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

by Heather E. Heying

We often mistake an effect (e.g., of an action, a treatment, a molecule) for our understanding of the effect. What a thing does, and what we think (or know) that it does, are not the same thing.

led astray by the fantasy of simplicity where the truth is complex.

Think you’ve found a solution that is too good to be true? Look hard for the hidden costs.

If you let your body communicate with you—with pain, swelling, heat, more—you are far more likely to get back in the game, whatever your game is, sooner, and more safely.

the hyper-novel world in which we live, so complex, so filled with choice and authorities of varying credentials arguing opposite things, that many of us crave simple, immovable rules with which to navigate our lives.

We want, at least in some realms, to be able to “set and forget”—to rely on culture, rather than consciousness.

This is part of what drives brand loyalty, taking the same commute even when a better one is available, and sticking to pharmaceutical and dietary recomm...

Listen to your body, remembering that pain evolved to protect you. Pain is information about the environment, and how your body is responding to it. Some injuries require professional treatment, but some can be monitored without intervention. Pain is both unpleasant and adaptive; think twice before shutting down its message.

Resist pharmaceutical solutions for medical problems if you can. While antidepressants, antianxiety meds, and more improve some people’s lives, they are often not the best solution. Usually, there are alternatives available; many mood disorders, such as depression, are beginning to be understood by Western medicine to be treatable with diet, ample sleep, and regular activity.

remember the Omega principle, which posits that expensive and long-lasting cultural traits like cuisine should be presumed to be adaptive, and that adaptive elements of culture are not independent of genes.

There is no universally best diet for humans. There can’t be.

When you see a paradox, keep digging.

In populations where the overlap of a trait is significant, it can be difficult to parse population-level patterns from individual experience. If you, as an individual, do not fit a particular pattern, the discrepancy can feel like evidence that the pattern is false, but that feeling does not make it so.

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.

What it would be foolish to do—and what many WEIRD people in the 21st century are doing—is to pretend that sex equals gender, or that gender has no relationship to sex, or that either sex or gender is not wholly evolutionary. Remember the Omega principle, which tells us that adaptive elements of our software (e.g., gender) are no more independent of our hardware (e.g., sex) than the diameter of a circle is independent of that circle’s circumference. Gender is more fluid than sex, and has many more manifestations, but “acting feminine” (gender) is not the same as “being female” (sex).

ask people to believe things that are patently untrue and they will be ever less likely to form a coherent worldview, one based in observation and reality, rather than fantasy.

When we say that men are taller than women, the words on average are implied.

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.

Different preferences lead to different choices.

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

Broadly speaking, there are three possible reproductive strategies: Partner up and invest long term, reproductively, socially, and emotionally. Force reproduction on an unwilling partner. Force nobody, but also invest little beyond short-term sexual activity.

If women adopting some of the worst traits of men is our evidence of equality and freedom, we need to reinvestigate our values.

Society sliding toward this third reproductive strategy for both men and women is a variation on the Sucker’s Folly—the tendency of concentrated short-term benefit (sexual pleasure) not only to obscure risk and long-term cost, but also to drive acceptance even when the net analysis is negative (in reducing the chances of finding love and all that flows from it).

Hotness is a manifestation of sexual strategy three gaining primacy. Beauty, by comparison, is a manifestation of the first sexual strategy, the one that’s in it for the long term. Hotness fades fast with reproductive potential. Beauty fades far more slowly.

Just as jealousy varies by sex—men are more likely to be jealous of physical infidelity, women are more likely to be jealous of emotional infidelity45—so

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.

Much human mythology is centered on inducing people to extend their concept of self, and to shape the in-group to which the concept applies—the Good Samaritan story reveals the capacity for love even between those who are supposed to be enemies.

Major programming of the brain can take place through cultural transmission when offspring are in close contact with their parents. This is far faster than genetic change, and allows not only for rapid behavioral evolution, but also for tailoring of behavioral patterns to the local environment—physical, chemical, biological, and social.

Behavioral flexibility—plasticity, which we will return to in the next chapter—emerges in organisms that are not fully programmed by the genome. Painting with a broad brush, plasticity increases both in species that have interaction between the generations and as helplessness in hatchlings and newborns increases.

What causes the transition from independent breeding, in which individuals are simply pursuing selfish interests, to cooperative breeding, a system of greater complexity and collaboration? In part, cooperative breeding, which is on full display in many human societies, is most likely to evolve when rates of promiscuity are low2 and resources are distributed across the landscape such that any given individual cannot monopolize them. The monopolization of resources opens the door to the monopolization of mates—indeed, the distribution of resources in space and time has far-reaching effects on mating systems.

Men might seem to be getting the better part of this deal—and indeed with respect to physical pleasure, easy access to sex is a prize from which most men cannot look away. But as we discussed in the previous chapter, the sex in question is low stakes, rewarding in the moment but meaningless in the long term. Men may physically feel as though they have been judged sexually worthy by large numbers of women, but subconsciously they know that the bar for such acceptance has been lowered so far as to be meaningless. Yes, it is sex, but it is junk sex, formulaic and without depth.

That said, heterosexuality is the norm, and not for socially constructed reasons. Among straight men and women: if women conclude that in order to be equal they must behave like men when it comes to sex, then the system breaks down into one in which everyone behaves like men at their most adolescent. In spite of its stodgy reputation, monogamy is the best mating system. It creates more competent adults, reduces the tendency to engage in violence and warfare, and fosters cooperative impulses.

A perfectly functional piece of hardware is of little value if the software and the files are seriously corrupted.

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.

The wisdom of elders is ancient and necessary in human history, and there is deep value in being skeptical of the wisdom of elders, when that wisdom is out of place, or of the wrong time. Parents have an overriding interest in their offspring being highly effective in whatever environment they will inhabit. If the mind’s software needs updating and the young are in a position to accomplish it, it is in everybody’s interest that the antiquated paradigm be replaced. This explains why, for healthy parents, seeing oneself in one’s children is some mixture of rewarding and jarring, but seeing them thrive is a thrill and a relief.

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.

Humans are both competitive and collaborative. We cannot be human without both of these things, and unstructured play reveals both in children.

We are being solidified by modernity into states that, in prior eras, would have been more ephemeral.

Consider the philosophical question, first introduced by the ancient Greeks, of the ship of Theseus: If over time this ship has a plank replaced because of rot, then another, and another, such that ultimately every single original part has been replaced, is it still the ship of Theseus? Is it, in fact, the same ship?

With an individual organism, even more than for a ship, the answer might be both yes in one sense and no in another. Yes, we have a continuous lifeline from our birth until our death. Yet the transformations that occur, most intensively as we move from childhood to adulthood, mean that we are not the same beings as we were, and...

Children across cultures and through time have managed to grow to adulthood and learn to become functioning members of their society without the necessity of schooling. Jump to the 21st century and we find a world where childhood without schooling is unthinkable. David Lancy, in The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings1

The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives. John Taylor Gatto, in A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling2

Keep your wits about you. Believe that you can rather than that you cannot. Build deep community and, having built it, trust that it will be there for you.

we should be asking ourselves: What do we need to learn in order to become our best selves?

And of those things that we do need to learn, which of them need to be taught, and which can we learn in other ways—through direct experience, or through observation and practice, for instance? Put another way: What do we need school for?

In school we also might learn what it sounds like when irreconcilable positions meet one another. This allows an insightful person to go on to do the same thing within themselves: hold two irreconcilable positions in their head at once. The value in this is immeasurable; it allows a person to learn argument by arguing with themselves, which facilitates their ability to both uncover and recognize truth.

Humans are perhaps unique in the degree to which our theory of mind—the ability to understand that other living beings have points of view, and that those perspectives might be different from our own—enables us to explore contradiction and paradox.

Paradoxes are the X on an analytical treasure map, inviting us to dig here. While the West has tended to avoid paradoxes and to find them troublesome, Eastern traditions are more likely to have embraced inconsistency. We argue that Buddhism being littered with contradictions13 is adaptive, serving exactly the educational purpose we are advocating for.

what school is, is parenting that has been outsourced.