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

by Heather E. Heying

Risk and potential go hand in hand. We need to let children, including college students, risk getting hurt. Protection from pain guarantees weakness, fragility, and greater suffering in the future. The discomfort may be physical, emotional, or intellectual—My ankle! My feelings! My worldview!—and all need to be experienced to learn and grow.

There are new things under the sun, but it is the fate of every generation to think that it arrived too late, that everything is understood, and that the best response is to fall into nihilist disarray.

One set of goals for higher ed ought to be to teach students how to hone their intuitions, become experienced enough in the world to reliably recognize pattern, return to first principles when trying to explain observed phenomena, and reject authority-based explanations.

We purposefully sought out field sites that were remote not just because nature is more interesting and intact in such places—more lianas climbing their way up to the light, more vine snakes mimicking those same lianas—but also because encountering nature in its least disturbed state often comes at the “cost” of having no connection to the outside world. Far from the virtual eyes that document our every move, people are revealed, to themselves and to others.

The value of knowing something real about the physical world. When you have a sense of physical reality, you are less likely to be gameable by the social sphere. Never accept conclusions on the basis of authority; if you find that what you are being taught does not match your experience of the world, do not acquiesce. Pursue the inconsistencies.

A university cannot simultaneously maximize the pursuit of truth, and the pursuit of social justice, as Jonathan Haidt has famously noted.24 This is a basic trade-off, and unavoidable. It becomes important, then, to ask what the purpose of a university is. Is it necessary that we focus on the pursuit of truth? Yes, in fact it is.

Authority is not to be used as a bludgeon to shut down the exchange of ideas. Bob Trivers, evolutionary biologist par excellence, and our mentor in college, once advised us to seek positions in which we taught undergraduates. His reasoning was this: Undergrads do not yet know the field, and so are likely to ask questions that you aren’t expecting, “dumb” questions, or ones imagined to already be settled. When the educator is confronted with such questions, one of three things is likely to be true: Sometimes the field is right, and the answer is simple. Full stop. Sometimes the field is right, but the answer is complex, nuanced, or subtle. Figuring out, or remembering, how to explain that complexity or subtlety is worth the time of any thinker who deserves the title. Sometimes the field is wrong, and the answer is not understood, but it takes a naive view of the matter to ask the question.

The primary modality of advertisers is to create dissatisfaction, along with the impression that others are more satisfied.

We argued earlier that con artists and the confused often operate on a wholly social plane, rather than on an analytical one. How do you avoid becoming someone who assesses the world based on social responses rather than based on analysis, one of those people who are easily fooled by con artists and the confused?

Humans are evolved to be antifragile: We grow stronger with exposure to manageable risks, with the pushing of boundaries, fostering openness to serendipity and to that which we do not yet know. This is true for both bones and brains. Doing things with nonnegotiable outcomes in the physical world—skateboarding, growing vegetables, ascending a peak—provides a corrective to many wrongheaded ideas currently passing for sophisticated. Some of these include: all of reality is a social construct, emotional pain is equivalent to physical pain, and life is or can be made perfectly safe.

Having close calls is part of the set of experiences that are necessary in order to grow up. If your child has been made totally safe, living a life with no risk, then you have done a terrible job of parenting. That child has no ability to extrapolate from the universe. If you, as an adult, are totally safe, you are probably not reaching your potential.

Many things have a pathological version. Pathology is not the same as “downside”—senescence is a downside of early adaptive traits, but it is not pathological. In contrast, arrogance is pathological confidence. Positive obsession has many words in English: passion, focus, drive. The primary manifestation of negative obsession, of pathological obsession, is addiction. Obsession is agnostic with regard to whether the thing obsessed over is healthy or unhealthy. You can obsess over a love interest, which might lead to the love of your life. You can obsess over a particular varietal of mango, which may cause you to spend more time than strictly necessary seeking out such mangoes. You can obsess over what color to paint your walls, what order the paragraphs should go in, whether to tell your friend that her husband is a lout. Addiction is one end point of an unhealthy obsession.

What is “healthy,” of course, is ever more challenging to decipher, in no way helped by the presence of market forces in almost every decision. Attempting to understand humans as an evolutionary phenomenon, as we are doing in this book, assumes that all of our minds are, behind the scenes, doing a cost-benefit analysis between choices that we perceive that we have. From how to walk, to whom to mate with, to what book to read, it’s all cost-benefit analysis with the target of increasing fitness. Our software is built to maximize our fitness, even if our conscious minds have other priorities.

Boredom is effectively synonymous with the “opportunity cost” having gone to zero: if you believe there is nothing else enriching that you could spend your time on, then the calculation of whether or not to engage with a particular substance or action is skewed, particularly if that substance or action results in a feeling of enrichment, even a false one.

In retrospect, we should not be surprised that we created a system that addicted even its creators. In the future, we should be far more careful about opening up Pandora’s boxes. And we should create—and encourage the creation at larger societal scales—new opportunities for engagement, for creation, for discovery, for activity that provide an alternative to the boredom that leads to addiction.

Become aware of the constant flow of information telling you what to think, how to feel, how to act. Do not let it into your mind. Do not let it steer you. Your internal reward structure needs to be independent and ungameable. That independence, in turn, should allow you to collaborate well with others who are similarly independent. Be wary of those who may well be nice, but who are captured.

Now, though, it is time to innovate, because change is accelerating, and the received cultural wisdom isn’t sufficient. Individuals themselves becoming more generalist—through learning skills across domains, for instance, rather than diving deep into only one—will help us in this endeavor.

It is important to know what the group thinks, but that is not the same as believing or reinforcing what the group thinks. In a time of rapid change in particular, then, it is important to be willing to be the lone voice. Be the person who never conforms to patently wrong statements in order to fit in with the crowd. Be Asch-Negative.

When people from the Old World came across the Atlantic and landed in the New World, they may have at first imagined that they had stumbled upon a vast geographic frontier, but they hadn’t. In 1491, the New World is estimated to have had between fifty million and one hundred million people in it, with uncountable distinct cultures and languages. Some people were living in city-states, among astronomers, craftsmen, and scribes; others as hunter-gatherers.1 To Francisco Pizarro, the Inca Empire was a transfer of resource frontier. To the instigators of the rubber boom in western Amazonia at the end of the 19th century, the Zaparo territory was a transfer of resource frontier—and once the Zaparos were thus weakened, their longtime competitors, the Huaorani, moved in as well.2 In modern times, transfer of resource frontiers are everywhere: oil drilling, fracking, and logging in ancestral lands; predatory lending, as with subprime mortgages and much student debt; the Holocaust. One symptom of transfer of resource frontiers is tyranny.

The fourth frontier is a framework, therefore, that can be understood with an evolutionary tool kit. It is not a policy proposal. The fourth frontier is the idea that we can engineer an indefinite steady state that will feel to people like they live in a period of perpetual growth, but will abide by the laws of physics and game theory that govern our universe. Think of it like the climate control that allows the inside of your house to hover at a pleasant spring temperature as the world outside moves between unpleasant extremes. Engineering an indefinite steady state for humanity will not be easy, but it is imperative.

Civilization as we know it is going to become senescent because that which made us successful will ultimately destroy us.

Liberates (that is, that frees people to do rewarding, interesting, awesome stuff), Is antifragile, Is resistant to capture, and Is incapable of evolving into something that betrays its own core values. In the technical language of evolution, we need a system that is an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy, a strategy incapable of invasion by competitors.

We are not served by ignoring what we are—brutal apes, by one measure. We are also not served by pretending that brutal apes are the only thing that we are. We are also generous, cooperative beings full of love. We have arrived in the 21st century with evolutionary baggage, and a fair bit of intellectual confusion. Let us understand the baggage, in order to reduce the confusion, and increase our odds of moving forward with maximal human flourishing.

The Maya had an Enlightenment of their own, long before the European Enlightenment. We will never know its extent, as the vast majority of their books were destroyed by Europeans.

In order for us to have a conversation about humanity’s future effectively, people of every political persuasion need to understand diminishing returns, unintended consequences, negative externalities, and the finite nature of resources. Liberals (our political kin) are particularly prone to underestimating diminishing returns and unintended consequences. Conservatives are particularly prone to underestimating negative externalities and the finite nature of resources.

As Thomas Jefferson observed, even democracies need rebellion with some regularity.8 To the degree that a system is set in stone, it will be both gameable and gamed.

Society is obsessed with short-term safety because short-term harm is easy to detect and comparatively simple to regulate. Long-term harms are a different story, being more difficult to detect, and even harder to prove.

Regulation has a bad reputation in many circles. It is often done badly, and when it is done well, it tends to render the problems it addresses minor or invisible. As such, many see it as a needless obstacle, unaware of the benefits it has brought. A good regulatory scheme is efficient and light-handed—all but invisible. While inherently constraining, its net effect should be liberating, allowing access to the benefits of innovation without having to obsess about hidden consequences.

No manufactured system has regulation that is as elegant as that found in the human body, but we do have examples of good regulation in such systems. Take commercial air travel, perhaps the safest way to travel. Its safety is due to every aspect of it being regulated, and systematic investigation of the rare accidents that do happen. One could complain about the cost and inefficiency of the rules surrounding aviation, but those objections must be understood in context: the regulations make it possible for a sizable fraction of the world’s population to access almost any location on Earth within twenty-four hours, all while being far safer than one is when driving to the airport. The cost of the regulations is small compared to the freedom they create, a goal we should strive for with every industrial process.