What Happened to Evolution?
There’s this burly guy at my company who works in HR. Every day he types away endlessly on his MacBook Pro and whenever I see him, I can’t help shake the belief that if he were living in a different time he would most likely be a viking or a blacksmith. I don’t really understand how the trajectory of evolutionary history abruptly changed to put different demands on such an individual.
His large stature would have given him an advantage to increase the chance of being able to accumulate resources. He would have used his muscles to forcefully attain these resources by means of threat or violence. But in 2021, his physiological endowment gives him no advantage at his job, and his only means of accumulating resources are dictated by the allocation of his attention span to tasks on his computer.
Funnily enough, this former viking, who once could have been swinging a sword, now feverishly types away on his keyboard avoiding the danger of burning his lips on a pumpkin spice latte. Ouch! Too hot.
Charles Darwin would probably be scratching his head looking for an explanation. Our chances of survival used to be dictated by our physical nature i.e. survival of the fittest. But it’s no longer the fittest who necessarily survive or thrive.
Less than .001% of current society is rewarded for physical prowess, that being the domain of sports. If LeBron James lived around the time when this country was founded, he would most likely have been a slave. Better yet, if he lived around the turn of the 20th century, a sharecropper perhaps.
However, LeBron James happened to be lucky enough to be born at a time where we highly value elite athletic ability (and civil rights), so much so that we view it for entertainment. His traits align perfectly with the demands of modern basketball, making him therefore a prized specimen in our society at large.
But there’s a reason we only have one LeBron James, and that others have never been heard of because they were a dishwasher at Wendy’s or a math tutor somewhere in Arizona. These are individuals who possessed similar physical traits to LeBron James, but didn’t possess the genes for an interest in basketball.
If you’re like my burly viking co-worker, your job places an entirely different set of demands on you independent of your physical build. When it comes to desirable psychological traits, our society has specifications that create a strata of people with unbounded attention. The free-market values conscientiousness, ambition, resilience, and perseverance in this regard.
In the digital age, other specific characteristics are becoming increasingly desirable for people in different occupations. The prized commodity here is attention. An employer asks for 40 hours of attention on average per week. Your ability to perform, independent of occupation, is dependent on your dedication of mental resources to the task at hand.
Many people have difficulty willing themselves into doing something they are not interested in, but view a career rather as a means to an end, or more specifically, a way to put food on the table. The need for attention as a valuable commodity has led to the explosion of the pharmaceutical industry’s ADHD medication market.
In cut-throat careers, people will take drugs to exploit a competitive advantage over others. This became obvious to me when I worked in Silicon Valley; the use of cocaine in the sales department was ubiquitous.
College and graduate students in academically rigorous programs, like medicine or law, are desperate for attentional enhancement. When I was an undergraduate, many students I knew bought prescription medications illegally around final exams time so that they could study uninterrupted for 14 hours at a time.
There are increasing demands being placed on humans for the dedication of our attention to tasks that are demanded from us. On top of that, we find respite in using highly addictive social media as a means of compensation for the cognitive strain we endure.
Our communication is subsequently becoming condensed and processed for the purposes of allocating attentional resources. Attention is epigenetic, making it as malleable as the evolution of culture itself. Genes evolve and culture follows en suite. We treat attentional disorders such as ADHD with a greater variety of drugs in the hopes of curbing undesirable behaviors such as hyperactivity and mood swings. Yet treating such disorders could be maladaptive if we don’t understand the evolutionary purpose of such behavior.
One could formulate that human beings evolved for a different purpose, speaking over the campfire after a day’s hunt, sharing stories about the galaxy and looking out at the stars in the night sky. Our ancient ancestors dedicated themselves to traversing the plains of the savannah in search of food during the day, only to use the time around the campfire in the evenings to engage in an intimate experience of ideas exchange.
Similarly, we enjoy the shared experience of a smaller group of individuals exchanging ideas in depth, similar to the format of a podcast interview, because it allows us to listen in on the conversation as if we were there. Two individuals speaking together has the effect of touching millions of listeners all huddled around the same campfire.
Psychologists have argued that communication in this form is not only inherent to our human nature, but a necessary part of developing the faculties for speech and language. Children at a young age learn appropriate social behaviors/cues by engaging in play with other children. The inchoate period in childhood development is so delicate and crucial that we treat children with greater sensitivity, understanding that certain experiences leave an indelible mark on them.
Communication has now become bite-sized and easier to process for the average person, giving way to emoji characters, abbreviations like “lol” or “stfu.” We want others to get to the point, condensing our attention span to the size of a clickbait headline. People use reading to virtue signal, a sign that they were able to finish a seemingly insurmountable task like finishing a book despite living in an age of distraction.
We praise people for their ability to stay focused, whereas the victims of the age of distraction become forgotten consumers who disappear somewhere among the likes and comment sections of the videos we watch. The ability to pay attention in our modern era is becoming more scarce while also being increasingly demanded from us.
For those working at home or in front of a computer, the thin line separating endless hedonistic distraction and actual work is as subtle as a click of the mouse. The majority of time is spent attending to the most pressing matters in our jobs, but every free moment that could have been previously dedicated to contemplation is now spent on searching for the answer as soon as it comes into consciousness.
The most perplexing questions to life like “How big is the Universe?” or “what is consciousness?” left us wondering for days, reaching out to others for answers, and beginning to critically engage with the tenants of epistemology to get to the heart of such seemingly daunting questions that re-shaped our reality.
Nowadays, the answers are less ambiguous, yet the mental effort to understand such questions, and the gains from this process, are absent when we can have others do the thinking for us, having this information at our fingertips anytime, anywhere.
Nassim Taleb coined the term Antifragility to describe systems that grow under stress or pressure — similarly to growing muscles when you work out or developing an immune response after being exposed to a pathogen. We challenge students in the hopes of them developing stronger methods of questioning and reasoning. An age of appeasement rather than objectivity leads to a generation of thinkers unable to formulate their interests or question their own intellect.
What happens the more reliant we become on the internet for instant information retrieval and communication? According to the principles of antifragility, we won’t develop the same cognitive capacity to think critically. We search for the answers no longer in the stars, but on the pages of Wikipedia. The absence of God has ushered in an era of technological worship, digital humanism is leading us to strive to become the best version of ourselves, to attain the status of new digital Gods.
Our ability to devote attention combined with an over-reliance on internet technologies for information is changing the evolution of homo sapiens. Our hardware bodies may be adapted to the modern era, but our software minds are still stuck in the hunter-gatherer age. Since survival is no longer a priority in an abundant society, we learn to adapt to the faster-evolving demands of the digital landscape.
Only once we are fully unplugged will we begin to realize the extent of where we are, and where we have gone, like a sleepwalker waking up from a dream.