Issue 16: Are We a Match for Our Problems?

Although we often seem to forget it, we are animals.  We may be the animals with the highest IQ on the planet, but we are still animals.  Our species of homo sapiens is the product of 130,000 years of evolution.  A human living 130,000 years ago looked and behaved pretty much the same as me and you.  And that human was the product of approximately 6 million prior years of evolution. For approximately 99.99% of that time, we lived in wild habitats in which evolution shaped us to survive optimally.  In that environment, several behaviours were critical, including:

  • paying most attention to what is physically present (which dictated our survival in the wild)
  • prioritising the short term over the long term (if we didn’t overcome immediate threats, we’d never get to the longer term ones)
  • identifying with our group in opposition to other groups (our survival required social cooperation, but we didn’t have unlimited resources to share)
  • amassing maximum resources (we never knew when our next ‘kill’ might come, so we had to grab opportunities)
  • a ‘bystander bias’ (if there was a threat, it didn’t make sense for everyone to respond; the strongest would)
  • dealing with simple tasks, one at a time (related to immediacy)
  • hierarchical organisation (the weakest died, so status was based upon relative power and strength)
  • developing automatic behaviours and habits which made our actions more cognitively efficient.

How does that prepare us for just two of the most pressing (and related) problems in our world today?: 

  1. the climate emergency (complex, physically remote for most, requiring sacrifice and loss by the ‘haves’, relatively longterm)
  2. social injustice (requires the powerful sharing their power and resources with the less powerful and challenging cognitive bias)

This comparison raises a real question for me about whether we have over-extended our capacity as a species.  Given our deeply engrained characteristics, it’s no surprise that the most common reactions to these, and other, crises are: 

  • waiting for ‘someone else’ to solve the problems (a default to hierarchy and presumed leadership)
  • retreating into denial, feeling too small and insignificant to make a difference on such a vast scale
  • refusing to make personal sacrifice (preventing loss is a more powerful motivation than making gain)
  • hoping for a technological fix (there’s a long history of humans believing in magic)
  • lacking stamina to address such intractable problems
  • fighting with others over ever scarcening resources.

It seems to me that humanity is going to have to evolve substantially and rapidly in order to save ourselves from our own self-created fate.  We’ve fallen into all the traps of our evolutionary design over the last 200 years.  The only advantage we hold over our fellow animals is our greater capacity to learn and change.  We could start by studying the first list above and actively pursuing their opposites.  We will truly have to do that over the next few years if we are to deserve our name: homo sapiens.