Outpacing Evolution: Why Our Bodies Are Stuck in the Past

Outpacing Evolution: Why Our Bodies Are Stuck in the Past

Humans have advanced at breakneck speed. In just the past millennium, we have reshaped the entire planet; we built soaring skyscrapers, world-wide communication network, a practically infinite supply of food. We have turned the earth into a sci-fi world, unrecognisable from the past, and we keep advancing. The only problem is: we have been evolving extremely slowly. Our brains and bodies are not equipped for this new environment; we are working with ancient software.

I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, wisdom teeth, appendicitis, but the list just keep going further than you can ever imagine.

Ancient Survival Instincts

Think about how easy our loves are nowadays; we can just walk to the store for food, we have police and protection to handle threats, but it wasn't always that way. 

In early times, humans had to fend for themselves. Want protection, you need to prove you are worthy to join a pack, want to eat, you have to catch nutritious food, want to survive, you need to know what to do in dangerous situations.

Food wasn't all nutritious, and not at all plentiful, so humans had to find high calorie, energy dense food. Basically: fatty, sweet snacks in large portions. This was the only way for humans to not starve. Fortunately, it's much easier to not starve, but we haven't lost this instinct. Where does that leave us? It leaves us with an unlimited supply of fatty, sweet food that we, instinctively, eat large amounts of. This leaves us with eating addictions. This leaves us with obesity, diabetes, and financial distress. 

What about handing threats? It was extremely important to escape dangerous situations and we still have threats and dangerous situations today. However, some are majorly less severe than others. What's more dangerous: an overdue assignment or a polar bear chasing you? Pretty easy right? Obviously the polar bear... but our brain cannot tell the difference. So, it treats them both the same. This system, while ultimately effective, is extremely inefficient. That stress response uses extremely large amounts of energy, causing rapid weight loss, depression, and eventually, major health problems.

Okay, but I can't think of anything that the social alarm system in packs affects in my life. Wrong! Have you ever dropped a book at school and felt a sickening wave of shame and embarrassment? What do you think caused that negative reaction? It seems pointless, and it might be, but for early humans, dropping something could mean getting no food from that day's hunt, or getting ejected from your group entirely. That's certain death.

Physical Attributes

Throughout the millennia, humans did evolve, just not enough. You look at a picture of an early human, they look entirely different, big jaws, fur, hunched. These all served as essential traits for survival, and we lost them over time, but not all the traits that go with these features have gone away too.

Take the large jaw, for example: We needed that large jaw to chew leaves and raw meat, and with that came some extra teeth you know as "wisdom teeth". The large jaw went away, but the wisdom teeth did not, leaving them with nowhere to grow and leaving modern humans with extreme pain.

What about fur? Have you ever gotten goosebumps? It seems completely useless even for ancient humans but it was actually a system to trap heat by making the fur stand up. This is why we get goosebumps when it's cold. Making hair stand up also made early humans seem much larger in dangerous situations, so when we get nervous or spooked, we get goosebumps.

The Endless Race

It is crazy to think about how much of our daily, modern suffering is caused by random, leftover traits and useless survival instincts. We look at our complex emotional struggles, our health crises, and our physical quirks as personal failures. In reality, we are just a museum of ancient history trying to navigate a digital landscape.

Because human ingenuity moves exponentially and biological evolution moves at a snail's pace, we will probably be forever ahead of our own evolution. Our technology will continue to reshape the world in decades, while our DNA takes millennia to adjust. Until our biology catches up, we are left to survive in an office cubicle using the exact same tools that kept us alive on the savannah.