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

by Heather E. Heying

Yet one more is that reductionism facilitates the commodification of easily quantifiable things, while tending to ignore those things that are less quantifiable.

Thus, school becomes about metrics—how much, how...

A focus on speed and quantity is an error,

What myriad things are not being learned in school, because they succumb less easily to reductionist assessments?

school tend to fill children’s heads with knowledge, without showing them a path to wisdom.

Who am I, and what am I going to do about it?

How do I find my consciousness, my truest self?

modern schooling, especially the compulsory sort widespread across the WEIRD world, is more apt to teach quiescence and conformity.

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.18 This is where innovation and creativity occur, and yes, most of it is wrong or useless, but the most important ideas on which we now base our understanding of the world and our society came from the fringe:

The Sun is the center of the solar system; species adapt to their environments over time; humans can create technology that allows us to communicate across time and space, to fly, to create and explore virtual worlds. These were all impossible ideas. Laughable at the time. Those who quickly join in laughing at all fringe ideas now would have been laughing at all of those ideas in their time.

Risk and challenge help children learn.

authority that was earned rather than assumed,

Humans are antifragile; exposure to discomfort and uncertainty—physical, emotional, and intellectual—is necessary.

Risk and potential go hand in hand.

How do you actually teach people how to think, not what to think? It’s easy to say, but how is it done?

It is a failure of education to scare people into acceptable behavior.

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.

Authority is not to be used as a bludgeon to shut down the exchange of ideas.

if a trait is complex, has energetic or material costs, and persists over evolutionary time, it is an adaptation.

People who are deserving of being called “adult” can observe themselves carefully and skeptically, and regularly ask themselves questions like these: Am I taking responsibility for my own actions? Am I being closed-minded? Am I entrenched in a worldview, and if so, why? Am I coming to conclusions independently, or have I accepted an ideology that I allow to do my thinking for me? Do I avoid collaboration that would be valuable, if it would also be challenging? Am I letting emotions make decisions for me, especially hot, intense emotions? Am I ceding my adult responsibilities, and do I make excuses when I do?

These questions all ask, in different ways: Am I doing as well as I should or could be doing?

While it is true that we have lost track of the characteristics of adulthood, it is also true that the hyper-novelty of our world, specifically the reach of economic markets, is making it more difficult to be an adult. The market is full of con artists who want you to ignore your adult responsibilities. One of those adult responsibilities is to not spend money on every latest thing. Selling delayed gratification is rarely a successful business strategy, so it is hard to find in the marketplace. Instead, junk everything is available—junk food, entertainment, sex, news. The aggregate of the market is therefore selling infantile values, which make you a desirable consumer but a poor adult.

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

Children are growing up in a world that is designed to hurt them.

Remember Wile E. Coyote, whose life’s work was chasing the Road Runner in Looney Tunes cartoons? In hot pursuit he often found himself skidding off the edge of a cliff, where he would hang, suspended in air, until he looked down. Gravity did not apply until he recognized that it should. It was funny, because it was ludicrous. It was utterly ludicrous, and yet too many modern people seem to imagine that by changing people’s opinions or perspectives, you change underlying reality. In short, they believe that reality itself is a social construct.

Every opinion is not equally valid,

Movement increases wisdom. So, too, does exposure to diverse views, experiences, and places.

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.10

It is remarkable how the persistent empiricism of human beings, struggling to make their living in nature, results in practices that make ecological sense, even though they may be codified in ritual or explained in ways that seem superficial or not compelling ecologically. Indeed, local practitioners may have concepts, equally justifiable but very different from those of academics, of what constitutes a useful explanation.11

“When I succeed, it’s due to my hard work and intelligence; when I fail, the system is rigged against me, and I had bad luck.” It’s easy to see the flaw here when stated so clearly, but most adults today are motivated by some version of it in their day-to-day lives.

The fact that we tend to believe in bad luck, but not in good luck, makes it more difficult to learn from our mistakes.

Trying to explain away the past, rather than learning from it and moving on, is a poor use of time and intellectual resources.

Static rules are easy to remember; they are also of little use.

Being an adult, in part, means not abdicating responsibility, especially when others are depending on you.

A humorless society, community, or group of friends likely has large problems lurking just beneath the surface.

Give rats a lever that provides amphetamine on demand, and sure, they press the lever. If there is nothing else available to them, they become addicts. Give them an enriched environment, though, with lots of other cool rat stuff to do, and they don’t become addicts. They do other good rat stuff rather than become addicts.19 Perhaps they are, in fact, freed up to become obsessed over something that is healthy.

the Sucker’s Folly: the reward obscures the cost.

What the rat enrichment experiments suggest is that one contributor to addiction can be boredom. Or more specifically, a lack of awareness, or obfuscation, of opportunity cost. 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.

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.

Always be learning. Look for collaborators. Play at competition, and be prepared to stop playing if things get real. Be skeptical, if not suspicious, of any novel prescription for which the rationale is unstated or thin on reflection.

Seek out physical reality, not just social experience.

Get over your bigotry. Variation is our strength. Not just sex and race and sexual orientation, but class, neurodiversity, characteristics of personality—all of this adds to what we can accomplish on Earth.

Place equality where it belongs. Equality should be focused on the equal valuation of our differences. It should not be a bludgeon for uniformity.

Be grateful. Laugh daily, with other people. Put your phone down.

Learn how to give useful critique without backing the other person into a corner.

Culture we define as beliefs and practices that are shared and passed between members of a population. These beliefs are often literally false, metaphorically true, implying that they result in increased fitness if one acts as if they are true despite the fact that they are either inaccurate or unfalsifiable. Culture is a special mode of transmission because it can be passed horizontally, rendering cultural evolution immensely faster and more nimble than genetic evolution. This also renders culture noisy in the short term, before new ideas have endured the test of time. Long-standing features of culture, by contrast, constitute an efficient packaging of proven patterns. Culture can spread horizontally, but its consequential parts are ultimately passed vertically, from generation to generation.

Culture is received wisdom, generally handed to you by ancestors, and efficiently transmitted.

Consciousness we define—as we laid out in the very first chapter of the book—as that portion of cognition that is newly packaged for exchange,1 meaning that conscious thoughts are ones that could be delivered if someone asked what you were thinking about. It is emergent cognition, where innovation and rapid refinement occur. Conscious thoughts may never be conveyed, but they can be, and the most important ones are, as consciousness is most fundamentally a collective process in which many individuals pool insights and skills to discover what wa...