A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

by Heather E. Heying

humans are extraordinarily well adapted to, and equipped for, change. But the rate of change itself is so rapid now that our brains, bodies, and social systems are perpetually out of sync. For millions of years we lived among friends and extended family, but today many people don’t even know their neighbors’ names. Some of the most fundamental truths—like the fact of two sexes—are increasingly dismissed as lies. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society that is changing faster than we can accommodate is turning us into people who cannot fend for ourselves. Simply put, it’s killing us.

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.

here we are, jacks of nearly every trade imaginable, and simultaneously the masters of nearly every habitat on Earth. Our niche is nearly unbounded, and when we do find boundaries, we nearly immediately begin to test them. It’s as if we don’t believe there will ever be a final frontier. Homo sapiens is not merely exceptional. We are exceptionally exceptional.9 Unrivaled in our adaptability, ingenuity, and exploitative capacity, we have come to specialize in everything over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. We enjoy the competitive advantage of being specialists, without paying the usual costs of a lack of breadth.

Understanding what is in the mind of another—known as theory of mind—is staggeringly useful. We see the rudiments of this capacity in many other species, and we see it extensively elaborated in a highly cooperative few, such as elephants, toothed whales (such as dolphins), crows, and many nonhuman primates.

We can accurately pass a complex abstraction from one mind to another by simply vibrating the air between us. It is everyday magic that usually passes without our notice.

Even a rudimentary collective consciousness—what might be shared between wolves in a pack, for example, as they are hunting cooperatively—provides a staggering advantage. In lions, too, the pride is far greater than the sum of its individuals. Collective consciousness, an evolutionary innovation unlike any other, creates cognitive emergence.

When one is in the zone, the conscious mind is present, but as a spectator who steers clear so as not to disrupt the flow. Behaviors become habitual and intuitive. In an individual, we might call this skill or craft. In a family or a tribe, such habits become traditions, passed efficiently from one generation to the next. Scale this up further, and we have culture.

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.

The financial collapse of 2008, Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are all symptoms of a civilization-level disorder, one that has no name. Let’s call it the Sucker’s Folly: the tendency of concentrated short-term benefit not only to obscure risk and long-term cost, but also to drive acceptance even when the net analysis is negative.12 These events are evidence that we are resting on our cultural laurels and speeding toward disaster, lulled into a false sense of security—and

As our world becomes increasingly complex, though, the need for generalists grows. We need people who know things across domains, and who can make connections between them: not just biologists and physicists, but biophysicists; people who have switched gears and found that the tools they brought from their prior vocation serve them well in a new one. We must find ways to encourage the development of generalists.

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.

In the 21st century, nearly everyone accepts that evolution has created our limbs and our livers, our hair and our hearts. Yet many people still object when evolutionary theory is invoked to explain behavior or culture.14 Even for many scientists, this position is driven by the belief that some questions should not be asked if the answers to them might be ugly. This has led to ideologically driven censorship of ideas and research programs, which has slowed the rate at which we have enhanced our understanding of who we are, and why. Some of what evolution has produced is, indeed, ugly: infanticide, rape, and genocide are all products of evolution. It is also true that much of what evolution has produced is beautiful: a mother’s sacrifice for her child; enduring romantic love; and civilization’s care for its citizens, young and old, healthy and not.

recognizing the evolutionary truth that women are both more agreeable than men, on average, and more anxious is neither a diagnosis of any individual nor an immutable fate. Individuals are not the same as populations.15 We are individual members of populations, and those populations—men and women, boomers and millennials, Americans and Australians—have real psychological differences, but we are more similar than dissimilar.

We are also, still and forever, eukaryotes, animals, vertebrates, craniates. Group membership never disappears, but an organism will try to pass as something it’s not, if enough of its traits transform. We are nucleate, heterotrophic, vertebral, brainy, bony fish. We are fish.

Sixty-five million years ago, the Chicxulub meteor hit the Earth near the Yucatán peninsula. Its impact kicked up so much dust that the sun was blocked for years. Photosynthesis ground to a halt. On the other side of the planet, perhaps accelerated by Chicxulub, one of the largest volcanic features on the planet was forming, the Indian Deccan Traps, belching out large amounts of climate-changing gases.16 Mass extinctions followed, including that of all the (non-avian) dinosaurs, which had been doing pretty well for themselves for many tens of millions of years.

There is choice in when and with whom to mate, of course, but there are also underlying conditions that render pregnancy more or less likely to succeed, and they most surely correlate with our feelings of desire and choice, whether we know it or not. Some of these conditions apply population-wide: in time of famine, nearly nobody reproduces, as individuals lack the nutritional and physiological resources with which to bring a baby to term, and feed it after it’s born. Other conditions, though, are particular to the individual: Is your body ready for its first pregnancy? If you’ve had previous pregnancies, how old is your youngest child? Is she weaned? Do you have older children around to help? Sisters or friends? Your preferred mate?

Most people, when their culture began to run wood through sawmills and build homes out of the dimensional lumber that results, would not have thought to ask what, in our human experience and capability, might be affected by this. Dimensional lumber, and the carpentered corners that result, are novel features of the modern human’s environment. How has it changed how we perceive the world? Reframing your approach to the world, such that those questions do occur to you, even if you are not sure what the answers might be, is part of the goal of this book.

Carpentered corners create greater susceptibility to certain optical illusions. Overreliance on chairs creates all manner of negative health outcomes. What, then, might deodorants and perfumes have done to our ability to smell the signals emitted by our bodies? What might lives filled with clocks have done to our sense of time? What have airplanes done to our sense of space, or the internet to our sense of competence? What have maps done to our sense of direction, or schools to our sense of family? You get the point.

The modern approach to medicine, which can broadly be characterized as reductionist, reveals itself clearly in scientism—an ill-named but important concept. 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. Not only do we see words like theory and analysis wrapped around distinctly untheoretical and unanalyzed (and often unanalyzable) ideas, but—worse—we see the rise of a kind of fake numeracy, in which anything that can be counted is, and once you have measurement, you tend to forgo all further analysis.

From fluoridated drinking water to antifungals in shelf-stable food, from sunscreen to the overuse of antibiotics—over and over we make the same kinds of mistakes. Combine reductionism with a tendency to overgeneralize, in a hyper-novel world where quick but expensive and potentially dangerous fixes are common, and we have explained some of the major errors of modern health and medicine.

Functional biology, Mayr argues, is concerned with how questions: How does an organ function, or a gene, or a wing? The answers to these are proximate levels of explanation. Evolutionary biology, in contrast, is concerned with why questions: Why does an organ persist, why is a gene in this organism but not that one, why is the swallow’s wing shaped the way that it is? The answers to these are ultimate levels of explanation.

Even the great victories of Western medicine—surgery, antibiotics, and vaccines—have been overextrapolated, applied in many cases where they shouldn’t be. When all you have is a knife, a pill, and a shot, the whole world looks as though it would benefit from being cut and medicated.

On Christmas Day 2017, Bret broke his wrist attempting to ride the hoverboard that Toby, our younger son, had given Heather as a gift. Instead of going to the ER, he spent one night in excruciating pain, a second in fairly bad pain, and the next week trying to avoid shaking people’s hands at a conference where we were meeting new people. It was socially awkward but, after the first few days, not physically so. He never got a cast, and within two weeks he had nearly complete mobility and strength back. Four weeks after the break, he was as good as new.

In professions from medicine to sales to soldiering, men and women work together, but are we really doing the same thing? Female doctors are more likely to go into pediatrics; men are more likely to become surgeons.1 In retail, men are more likely to sell cars, women are more likely to sell flowers.2 And while retail jobs in the US were split nearly evenly between men and women in 2019, wholesale jobs skewed strongly male.3 In tasks that require physical strength, men, on average, are simply stronger. An all-female force engaging in hand-to-hand combat would not beat an all-male one, and it would be beyond foolish to pretend otherwise.

We work side by side, and some of us imagine that because we are equal under the law, we are also the same. 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. There seems to be comfort, for some, in the idea of sameness, but it is a shallow comfort at best. What if the best surgeon in the world was a woman, but it was also true that, on average, most of the best surgeons were male? What if the top ten pediatricians were women? Neither scenario provides evidence of bias or sexism, although those are possible explanations for the observed patterns. In order to ensure that bias or sexism is not predictive of who does what work, we should remove as many barriers to success as possible. We should also not expect that men and women will make identical choices, or be driven to excel at identical things, or even, perhaps, be motivated by the same goals. 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.

It is no accident that, in every human culture known, there is language that distinguishes male from female.19 It’s a human universal.

Men will never ovulate, gestate, lactate, menstruate, or go through menopause. Women who identify as men might, but that is different.

Some of the average differences between the sexes include that men have more “investigative” interests, while women have more “artistic” and “social” interests.32 Men are also, on average, more interested in math, science, and engineering.33 On tests, girls score higher in literacy, while boys score higher in math.34 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.

The differences between the sexes are found in babies, and across cultures, too—so this is not some weird WEIRD phenomenon. Given a choice, neonate girls spend more time looking at faces, while neonate boys spend more time looking at things.

Pretending that we are identical, rather than ensuring that we are equal under the law, is a fool’s game.

Keep children far away from pornography. Try to keep yourself away from it as well. The market should not be allowed to intrude on several things, including but not limited to love and sex, music, and humor.

Do not interfere with children’s development by trying to block, pause, or radically alter their development. Gender is the behavioral expression of sex, and so is both a product of evolution and more fluid than is sex. Childhood is a time of identity exploration and formation. Children’s claims to be the sex that they are not should therefore not be indulged as anything beyond normal play and searching for boundaries. While actually intersex individuals are real and incredibly rare, and actually transgendered people are also real and very rare, much of modern “gender ideology” is dangerous and contagious,48 and many of the interventions (hormonal, surgical) are not reversible.

Recognize that our differences contribute to our collective strength. If we more highly valued work that women are more likely to be drawn to (e.g., teaching, social work, nursing), perhaps we could stop demanding equal representation of men and women in fields that women are simply not as likely to be interested in. 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. Equal opportunity is an honorable goal in step with reality, whereas aiming for equal outcome—in which every occupation, from day-care workers to garbage collectors, has equal representation between the sexes—will disappoint everyone involved.

Love is a state of the emotional mind that causes one to prioritize someone or something external as an extension of self.

Women may consciously want to enjoy sex without commitment, but they are wired to fall in love with the men they bed because sex, babies, and commitment are evolutionarily inextricably linked for women. Sex and orgasm trigger the release of oxytocin in females, which promotes bonding.

For humans it is the opposite. The human niche is niche switching. Our niches transform radically, sometimes over remarkably short distances. Consider again the difference between populations of arctic hunters who hunt big game a few kilometers inland and those who specialize in aquatic mammals at the coast. Those specialties require radically different skill sets, and would not be possible if each individual had to discover the secrets to hunting effectively on their own. The solution to this conundrum is so familiar to us that we rarely think to marvel at it. Recall the Omega principle, which points out that any expensive and long-lasting cultural traits should be presumed to be adaptive, and that adaptive elements of culture are not independent of genes.

All too often, moderns try to protect children from grief. For instance, we have known parents who would not allow their children to attend their grandparents’ funerals, for fear that it would scare them, or harm them. This fear and anxiousness in raising children, in turn, creates fearful and anxious children.

When a young snow monkey named Imo’ innovated cleaning her sweet potatoes by dipping them into the sea, the adults in her troop were slow to take notice. They lived together on a tiny islet in Japan, but only two adults in the troop copied her behavior over the next five years. The young monkeys, though, the other children and subadults, watched and learned. Five years on, nearly 80 percent of the juvenile monkeys were cleaning their sweet potatoes in the style of Imo’.

Just as we are born with more neuronal potential than we use (most of our neurons die off before we become adults), we are also born with more linguistic potential than we use, and some of it is lost during childhood. We are born with broad potential, and that potential narrows over time.

It is a fine needle to thread, giving children enough space to make their own decisions and mistakes, and protecting them from real danger. Our societal pendulum has swung too far to one side—to protecting children against all risk and harm—such that many who come of age under this paradigm feel that everything is a threat, that they need safe spaces, that words are violence. By comparison, children with exposure to diverse experiences—physical, psychological, and intellectual—learn what is possible, and become more expansive. It is imperative that children experience discomfort in each of these realms: physical, psychological, and intellectual. Absent that, they end up full-grown but confused about what harm actually is. They end up children in the bodies of adults.

It is risky for my child to miss a benchmark. It is risky for me not to force my child to meet arbitrary deadlines. Such parental focus can instill fear in our children, which they carry forward as an aversion to risk.

Humans are antifragile:28 We grow stronger with exposure to manageable risks, with the pushing of boundaries. As we grow into adults, exposure to discomfort and uncertainty—physical, emotional, and intellectual—is necessary if we are to become our best selves.

talk to your children as if they are mature and responsible beings. Hold them responsible for their actions, and for ever more of their needs as they grow up. Give them real work to do, not busywork. Do not make false threats (“If you keep doing that, I’ll turn this car around!”). Always make sure that they know they are loved.

With our own children, we have expected them to make their own breakfasts and lunches on school days since they were in elementary school, as well as to feed the pets daily and do their own laundry every week. We also, gradually, exposed them to a wide range of risks. By the time they were ten years old, they were trustworthy on top of mesas in Eastern Washington, with coral snakes in the Amazon, in forests and surf at various locations (but less competent in cities). When they did get hurt in minor ways, we didn’t put bandages on “boo-boos”; instead, we told them to get up when they fell and get back on the bike or scooter or up the tree.

when they were tiny, one of us was usually touching the child—wearing him, carrying him, sleeping with him. Now they are adventurous and polite, with senses of humor and justice. They know to honor good rules and question bad ones. We have told them that sometimes we’ll make mistakes and give them bad rules, but we are 100 percent on their team, and they should ask why our rules are what they are, but it is counterproductive to simply break them for the sake of breaking them. For the most part, they don’t.

For the first year-ish of their lives, our boys slept with us or next to us, and when they cried, we responded quickly. Sometimes it felt endless, to be sure, but in short order, they didn’t cry much. Once they were sleeping in their own room, we had family nighttime rituals, like reading to them, but we also made it clear that bedtime was bedtime and that they should not game us. When it was time for bed, we tucked them in, and neither of them ever did come out of their room with nighttime demands. We believe that this is in part because they knew that we were there, and that if they really needed us, we would come.

But the pharmaceutical industry has found, in neurodiversity, yet another opportunity to profit.

In our own experiences teaching college undergrads for fifteen years, we received health histories from all of our students nearly every quarter, in advance of taking them on multiday field trips to the scablands of Eastern Washington, the San Juan islands, the Oregon coast. By the late aughts (2008, 2009), some of our academic programs had a populace in which more than half of the students were still on or had as children been on mood-altering pharmaceuticals—again, typically (but not always) speed for the boys, antianxiety and antidepression meds for the girls. That number did decline some in the years that followed (although this happened in parallel with an uptick in doctor-prescribed exogenous cross-sex hormones and hormone blockers), and there was always a substantial minority of students on something prescribed by a doctor. Many of these students were actively trying to wean themselves from these cocktails; some of them were even successful.

Betting against the fringe is an easy bet, usually a safe one, and when done in a tone of paternalistic indulgence, say, or authoritarian disdain, it usually shuts down dissent. While most fringe ideas are in fact wrong, it is exactly from the fringe that progress is made. This is where the paradigm shifts happen.

For young schoolchildren, one solution would be having a garden at school, and spending time in it in all sorts of weather. Frequent field trips to natural areas, and spending time actually outside rather than in the climate-controlled protection of the “nature center,” help, too. Will it always be comfortable? No. Will some children be ill prepared for rain or wind or sun? Yes. Will they learn from small, early mistakes to start taking responsibility for their own bodies and fates and so get better at navigating the world? Yes. Yes, they will.