Miscellaneous Feeds

“T-Rex doesn’t want to be fed. He wants to hunt. You can’t just suppress 65 million years of gut instinct.” – Dr. Alan Grant, Jurrasic Park.

Of course, Isla Nublar (Jurrasic Park) was attempting to placate those sixty-five million years of gut instinct and DNA, and it failed. Miserably. When you capture something, it’s just not the same. That’s why the zoo and SeaWorld make you feel nothing, but even a small bobcat strolling across your back lawn raises the hairs on your neck. Humans have been removed from our ancestral environment for millennia, but the instincts and firmware that evolved from those conditions are still a part of our machinery. This dynamic is what evolutionary psychologists have dubbed Evolutionary Mismatch.

Most of human psychology evolved over eons in the Subsaharan African Savannahs. Only recently have humans lived in large-scale, post-agricultural, and post-industrial societies. Organic evolutionary processes take a long time to effect change. Our minds are better suited to ancestral, pre-agricultural conditions than modern conditions. Many aspects of contemporary living (e.g., the availability of calorie-dense foods, the absence of extended family members, etc.) do not match our evolved psychology, and problems like mental and physical health issues often result. This is a dynamic known as Evolutionary Mismatch.

Evolutionary Mismatch occurs when an organism’s traits, which evolved to be adaptive in one environment, become maladaptive or less beneficial in a new environment. This phenomenon arises when the environment changes more rapidly than the organism can adapt through genetic evolution.

There are two main types of evolutionary mismatch:

• Temporal Mismatch occurs when an environment changes over time, making previously adaptive traits less advantageous. For example, human dietary preferences that evolved in environments with scarce high-calorie foods are now maladaptive in modern societies with abundant processed foods.
• Spatial Mismatch occurs when organisms move to a new environment that differs significantly from their ancestral one. For example, island birds that evolved fearlessness due to a lack of predators become vulnerable when mammalian predators are introduced.

Evolutionary mismatch is particularly relevant to humans because our modern environment differs drastically from the ancestral conditions in which many of our traits evolved. This rapid change, occurring over just a few thousand years, has outpaced our genetic adaptation, leading to various mismatches in areas such as diet, physical activity, and social interactions.

The good news is that human beings are a pretty adaptable species. Combinations of various evolved traits make (most) of us decent drivers. Humans never evolved to drive cars, but we have the motor skills and implicit memory to get us from point A to point B in an automobile. Through fortunate twists of genetics, some of us can develop the combined skills to be NASCAR or F1 drivers. Still, there were no Chevy Camaros on the African Savannah for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to master 200,000 years ago.

Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should do something.

That’s another Jurrasic Park quote. Various aspects of our evolved mental firmware served us well in our ancestral past and continue to serve us today. However, some of those aspects can be deadly to us now — such as an over-abundance of calorie-dense food leading to our present obesity rates. Others may seem detrimental or undesirable because of our modern interpretations of how humans should behave in a prosocial society. Most of these relate to our emotional processes and how we ought to interpret them instead of why we have them in the first place. Evolutionary Mismatch conflicts with our civilized, post-modern beliefs in how humans are versus how we believe they ought to be. If that seems arrogant or presumptuous, congratulations, you’ve divined my reason for writing this essay. Because…

Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should do something.

You see, most modern ideological disparities can be distilled to a conflict between the evolutionary mismatch of our evolved function and the memetic beliefs about what we are versus what we should be. It’s evolved function vs. idealized form.

Could Women Learn to Find Househusbands Sexy?

Enter Dr. Steve Stewart-Williams. In a recent interview, Mairi Macleod asked Steve,…

“Do you think women will learn to find househusband-type men sexy given that this would be an adaptive thing to do in order to enable reproduction in couples where women are bringing in an increasingly large share of the household income?”

The whole exchange can be found here, but the summary of Steve’s (overly diplomatic) response was thus:

“Yes and no. Social norms are clearly important. It’s more acceptable today than 50 years ago for the woman to work while the man takes care of the kids, and thus, more women (and men) are happy with that arrangement.

Women may find their househusband partners sexy for many reasons: their looks, personality, and sense of humor. But could women learn to find themselves sexy, specifically because they change diapers or do the dishes?

Could they learn to find washing dishes sexier than status or social dominance?

It seems unlikely to me – even if such preferences would be biologically adaptive today. Humans don’t have an evolved tendency to acquire whatever tastes and preferences happen to be adaptive in their current environment. Instead, we have certain built-in tastes and preferences that were adaptive for our ancestors throughout the course of our evolution.

For women, one of these built-in preferences seems to be for men with high status and ambition. Thus, high-status, ambitious men may always have more female fans than househusbands.

That doesn’t mean, though, that women can’t find househusbands sexy. It just means that if they do, it’ll largely be for other reasons. And of course, there are always exceptions!”

Could women learn to find washing dishes sexier than status or social dominance? Let’s rephrase this.

Could women override 200,000 years of evolutionarily functional sexual arousal to high-status, physically desirable, and socially dominant men and learn to favor men who display the behavioral cues found attractive in feminine women? Can women psychologically condition themselves to be aroused by feminine-presenting males enough to want to reproduce with them?

Surprisingly, the answer is yes.

Anything can become normal — even the most morally reprehensible atrocities — once you condition a subject to push past their innate revulsion response. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something. That evolved revulsion response still manifests in humans 200,000 years later because it’s served us in our survival and reproduction. The same goes for jealousy, mate guarding, division of labor, conventional gender roles, anger, happiness, hope, and frustration. These proclivities and behaviors manifest in us because they were beneficial enough to be passed on to our present generations. While some aspects necessarily demand our self-control, denying their utility or presuming they ought to be purged from future generations is the epitome of human moralistic arrogance.

We think we know better.

Ultimately, T-Rex doesn’t want to be fed; he wants to hunt, and no amount of convincing him it’s his moral imperative to be fed will repress 65 million years of gut instinct. Evolutionary Mismatch places modern women in a real pickle. As more empowered women discover they’ve become the men they wanted to marry, they also find that they hate being that guy themselves. Rather than address the disease, we fixate on the symptoms. We exacerbate evolutionary mismatch by attempting to rewrite the rules of the game that were established 200,000 years ago.