch authors Ronald Giphartand Professor Mark van Vugt and The Ape That Understood the Universe: How
Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve
Stewart-Williams, associate professor at the University of Nottingham Malaysia
Campus. Stewart-Williams’ book is the more general one and is best suited to
anyone new to the subject. He uses the device of an imaginary extraterrestrial
trying to make sense of human reproduction, violence, cultural memes,
tribalism, and bad eating habits. Giphart and Vugt, apropos to their book’s
title, focus more specifically on the mismatches. You can take a test quick
test of your own degree of mismatch here: https://augustastate.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_etBn10FnqLrnJgp.
I scored a 28.
Both books are serviceable and I’ll give
them a mild thumbs up for what they do, but a rather more entertaining book from
a decade earlier covering much of the same ground is Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters by Alan
Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa. The larger part of what the authors have to say is
not only obvious, but blindingly obvious. Not all, but most. They tell us the
burdens of parenthood often make people unhappy. They tell us men are motivated
by sex. They tell us women are more selective than men in their choice of
sexual partners and that they take social and economic status into account.
This hardly is startling stuff, and even tabula
rasa sociologists agree with it; the latter simply assert the reason is
culture and socialization. The authors refer to studies that are quite persuasive that there is
more to it than that.
Does evolutionary
mismatch make us unhappy? Freud certainly thought so 90 years ago, which he
expressed in Civilization and Its
Discontents. He thought the trade-off was worth it though. Others are not
so sure. They think that stepping out of the cave was a bad move. Perhaps so,
but I don’t think I’ll be abandoning central heat and LED television in order
to return to it even if that means my inner caveman will sometimes grumble and demand things that are bad for me.
The Cramps – Caveman
I guess that's why they call it a man cave. :) I wonder how much collecting things: music, books, antiques, etc. fits in with our past of hunters and collectors.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you've uncovered the real reason people settled down. Nomads have to keep their belongings pared down to whatever they can carry with them. It must be hard to decide what to take and what to leave behind. If we have a home we have someplace to keep our stuff.
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