Modern Wisdom - #192 - Professor Adam Hart - When Human Evolution Collides With The Modern World

Episode Date: July 4, 2020

Adam Hart is a scientist, author & presenter. Our species has been around for far longer than the modern world. This is leading to some imbalances between our evolutionary heritage and the environment we now find ourselves in. Expect to learn how obesity might be an evolutionary adaptation gone awry, why fight or flight happens in the workplace, the misalignment of technology with our brains, the evolutionary basis for violence and much more... Sponsor: Shop Eleiko’s full range at https://www.shop.eleiko.com (enter code MW15 for 15% off everything) Extra Stuff: Buy Unfit For Purpose - https://amzn.to/2ZlMFa1  Follow Professor Hart on Twitter - https://twitter.com/AdamHartScience Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Professor Adam Hart and we are talking about how unfit for purpose the human species is for the world that we find ourselves in now. You see, our species has been around for far longer than the modern world and this leads to imbalances between our evolutionary heritage and the environment that we find ourselves in. So today, expect to learn how obesity might be an evolutionary adaptation gonna rye, how the flight and fight happens in the workplace, the misalignment of technology with our brains, the evolutionary basis for violence and much more.

Adam is a presenter for BBC as well, so his delivery today is just so cool, a really, really impressed by him and the book is really fun. So if you're into this evolutionary biology stuff, I would very much suggest that you go and pick it up. In other news, it's Patreon. Patreon coming this Monday, I'm so, so excited

to get this live. If you love the show and you want to help support us make more of the content that you love, then please consider joining the Patreon. Dean has a shopping list for camera and lighting upgrades that is literally longer than his leg. So I think it might take quite a while for us to finish that off, but oh my god, once we finally complete all the upgrades that we want for this show, it is going to sound and look absolutely world class. The plan is to make modern wisdom the prettiest looking podcast, the most

overtly obscenely cinematic visual experience that we can muster. So it's just going to be awesome. I'm mega mega excited as you can hear and the opportunity to release the new recap series and to involve you guys in voting for upcoming guests and topics. All this sort of stuff is hopefully going to repay you for your support and help to level this show up to where it needs to be the guests that we get on the volume, the consistency consistency. Yeah, the consistency, like I was thinking about a cake there. Yeah, the consistency of guests that we get at the volume,

at the pace, you know, I really do think this show can become one of the best in Europe, and as we continue to level up the quality, we're only going to grow faster and faster. So thank you to everyone who is going to become a part of that on Monday. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Adam Hart. Are you feeling fit for purpose this evening? To be honest, at the moment, I'm not sure I'm feeling fit for purpose at any given point, but I'll give it a go. That's fantastic. So today we're talking about human evolution and what happens when it collides with the modern world, the imbalance between sort of who we are and where we exist, right?

Yeah, exactly. That's what the book is fundamentally about, basically, we're an evolved animal and we're pretty decent, right? We're pretty good evolved animal. We fit very well to the world and we've achieved global dominance as a consequence, but we have created now a modern world environment

that seems to clash. And we've got lots of problems in the modern world that we can try to take back to our evolutionary heritage to greater or lesser extent. Sometimes it's quite a playful piece, sometimes it works quite nicely, but we can see those evolutionary echoes in the modern world. So that's the kind of overall idea. I get it. So how much of an imbalance is there between humans and the modern world? Because sometimes How much of an imbalance is there between humans and the modern world? Because sometimes I think that I'm doing pretty alright and then sometimes I feel a bit like an alien. Yeah, I think we have to understand that we have changed the world in such a massive and dramatic way. In some cases over the last decade, I mean, if you think about it, we're having a conversation here

over Skype. I've got my Twitter feed open. We can talk about things going viral and social media stress and fofo and all that sort of stuff. That this would have been meaningless even 10 years ago. And that's just in one small aspect of our life. If we look across the piece, I mean, COVID-19 is exposed, of course, how globally connected we all are. We've got used the idea of going on flights and moving around. The world now is a very different place from what it was a generation before. And of course, if we look back over the last 100 years or so, it's a very different place.

So we've always changed our environment. That's almost a feature of humanity. But the changes that we produce now and the environment that many of us now live in and what we call the modern world is a very, very different world from well even a century ago But actually the world in which we we evolved you know if we look at us sort of post agricultural revolution ancestors 10,000 years ago And we compare it to our lives now it's a very very different sort of setup Although of course many aspects of it are also the same so it's it is a different world that we live in and I think we have to accept that

Yeah, I suppose the first thing to realize here is how slow evolution works and how quick and effective we are at changing our environment. Yeah, that's right. I mean, if you look back, so the biggest, probably the biggest thing that happened to us was that we worked out how to grow food. And obviously that's a pretty decent thing to have worked out. It saves us a lot of time, allows us to expand our technology and innovation because we're no longer foraging for food and we have a different sort of societal setup.

But that came with problems. So actually when we developed agriculture, there were a lot of health problems, our dentition. We suffered from dental careies for the first time extensively, for example, because of the way that our skulls were changing and our dentitions were changing. So we did have evolutionary change and that slowly but surely helped us

to accommodate the changes that were happening. But we're talking over thousands of years. It wasn't as if it wasn't like the internet revolution where within five years everybody's online. And that's not how the agricultural revolution worked. It was over a long period of time. We also have an evolutionary change in order to, for example, digest milk. So those of us that have lactase persistence and are able to drink raw milk, that is an evolutionary adaptation to daring and to farming. So we see that happening quite slowly. And of course

that's what environmental changes are often like. There are non-human induced. But recently, we've seen environmental changes that are just absolutely ridiculous. I mean, you look across the world at the moment at mega cities, for example, super cities. We have literally tens of millions of people living on top of each other in incredibly high density environments. The number of people on the planet is enormous compared to what it was, the technological shifts that have happened. These are all environmental changes. Now, there are changes to our environment,

but affect how we behave and affect how we live. And really, the change over the last, let's call it the last generation. You know, we can argue about whether it's 20 years or 30 years or 50 years, actually, it doesn't really matter when we look at it in evolutionary terms, because it's too slow for us to or 50 years, actually, it doesn't really matter when we look at it in evolutionary terms because it's too slow for us to evolve to take account of it. We have to have social sort of accommodation

for all these environmental changes and it's incredibly rapid and dramatic. It really is. I was in Dubai a couple of years ago with my dad and I couldn't believe just how recent that city was. Yeah, I mean, that was... That was desert. Not that long ago. Really not that big of a... It's more fishing village, I mean, that was, that was, that was, that's it. That's not that long ago. Bro, really not that long ago.

That's a, it's a small fishing village, I think, wasn't it originally? Insane. So obviously, there's kind of two, two schools of thought, I suppose, or broadly two schools that I see. One of them being the, left leaning person who might look at the modern world and look at inequities and inequalities

and stuff like that and talk about it being bad, but then someone like Stephen Pinker who would look rationally at all of the ways with life expectancy and modern medicine and things like that that are effective. So there's kind of this balancing board in terms of how people see the world, but I guess evolution and humans and our ability to adapt, that's not going to change at all. No, we're not going to evolve our way out of some of the problems that we face right now. I was thinking about this actually today because social media was being discussed on the

radio, so I was driving and I talk about social media in the book. But the way that we have evolved an amazing capacity for social behaviour and that's almost a definitional part of our species and the ability for us to communicate in language enhances that sociality and you sort of get this runaway selection where one enhances the other which increases the benefits of the other. Our intelligence, we see this across the animal kingdom, more social animals, don't have larger brains. All of these things are intermixed and interlinked, and we're incredibly good at it, right? We're incredibly good at living together, cooperating, working together, achieving incredible things face to face, and we know the rules, and most of us are able to read the room and work out

emotional engagements with people. And we have an emotional and most of us are able to read the room and work out emotional engagements with people. We have an emotional intelligence that lets us navigate that environment, but now we go online and we sort of try to use those same rules, but it's a completely different environment that we have to operate in. People can say, well, that's kind of a trivial example, but people commit suicides as a consequence of interactions online. That is the ultimate lack of fitness, right? To take your own life as a consequence of something. And that is really a very serious thing. It affects people's lives.

It affects how people interact with each other and their mental health. And it's because we don't know the rules. Now, we've had thousands, tens of thousands of years of evolution to help us build up the cognitive processes that enable us to navigate our social world in the real world. We've had about 10 years to work out the rules. And of course, and here's the thing, right? As soon as we work out the rules, the social environment changes because something that's a new form.

So, people, I think I sort of got the impression people were starting to get a handle on how to use Facebook. But then Twitter came up on the sort of back, back, right, since then everyone was getting quite involved with that, and that is a very different vibe to it. People say things to me on Twitter, they would never say to my face, you would never get up in someone's face like that and say the sorts of things that people will say on there.

You just wouldn't do that. We've had tens of thousands of years of social evolution that stop you from doing that because you're likely to get punched in the face, but that doesn't happen online. So I think we start to learn the rules and then something new comes along. We get Instagram coming in when suddenly we get this highly filtered version of Instagram is kind of an interesting one. It's quite a, it has a high potential for mental health damage, I think, because of our tendency to compare and contrast with other people's lives. That is something that we are just coming to terms with. As soon as we do that, of

course, we'll tick talks around now, so that's the new big thing, isn't it? And we'll get used to that. And then the goalposts will move again. So even when we're able to get a handle on this new environment, we shift the environment and it's just happening all the time. And I think that is really the key point we are changing what we do and the way that we interact and the environment that we're in, in all kinds of axes, in ways that really are, don't just outstrip evolution,

I mean outstrip evolution because they're happening sub-generational, but they outstrip even our ability to sit down and think about it, even our ability to just get a basic handle on it. And I think we have to sit back sometimes and realize just how remarkable we are, and that we can do these things. And you and I are having a conversation over the internet. This would have been a ridiculous thing to consider a generation ago, but at the same time, we aren't always up with the rules of engagement, and I think that's something that we really need to sort out. Yeah, there's an arms race going on at the moment, and there's a number of different levels

that it's operating on. So, technology and new modes of being will always lead, then probably a little bit after that, individuals might start to adapt, then some social norms might arise around how groups should adapt within that, then lagging up behind that, the policymakers finally get their act together and catch on to the fact that we need GDPR online compliance, or we need to police what YouTube is policies able to do or what Twitter's policy is able to do or whatever it might be. And then bringing up the rear, a couple of hundred generations after that,

evolution is like the old slow decrepit dog. There's like at the end of the leash, like 50 yards behind you, just slowly creeping up behind. And we've got all of these, and you totally write like the arms race that's going on between the pace that we're able to move at as a society, as a world, and everything else, you know, those layers and layers there, several different sort of filtering points at which we're not able to keep up.

So, I mean, is evolution right now, is human evolution kind of a little bit pointless? Because by the time that you evolve, the environment that you've evolved to adapt to will have changed. Yes, and of course, many of the things we're talking about, evolution can only happen if there's a genetic basis for the traits that you're referring to, and if that genetic basis affects survive on an ultimately reproduction, right? That's your fundamental aspects of it. And, and many of the features that plague us in modern life might have some echoes and evolution, but they're not necessarily affecting, they're not necessarily affecting our reproduction, if you like. So, our inability to handle social media may well have an evolutionary sort of echo in terms of the types of social groups that we've evolved to handle. And the size of those social groups and those sorts of interactions, that may well be the mismatch that we see in the modern world,

but our inability to handle that doesn't necessarily affect our ability to reproduce. It doesn't become a dominant feature. It's not, if you like, open to natural selection in the modern world. So evolution isn't going to get us out of that problem, even though there may actually be some genetic component to it. Our ability to handle larger groups could well be a genetic component. If we accept that there is some evolutionary echo to the way that we think about these things then there's going to be some variation in population and some people of course can handle things better than

others and actually you know like I talk about in the book for some people social media is in a problem at all and for other people it's a very big problem and there's no reason to assume that there may not be some underlying genetic variance there. It's going to be very complex and it's going to be far from straightforward, but there could be something there. But is that ever going to translate into a sort of meaningful selection environment so that people that do well on Twitter, suddenly have more children actually, they pass on that ability to do well on Twitter?

That sort of evolutionary scenario seems a little unlikely. But the biggest problem with it is that, is that even if that were the case, of course, by the time that's able to act in a generation or so, the problem's gone away because we've come up with a new way of interacting. I've just been joined by a almost two-year-old who should be downhellow, darling.

He should be downstairs. So if I could just pause very quickly. I'll have him remove, tag on him. Absolutely fine, yeah. We can send the child's catches. That's it. The child catches are coming to your old being right. No, I've sent for the child catches.

So all right. The certainly fine two-year-old has two year olds has arrived. All right, fella. See you later on. Just you know, it was your co-host for a brief, for a brief while there. Yeah, well, and Eela starts, oh, could you close the door? Sorry, sorry. Yes, sorry about that. So yeah, I'm a bit, you know, that that's that's the big problem problem with all of these things is even if there was enough variation enough of it was genetic in the background, then it made some meaningful sense and people that did well in certain things left more roster than others by the time that happens,

the environment has changed, we've changed the environment. Of course, there may be more subtle effects with that. We talked earlier about social media causing problems. One of those problems is things like stress. And we can see some genetic basis and differences in the way that people handle stress. But equally, that's a balance because some people will handle it in different ways. This warrior, warrior kind of idea, which which maybe have strength and weaknesses at different points. So all of it, all of it becomes quite difficult to see a way to evolve our way out of trouble. But certainly evolution has provided some of the background that sort of got us into trouble in the first place. Yeah, it's so weird the way that our evolutionary

heritage rears its head when these new things happen, right? So you bring in a new technology and you're like, well, I wonder how the human makeup is going to respond to this surplus of food. I wonder how this human makeup is going to respond to this, that hypernormal stimuli coming from your mobile phone and dopamine hits throughout the day and all this sort of things. And it's crazy, man. It's so fascinating. This is why I've been loving reading your book and some of Robert Wright's work and Rob Henderson, we recently had him on talking about evolution and dating and it's really, really cool.

So you mentioned there about group size, actually, I wanted to ask, how does Dunbar's number relate to social media? Yeah, well, this is a really interesting one because it's, the odd thing I found when researching this idea was that you can find quite a lot of people say all dumbass numbers are very controversial and you'll kind of read around and people will come up with different numbers.

So the idea of the Dunbar numbers, it's the number of people that are in your social group that you can feel comfortable with and Robin Dunbar, I think, to find out this idea of who you could go up to in a bar and join for a drink without feeling embarrassed about it. And the idea is that that number maxes out at around 150, but that there are layers within that. So there tends to be smaller numbers, sort of around five or so that you're very intimate close friends, and then a slightly wider circle and expands out.

And the idea is that when you go beyond the Dunbar number, that you struggle with those social groups and that social groups tend to form naturally in human, both in human history, actually, if we look back in modern sort of human relationships into these kind of groups of that number. And I saw lots of people go, well, that's not true. And you'll find this other number in there. You say, well, no, it's 350. And if someone else that came up with research, it's a 1,200. And you've got all these sort of people arguing the details. But what I noticed

never really came out was the idea that there was a limit. And in fact, the upper limit seems to be down to our ability to remember faces. We at some point I had, you know, we can't cope with any more. And so when you follow all this through this idea of the Dunbar number, however, which way you dice it, you end up with people deciding that, yeah, well, there is a limit. Actually, we're just not totally sure, you know, maybe the numbers this, maybe the numbers that. But there is a limit. And that limit seems to always be in the order of hundreds or, you know, perhaps up to a thousand. Well, when you look at people's online social networks,

they are much larger in many cases. And in many cases, those online social networks can be quite active as well. So it's not just a case of, you've got, say, 10,000 Twitter followers, but you only interact with two or three of them. Actually, you may have interactions with a large number of them in different shifting patterns. So you can end up actually with very large networks. And then when you intercept that, I mean, this is the other thing, right?

That's our virtual world in one platform. But of course, people have lots of different platforms with different interactions on. And on top of all of that, and this is something that I wasn't able to really find that much research on, we have our real world networks as well. So we might be maxing out or getting close to the Dunbar number or whatever number we decide in the real world, and then we lump on a whole load of different social media platforms with all of these things as well. And it seems that people, particularly people who are quite room-in-south and perhaps prone to overthinking things maybe, have a real issue when the

social network of the online world mixes with their real world and it can cause real problems. But equally for some people, it can be a real big benefit. There is this slightly odd idea that we know friendships are good and healthy and we know that friendship networks and strong friendships are good for mental health. But having very, very large networks online for some people can be very bad. And my advice for that, I didn't write a self-help book, but if I was to, my advice for these online social networks is learn how to mute and ignore and block and learn how to manage them to get what you want out of them.

I think that's something I've learned, but I think it's also something that we don't tend to think of when we join a social network online and we expand beyond our Dunbar number range, if you like. We often don't think, well, why am I doing this? What is the point? I see people on Twitter and Facebook go, I'm taking a break from this now, it's all too much. And you think, well, what were you doing? What was your reason for joining that network? And what are you trying to get out of it? We're not used to doing that because

we don't think of friendship groups in that way in the real world, right? We don't always look at someone and go, right, what am I going to get out of you? What's my angle here in becoming a friend of yours? That's not what we do. Not that costly. You know? Like, yeah. And also, there's not a, if you just stop speaking to someone that happened, you don't remove yourself entirely from the social environment. You don't go, right? That's it. I just fancy a little bit of time in monk mode for the next four months. All of you, my entire social circle, all of you are ourselves. I can't take you anymore.

Yeah, that doesn't happen. It is interesting. I mean, there's a bunch of doorways open in my mind. One of them being play stupid games, win stupid prizes, which is a quote from Naval Ravacant, where he asks, what is the prize for winning the game that you are playing at at the moment?

And one of those for a lot of people will be checking their phone every 30 minutes. Like, what is the prize for winning that? And this is something, I am the epitome of someone who spent too much time on their phones. I'm a club promoter by trade. I've sent

and received millions of messages on WhatsApp, millions. So I am very, very accustomed to what it feels like to have a tech addiction. And I've had to set myself such hard and fast rules in a desperate attempt to try and wrangle a technology which is far, far, far outgurning me. This race to the bottom of the brain stem is, I am just a pawn and there is billions of dollars and the smartest design is on the planet. Behind every button press, you know anyone that's spent a bit of time looking at Tristan Harris's stuff

from the Center for Humane Research and he's, we've spoken a lot on the show about tech addiction, we're big fan, big advocate of fun reduction on the show. But yeah, having a separate device for social media has been a big help for me, not allowing my phone into certain rooms of the house. So if I want to use my phone, I've got to go into the kitchen,

not sleeping with my phone beside my bed, has been a huge difference having a hard digital sunset on a night, and it's like, even this, like think about what I'm saying. I'm going to construct this bizarre world within the world with weird little fences and rules and stuff in a desperate attempt to stop using a device that I had to pay a grand and a half for. Yeah. And this, this, none of that would have made sense to anyone 10 years ago. No, none of what you've said. And yet every single thing that you've just said, I thought,

yep, now that's actually a good idea. Yeah, not a bad plan. You're right. And the devices that we hold on our hands now, they're like, people that design fruit machines know this. And one of the problems of gambling, addiction or trouble problem gambling, is it's sort of more broadly known,

is that particularly with slot machine gambling, it's the unexpected win associated with bright lights and noises that form this sort of perfect storm to reward those pathways in our brain that that main cast associate this with a good thing, right? This is excellent. We must carry on. And that of course is at the root of addiction, of addictive behaviors, when we think of drugs and things more broadly and having a device that is attractive to hold, it's an aesthetically pleasing thing that makes us feel good. It rewards our reward pathways

because we're getting messages and we're getting likes, right? We're getting confirmation of what we want, affirmation of what we are. It reinforces that and all of those things that we're talking about, their psychological structures in our brain that have evolved to keep us alive and to breed essentially, the reward pathway is basically there to eat and have sex. That's effectively what is there to reward. And now we, I talk about the hijack hypothesis in the book when it comes to substances and drugs, but of course we can see the same sort of thing with devices. And you're right, we're having to come up with this whole sphere and

this whole realm of engagement and management options. In order to manage this technology that our huge brains have let us devise and innovate, which is incredible when you think about it, but of course in there, we also have these evolved mechanisms that are perfect for making us addicted to it. And it is. It's something that we need to want. And look at my kids. They love technology. You have to come up with rules.

And I see lots of parents with rules for their kids, like no screens, blah, blah, blah. They don't have those rules for themselves. And I'm just as bad as anyone here. There's anyone listening. I had to put the, um, uh, the kind of Twitter launch icon, I've hidden it on sort of screens about five kind of sweeps away from my home screen and stuff. I don't keep it loaded up. So I actually have to go

on to it and make a physical move because if it's in the background, we can weigh it notifications. I know that I know I won't be able to help myself. We've got to, got to got to add that effortful friction in. Mandopamin is a hell of a drug and variable schedule rewards or a hell of a delivery system. Yes. We're out gunned in that department. So can you tell us about the hygiene problem?

I love this. Yeah, so I mean, I guess one of the issues of the modern world, and we can certainly see it in lots of aspects of the modern world, is inflammatory diseases and actually inflammation in general is now implicated in a whole load of different things. And this is when our immune system sort of over reacts to what's going on.

It's actually one of the sort of cytokine storms that people are talking about causing deaths in COVID-19 is in effect an immune over response, right? And we can see it in much less dramatic things, but nonetheless very life-changing and life-reducing kind of things like asthma, for example, allergies, you know, not just sort of peanut allergies and sort of potentially serious or fatal allergies, but sort of lesser allergies as well well and we can find all of these things and and one of the very seductive ideas about this is the it was became known as the hygiene hypothesis which is effectively saying we are all living such clean life styles now and we use so many

domestic cleaning products and everything that that our immune systems never get chance to learn from foe right we never get the chance to build up the idea in our bodies that well these bacteria are good, these bacteria are bad and we end up with this immune system that if you like, it hasn't been to school properly and it's kind of not learned to respond properly and and that's a really interesting idea because it's very seductive. You see it absolutely everywhere to repeat it in the popular media particularly, you know jump on the hygiene hypothesis but when you actually look back through the history of it, the scientific idea and the publishing of it,

it was never about home hygiene in that sense. It was actually the original idea was looking at the incidence of things like asthma, for example, and it looked at household effects. And the biggest household effect was actually the size of the family that you're in. Because it gives you more interactions. So if you have more children, basically those children have more interactions with children more, for close interactions,

more opportunities basically to ingest bacteria and so on. And because you're dirty and they're dirty, and you've got everybody dirty. Yeah, and of course, if you look at our modern lifestyle, we tend to have much less exposure to outside. We live more inside lives than we certainly than we evolved to live. And so, tanking together, those ideas actually have some merit and they went on to form what's become

known as the old friend's hypothesis, which is the idea that we co-evolved really with the whole suite of harmless organisms, micro-organisms, bacteria, nematode worms and all sorts of other things, and that by being exposed to these very young in life, you know, our adaptive immune system is able to go, okay, cool your friend, your friend, you know, shit, we better sort you out, you know, you're different, right? So, that's the idea of the sort of the old friends hypothesis, the hygiene hypothesis, of course, then developed greatly because of this idea that we all clean our houses more than we do. Let's see, I mean, looking back at my grandmother's, I'm looking around my house right now, I

can honestly say that there's absolutely no way that my house is cleaner than theirs. And in fact, people did lots of studies of this and they looked at the use of cleaning products and all this sort of stuff. And it really transpires that it's not this fact that we're also damn clean these days. And back in the day, we all ate mud and Mars Biles were the size of house bricks. It's not this sort of kind of great, great change. It's actually down to the way we live and the modern, you know, if you like the modern Western lifestyle the idea that we are inside much more as children we tend to have less interaction with other children, you know, we're a crashing species almost, you know lots of children in in sort of. Now you would have had family groups mixing together much more than they often do. Family size would have tended to be in larger.

There would have been potentially more contact with animals and livestock than we have now. And so all of these changes to our lifestyle can have an influence on the way our immune systems learn. And we can see similar sorts of effects in lots of different places around the world. I mean, there was a really nice natural experiment where a group of an ethnic group in Northern Finland, I say a nice natural experiment, nice in invertecones from a scientific perspective, an ethnic group got divided by border effectively between Finland and Russia, and very, very rapidly the Russian group were living a sort of more traditional lifestyle for them and a more rustic

lifestyle, I guess you would call it, with association with animals and so on. And the group in Finland lived, were living what we would describe as a modern western lifestyle. And very, very quickly they were able to see the differences in those two effectively genetically identical populations. They hadn't had time to diverge, but they were the only difference between them now was the environment they were in. And they were able to follow through the sort of the fact that the group that was in this modern western sort of setting had more lifestyle related kind of energies and so on. So it's a really interesting idea. It is a tricky one, and it's the sort of thing that's very difficult to do the type of control experiments,

you know, sort of the gold standard kind of medical trial that you would like to do the type of control experiments, you know, sort of the gold standard kind of medical trial that you would like to do because of the ethical implications of it, but certainly the coercive evidence is strongly points towards this lifestyle effect changing and resulting in these allergies. The question that we need to know, do I clean my house or not? Well, absolutely, and yes, you should, because this is the other thing that developed, of course, I mean, I've heard people say, well, you know, I'm going to take little Toby out, whatever, and force feed him, you know, mud. So if you push a toddler into the ground, it's good for their

health. It's good for their, this was the idea. I mean, well, I won't clean my house. Well, of course, actually, you know, we should hygiene. And that's where seeing right now, hand hygiene, particularly, is an incredibly important thing. The fact is that we, yeah, being clean is good, right? We need a longer suffer from many of the infectious diseases that we would, we can clean wounds, we, all of these things are wonderful. And if you handle things like chicken, for example,

you know, with campyloid back to being quite rife in some of these things, yeah, God's sake, wash your hands, right? Wash your children's hands down. Adam, Adam, Adam, I had. I've been gettingife in some of these things. Yeah, God's sake, wash your hands, right? Wash the children's hands down. Adam, Adam, I had. I had. The, the, the, all these things are good, but. I had Salmonella 18 months ago.

Oh, right. And wouldn't it rise it? No, and actually, and something, I mean, I wrote a book about five years ago, which looked at us the complex relationship with bacteria. And one of the great surprises with that was to, and I don't remember the figures off hand, but was to see how many people in this country die from food poisoning, from Salmonella, Listeriosis and so on. It was quite shocking. And in fact,

there was a food poisoning outbreak, if I remember rightly, up around the northeastern, not, you know, five or ten years ago, I mentioned in that book, you know, these things happen and that you're right, they're they are not fun, right? So definitely, definitely have some basic hygiene. Orchle, awful way to spend half the month of October and most of the month of November. Yeah. It doesn't stop, man. It was, it was savage.

Anyway, I won't go into too much graphic detail. So you looked at stress, too. What did you find out there? Yeah, I think, well, stress is brilliant. Stress is actually what started the book. So I was looking for another book to write. And one of the things that came out from the book on bacteria, which was talking about sort of allergies and so on. I got looking at inflammation and then started reading around and ended up finding that stress in the modern world is this big long,

chronic stress is this long-term killer. And that we don't, you know, we still don't understand that much about it. So I started thinking about stress as a topic and then realized that it could expand more. So, you know, the basic, the basic story behind stress is that stress is an absolute life saver. Stress is fundamentally this fight or flight response, right? Something terrible happens. We need to fix it right now. We can't wait for a sort of homeostasis to take care of it. It's not, you know, right now we need to do something. We need to jack ourselves up and get ready for it. And so we get this fabulous hormonal sort of ballet through our body that releases all these hormones that elevate our heartbeat.

You know, all of that feeling that we're all familiar with, elevate the heart, be elevate blood pressure, divert blood away from where it's needed to, or where it's not needed to where it's needed, all of these responses that we associate with that. And that's a life saver, and it's certainly saved. I'm guessing that nobody hasn't been saved at some point from serious injury, and potentially actually death, as a consequence of that response. And I'm walking out in traffic traffic accidentally dropping something on your hand that's hot, you know. All of those things, right? That is a lifesaver and every one of our ancestors would have enjoyed that, you know, this sort of stress-thankful chain all the way back. And in fact,

the biochemistry underlying, this isn't a human thing, you can go back through the primates, through the mammals, reptiles, even some invertebrates have this sort of system in place. So this is a really deeply evolved thing and it saves our lives. The problem is that if you release all of these hormones all the time, they have a harmful effect. It's got an allostatic load. They have this harmful effect on our body system, right? It's a great thing because you need it right now, but you can't be living with this all

the time. And what we find in the modern world, for some people, and potentially, actually, I think for many of us, you know, some people deal with it better than others, but many of us are subject to an almost constant drip feed of stress. Instead of having these major stressful events that save your life because it bears just jumped out from behind a bush. We have a groaning email inbox, three phone calls to take care of. We mentioned it early and the social media alerts and notifications and 35 different WhatsApp threads, half of which you're unsure why you're even on anymore. All of these things gone and missed buses and then of course we've got financial ways. We're able to read the news and take on the woes of everyone else. In some earthquake at 2,000 miles away in a place you'd never heard

of is suddenly becomes something to do with you, you know. And all of these things build up. And the really sort of bad thing about it is we get this sort of drip drip of stress but then that has immediate effects. It can cause headaches and pain which of course can cause you more worrying and concern. It can cause sleeplessness, which is a major source of additional stress because then suddenly you're an insomniac. And we end up with this almost maelstrom of what we would think of, I think, is a very modern day. Whoa, a very modern day problem.

And it's coming at us from all sides. And of course, we haven't lived this life for long enough. For us to really have a very solid handle on what it might, and how that might affect us. 70 and 80 year olds right now did not grow up in the same world that teenagers are growing up in with the same stresses. They had their own stresses and different things as well.

Some of which would have been greater individually, but did they have such a large, stressed landscape as we live now? That is something which we are discovering all the time, but what we do know is that more and more evidence is gathering up that this constant, chronic stress, micro stress that we're under, is having an effect on our health and well-being. And it's something that evolution isn't gonna help us with. Evolution has given us this wonderful tool. And it's allowed some people to deal with it in different ways

and it's allowed some people to have a variation in how they do it. But it's given us this wonderful mechanism for keeping us alive. But it's up to us, I think, to regulate our lives in the modern environment and perhaps change our environment so that we change that stress landscape because we can't live like this.

And what's interesting is if you look at, you know, you look at, well, actually, NHS advice and things, it sounds more kind of glassed and breathing, hardly, half the time now. Most of the advice I have to say is quite unhelpful. It's things, effectively, it sort of says, pull yourself together, calm down and, you know, go for a walk or something. And actually that might be very good advice, but it's not necessarily the advice that someone that's deeply stressed needs to hear. So we still need to work out the best language for that. But what's interesting is you look at retreats, for example, spars.

And it almost feels like the more they strip out of the modern world, the more you pay, the more spartan your existence is., the more you pay, you know, the more Spartan your existence is. The more it's going to cost you, right? And I'd buy a state-in-a-tell in Africa, actually, a while ago, they had to spar and they had a big sign, you know, leaving on my mobile phone here, they had a locker for it and everything. It was very much stripping away aspects of our modern life, which we would consider to be luxurious and they are, and safe, and they are, might be a very safe, luxurious life, really.

But stripping those aspects away and giving us some refuge from them is how we're now trying to de-stress our lives. And that's, I guess, over the last couple of months, you know, with sort of lockdown, one of the narratives that I've seen coming out, and this is probably down to the sort of echo chamber that I'm in in social media, but I've seen people very much say how important the natural world has been to them, how important it is for them to now go out for a walk every day, for them to go and sit in their garden and just watch the bees, or you know, get their binoculars out and have a bird list. And

they're saying that that is how they're dealing with it. And in effect, well, they're de-stressing by removing the modern world, slowing down, taking it easy. And I think that is something that we definitely need to do, because the lives that we're living now are luxurious, safe, privileged, and yet, cause us all kinds of stressed or woes.

And it feels like something that we, I think we can get on top of that. You know, I think we just need to identify what those stresses are, understand that we've got this evolutionary background that isn't helping us and working out to get those things to, to, to operate together. And I think that's something that, that possibly actually, the last few months might have helped some people to come to terms with. I know it's helped me actually because the whole work like balance is put into stark relief when you're working at home constantly and you've got kids around you have to manage those things. And, and you know, now I find myself going, I'm imagining earlier, I find myself going outside a lot know, I'm a biologist by profession. I'm a keen naturalist. I'm a natural historian by sort of persuasion, but I don't get that much chance to do that.

This year's the first year that I've seen Skylux flying for years that I've been out here in Kikus because normally, you know, I would be at work and then at home and then sort of, you know, probably on social media. Yeah. Yeah. So being forth to balance those things has actually helped me immensely, but of course, be at work and then at home and then probably on social media. Being around and stuff like that. So being forth to balanced those things has actually helped me immensely. But of course for some people it's also been another stress. Well, I understand and I appreciate the people that have had stresses and stuff during lockdown.

But the reduction of stimulation, the reduction of novelty, the reduction of opportunity for experience, as far as I'm concerned, has resented many people, including myself's attention, onto simpler pleasures. So I was mentioned this on a podcast the other week, that over the last two and a half months, three months, or whatever it's been since I've been in lockdown, I have been able to do my morning walk and watch the trees go from bare branches to getting ready to leave to buds to flowers. And I know which trees went first. I have like the shape of them, like some of them I've given like weird pet names to and obviously this is just all part of the odd psychosis that's going on inside of my mind. But like I took

notice of my flower, the clemitis I've got in my garden, I've never, I've lived in this house for five years. I've never taken notice of stuff like that. So I do agree that hopefully we've been able to reset dial back that hypernormal stimuli, dial back the constant, it's Joanne's barbecue this weekend and we've got to hurry off because we've got to go to our parents down in Surrey on Saturday and blah blah blah. I really do hope that that is something that people take away, the fact that they can have more simple, more easy and enjoyable experiences and hopefully kind of reconnect themselves with that grand of asnus that nature does because

it makes you feel small, right? It reminds you that your problems aren't that big. So the two key takeaways, we've got so far that I've I've got from this, the three key takeaways. Number one, sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom. Number two, if you've got a child you worry about getting ill, shove its face in some mud. Number three, if you want to really enjoy your life, then loincloth, mudhut, out in the middle of somewhere completely barren and stark and just live out there for like a week and you'll come back and you're just going to be fully actualized and full of zen. So those are the three takeaways I've got so far. Up next, are we evolved to be violent? Yes, now this was a chapter which I've found particularly

interesting to to come out from from a zoological perspective, because I think you can find lots of people that will suggest that that humans are the only people, they're the only species that will that kills its own kind and as a barlogist I know that that's I mean, that's twaddle, right? It's absolutely incorrect. I've studied leaf cutting ants and honeybees for example in some depth and both of those highly social species right that we look at in terms of harmony. I mean but bees of actually honeybees are actually synonymous with harmonious living. Well actually you know the queen when she emerges will kill her sister queens. They

will each each other's eggs. I used to study these ants called dynaponoracodra sets. Huge things. They're actually the biggest ants in the world. They live in Brazil. They've been relatively small colonies. About 10 or 15% of the ants in a colony are involved in all these antagonist interactions between each other. They're sisters, but it doesn't make any difference to them because they might get the chance to sort of become the breeder in the colony, and they're trying to kill each other. And in fact, what someone did fairly recently was to do what's got a phylogenetic analysis.

So they looked across the broad sweep of mammals, and they looked at their relationships between the different groups, the evolutionary relationships between the different groups, and the incidence of inter individual death. But basically, members of the same species conspecifics killing each other, fatal conflict, if you like. And what they found was that 40% of mammal species had solid evidence of that happening, 40% of them. And their suggestion was that actually they would have found it

in more, except, you know, we haven't studied most of these things. Basically the rule seems to be that if they've been studying for any length of time, it turns out that they probably are killing each other at one point or another to shut out each other at one point there. And here's the brilliant thing, you look at that, they illustrated this beautiful circle of all the species going around so you can sort of see them all in one place. And there's a really massive kind of lump of violent interactions and you look at it. It's the primates. The groups that we come from are unusually violent for mammals, even then you can find

this violence throughout. And then you sort of look further in and the apes are kind of a bit more violent still. And so we have come from a violent lineage. You've got a perfect heritage there. We do have that heritage for it. And you can come up with all sorts of quite plausible evolutionary scenarios as to why violence can be at times a great problem solver.

If particularly, for example, if you're a group living animal and you come into conflict with other groups, for example, which would have been at some point an issue, but also to resolve conflicts within groups. So, you know, violence can definitely be an advantage at times, and it can be a lifesaver, particularly in sort of conflict times. So, you know, I think we can overdo our sort of violent history, but over the course of our evolution,

there are times when violence would have been a definite advantage. And then if you look at us as a physical unit, we're pretty handy, right? We're a decent size. We're quite strong. We've got long limbs, which provide perfect kind of levers and perfect sort of gives you very good range. You can swing your fist very, very fast. We've got feet, knees, elbows. We've got heads and skulls,

but taking the front of our skull is quite tough. We've got some pretty decent bits about us physically that allow us to inflict harm on to others. So you've built weapons here and there? Yeah, exactly. I mean, sure, we don't have teeth and claws that are particularly effective, but nonetheless, we're not badly put together. I came across this fabulous argument by a biologist who tried of tried to put for the argument that the fist and the way that the fist is made and buttressed and sort

of the architecture of the human hand and everything was to do with a fist and that we were sort of pre-adapted, you know, the fist were not pre-adapted, the fist was actually adaptation for fighting and he'd also put forward the idea that the human male face and differences in bone structure between males and females, it was basically a sort of punch-proof face. That was his kind of over-the-sphere way that the impact comes in and a thick neck that we'll be able to withstand. Exactly that. So those ideas, it must be said, were met with some fairly robust criticism in the literature, but nonetheless actually some people also said, well, you're maybe there's something in it. So there's sort of an idea that we might have, they might

be adaptations. I'm not really sure I'd buy into that, but certainly as a physical specimen, we have some fairly useful attributes for violence. Of course, we then also got a pretty decent brain that's both innovative, so we're pretty good at using weapons and tools and can plan ahead, so we can to start to bring all these things together So it doesn't seem necessarily surprising that we are our violent I guess one of the surprises is that we're not more violent and of course then we see evolution coming in as well And there's lots of evidence and ideas about sort of how

We've evolved mental mechanisms and neural mechanisms for reigning ourselves back. Emotions, for example, things like shame and some of the emotional sort of side of things are hypothesized by some to be ways to reduce our violent tendencies. So it was quite interesting in and out for me this sort of thing. And what's really interesting as well

is that you can find perfectly good well put forward, theses by people that say we are more violent now than we were. Very, very learned theses that say, no, we're actually much less violent than we were. Learned theses that say, no, we're no more violent than we were before.

It's almost as though we have not really got a firm grip on it. But what I did find was that there is evidence for genetic components to violence, and when people have looked at violence and tried to, it's always very tricky, of course, to separate nature from nurturing human studies, but it does seem that violence in the broader sense of the term and what we might, you know, subsume within that, that there may be some genetic component to it as well, and what that suggests is that it has been under the influence of evolution. So, evolution has certainly had a role to play,

of course, in the modern world, and in our modern way of thinking, we have a very different view on that. And just because evolution, just because we've come from an unusually violent, sort of, phylogenetic origin, and just because we have all this ability to be able to do this, and just because at some point in the past there may have been selection for it. That is not a big excuse for violence because equally we've had selection and mechanisms that prevent us from acting through on that. And of course, our secret is, you know, our secret, I guess, our ultimate goal is to work out why it is, and what triggers there are in some people that make some people much

more violent than others. And that's really a hope, I think, of lots of people looking at the evolutionary history of this sort of thing, to try and get some sort of handle on how we might, if you like, cure or treat violence. But equally... There's an argument there. There'll be a number of people that would hear you say or hear researchers say that we're looking at ways to cure violence. And they would think, they're trying to neuter the population, they're trying to make us helpless and weak and unindependent, and they want this sort of utopia. And again, what we're talking about, the misalignment between human makeup and current environment, the fact that we have this

flinch response now, where the vast, vast, vast majority of things don't require a flip. We don't need to be scared of a cold shower. And yet, every morning, when I go and have a cold shower, shout myself just before I go in, because I know what it's going to be like. And I know that I'm fine. Or, for instance, when I'm doing breath work, let's say that I'm doing some quite challenging holotrophic breath work. And I'm scared that I'm choking and I can feel the gas response coming.

It's like, I know I'm not choking. I'm in complete control. It's me that's holding my breath. And yet, we have all of these misaligned concerns and warning signs that go off around us. There's going to have to be a line where we begin to align the way that we are, the way that we operate to the environment more effectively, but there must be an overt and window to that where you actually push it so far that you essentially no longer become human.

Yes, and I think we need to be careful when we develop these sorts of these these too far, because actually, of course, things are always a bit more complex. We're not going to find a gene, for example, they're not a gene for violence, right? And there's not going to be a simplistic way of curing it. But I think we can get some insights into what are clear problems in the world today. And violence can be in the broad, is clearly a problem. Domestic violence is a huge issue and a huge problem. Violence towards children is clearly a problem, violence towards everyone. Unjustified violence, let's put that in verdict commas and sort of, and sort of park it, but just, let's assume that in some cases violent responses are justified or desirable to defend yourself,

for example, most of the violence in the world is not defensive. It is not in that sense. And we see the escalation of violence across the world, resulting in manifesting atrocities up to the level of genocide. Clearly, there is a problem. And even understanding it, gonna help us in some way. A much more personal level. Because when we get to these big abstractions and we start to actually talk about the genocide

and everyone can go, well, I'm not a part of a genocide. It's like, okay, everyone's been on a night out. I've stood on the front door of over a thousand nightclubs, right? And I have seen hundreds and hundreds of fights. So many guys that are posturing, that are looking to not lose face in a group of drunk people who don't even know who they are and won't remember what happened the next day and you think this is I'm watching it, thinking this is an evolutionary adaptation to not wanting to drop down the pecking

order within your tribe, gone so haywire that it is unbelievable. It's a pure evolutionary, if we were sort of alien biologists dropping onto earth and we saw that classic drunken nightclub brawl. Oh, come on, mate. Come on, then. Yeah. Well, first of all, it's posturing, right? So, so you get displayed. So, in our case, it's often vocal display. So, people will start adopting a way of speaking,

which they wouldn't normally adopt. They're shouting. They're there, swearing at each other and they're their name calling, right? That is no different from red deer bellowing at each other, right? It's trying to work out who's the biggest. And people might back down at that point. And if they don't, they start displaying.

And you see it in deer, right? They'll start walking parallel to each other, they're sizing each other up basically to work out of his worth. You see that in men right? They'll start putting their arms out, come on in, come on then, they're trying to make themselves look bigger. It is pure pure animal behavior at that point and that is that is how's it evolution the origin, it's display, first of all the threat displays, then we get physical displays and then if it escalates of course it goes into a fight. And you're right, it's to do with status,

it's to do with access to females, it's to do with access to resources. Of course, in the modern world, those things are slightly subverted and become somewhat bent and twisted, but the basic essence of it is the same. And then, of course, people will start fighting. And what they're generally doing,

I mean, if you watch people having, as you've done much more than I have, I'm sure. The sort of fighting they're doing is either a fairly weird imitation of the type of fighting that they see on television and films, which we are immersed in constantly, which of course doesn't really work because it's there to look good, or it is brutal. All the fancy kicks in the world aren't going to be as good as stomping on someone's head. And that's what you actually see in the real world. And that is where people get killed in these ridiculous threat displays. We have a problem when that's happening, right? For the most part,

what I see, and that's a really interesting insight I've never thought of before. For the most part, I see fights, which are grander and less effective than they need to be. I've never, in all the fights I've watched, seen someone bite another person. And yet, if you were trying to pull a murderer of your child, it would be in the eyes, you'd be in the throat, but it's not. That sort of fighting is this almost like, er, berolyty. It's slightly ritualized.

So yeah, this kind of weird dramatized like a K-fabe WWE bullshit. So look, I've got a couple more questions, but I want to do a quick fire round for you now. I don't want to do that. I'm going to, a quick fire round. A quick fire round is going to be, try and give us a brief evolutionary explanation for different emotions. I'll try.

See what you can do. Okay, so first up, pride. Pride. Well, that's an interesting one, isn't it pride? I suppose, I mean, this is pure, there's a worst type of harm to air adaptionism, but I guess pride is almost a sort of self-rewarding thing, isn't it? It's sort of an affirmatory kind of self-rewarding. I

wouldn't be at all surprised if feelings have fried a few to MRI someone that's done something that's prideful, that it doesn't affect that reward pathway in some way, because if you've done something that makes you feel proud, you maybe you might want to end up doing it again or seek that emotional out again. I wonder if that's. I don't know. Next one, envy. Well, I suppose envy basically comes down to resource management and territory and so on isn't it? You're envious of things which will give you more status and more reproductive power, ultimately. I can imagine I've got two black birds that live, the males are constantly faricking each other. One is on the street opposite and one's on my roof and they've both got pretty decent territories, but you can see each of them eyeing up the other one. I'm guessing that envy in humans is probably

a more sophisticated and more intellectualized version of that. We see something we want that will give us some status, some resource that we need. And envy, eats away at people, it motivates. It's probably linked in some way to those motivational pathways that gets us to get something that we perceive to be a value to us. That's my own shared adaptionism for that. I like it. Two more. So loneliness. Well, loneliness is an interesting one, isn't it? That that's something that ironically, perhaps in the modern world of

interconnectedness, we, we find ourselves less connected. And we see loneliness, I'm loneliness is an extremely unpleasant thing to experience. Um, whether that's a pathological reaction to the situation. So if you like outside of the realm of, it's not an evolved response, it's simply a symptom, a disease response, or whether there is some evolved response to it

because it's such an unpleasant way of feeling it stimulates us. I don't know, but I guess one of the things that we see with people that are chronically lonely is it doesn't necessarily drive people towards seeking out humans. In fact, if anything, it tends to lead to further isolation and further loneliness. So I wonder whether loneliness might actually be a symptom, almost a disease, if you like,

a symptom of something rather than an evolved emotional bond. Yeah, I'm guessing there'll be people listening to this that know a lot more about the evolution of emotion than they're going to shout the game. So, comment, Adam, we can comment in the comments below and correct us throughout this author. I've said like five times about shoving a child's face in the mud. It's fine. Final one, right? I've asked this question to a number of different people, and this is the most difficult one.

Have you seen Interstellar the film? I haven't yet, no. Okay, so in Interstellar, there's this short sequence where they're talking about the evolution of human emotions and they're trying to justify our workout why we still love people that have died. It's a grief. Yeah.

I suppose. Well, it's different from grief, isn't it? Grief is almost that separation sort of thing. The pursue or the continuation of love of people that have died. How is that fitness enhancing, you know? I guess, I guess in a sense, maybe we want that to be us some sense.

Perhaps that's one of those things that's gone beyond simple fitness enhancement and is a product of, this is such a squirrely and a weasily response, but perhaps that's one of the products of the complexity of our brain that's simply emerged from the background of all those neurological connections. Maybe that's a spandrel, if you like, an evolutionary kind of loads of other things that we've all for different

reasons, and it's a consequence of them, we get these interconnections that lead to something that we can explain. That is a... I like the fact that you've got this kind of like, haywire add-on, the kind of like a bug in the system. So you could think, again, this is, I thought about that question loads, and this is the first time, you're eliciting a lot of new thoughts here, right, which is great.

What you could have is your brain is unable to work out the fact that your feelings for someone, the fact that you're feelings for someone, the love that you had for someone, that they're no longer there. It's actually a denial of death almost, somewhere back inside of you. I don't know why that would be evolutionary. But that kid, well, I guess a denial of death is probably a very good thing, right? If you refuse to believe that death is there, and you, well, no, actually accepting that death is there

is much better, isn't it? Because you know how bad death would be for your fitness, so you ruthlessly try to avoid it. So actually kind of ignoring death, I'm not sure. I'm going to wait to let you. Let yourself ponder, have a little ponder on that. Well, yeah, it's interesting. When you watch Interstellar, you'll know the exact bit that I was talking about.

So my final question, what happens next? We said at the very beginning of this conversation that human evolution is kind of a bit moot now, or at least for the time being, for as long as the environment changes fast as hell, evolution is kind of just spinning its wheels. What does that mean as we go forward? I think what it means is that we need to sort of grow up a little bit. We've reached this point now in our civilization, and particularly over the last few decades, and last generation or two, we've really reached a very critical point. And perhaps even a tipping point in the way that we view the world

and see the world. I think we need to embrace the fact that we are incredible creatures. We are amazing. We can control our environment to a ridiculous degree. We can explore space. We can smash atoms. We can do all of those things. And too often, I think we sit back and say, oh, but, you know, we're rubbish and we blah, blah, blah, blah, and like, oh, we awful and we, you know, we can't run as fast as a cheater or whatever. No, we're incredible. We're the fastest, strongest, most intelligent creature on this planet.

We should embrace that and we should use that in a much more effective fashion. I think to do that, we're going to have to accept the fact that we are animals, that we have these kind of evolutionary echoes that influence things both consciously, subconsciously and also within our bodies and the way we respond to things. We almost have to embrace all of that and much understand ourselves in a much better way, I think, if we're going to move forward, because you're right, evolution is not going to get us out of this. We're going to get us out of this. But for us to do that, we have to really deeply tank on what we are. And we are flesh and blood animals that have been subject to evolution, but we're also something incredible, because we've got in our heads the most complex structure

that we know of in a universe. That's capable of innovation that we can't yet imagine and imagination that we can't quite fathom. So I think we just need to bring all these components together, but underpinning all that, and this was really the big surprise to me, is the fact that we're not very good at thinking about the future.

Evolution has an equip just the future. Evolution has an equip just for that. Evolution doesn't care what's going to happen in three generations time. It cares what happens now, right? We have evolved in our heuristics and our brain have evolved as kind of here and now things. And we devalue us actually. We think of ourselves as different people in the future. Future us is sort of treated as the same as everyone else, but we can stop that. We can actually do experiments that show that if you just tweak people a little bit and prepare them and say, listen, you're going to need to make a decision for future you, but future you's going to be you, yeah, it's going to have the same hopes and fears and emotions and everything. If you prime

people in that way, they treat future them better than they treat a future them without that priming. And I think we need to learn those little lessons that let us take our revolutionary heritage and sort of turn it on its head and make it into a strength. You know, the sort of judo approach of understanding our enemy. And I think that, and I think that's where we're going to need to go. I think we're going to need to be much more understanding about what we are both in the sort of philosophical sense, but also in the biological and very real flesh and blood sense and understand that heritage, but also understand what it means for us right now. And perhaps then we have some hope because we are in every

axis really. It's very hard to find anyone arguing against a point that we seem to be right now in history at quite an important point in terms of human population, the way we're treating the planet, our environmental issues, the social issues you mentioned earlier, the ideas of social inequality and everything. It very much feels like we're at that, we're at that important point. I think we're going to need to understand our past and our present in order to move on into that future Which of course we need to get a better understanding of as well So it's tricky tricky times, but it's exciting times as well. You know, there's hope I think there is so much

complexity To hold in that you know and I genuinely do hope that the more abstract, more long-term rational side of us that allows us to transcend the terrible social norms and the awful evolutionary heritage and all of the fears and the worries and the crap that we've managed to, the baggage that has been given to us by our ancestors in an environment that we're no longer fit to be in. But it requires a lot of social change. Like if evolution isn't going to do it,

then it has to be a combination of wisdom acquisition by the individual, social cohesion by small and local groups, by bureaucratic and political change by people in power who actually understand every layer below that, and then a global movement toward understanding that we are one species, one planet, one shot at this. You know, we didn't even start talking about existential risk and stuff like that, but you did a whole new rabbit hole for us to go down, but you know, yeah,

Fermi Paradox actually seems to start making more and more sense. Yeah, we need to, I think, we've tended to think of globalization a lot of the times. That's why it means I can get cheap trainers from Indonesia and fly to Australia. You're absolutely right. We need to realise that actually we are globalised now. We can see ourselves in the round. Literally, from space we can see ourselves, we need to embrace that. We need to embrace what we are as a species, much more I think, and realise our problems and you're right, it's going to happen at all levels, but it needs to happen at all

levels. It needs to be individual, it needs to be local, it needs to be national, but it needs to be global as well. And we can start to see movements moving in that direction. But one thing that we can be sure of, right, in human endeavour, we usually end up going further than we thought we would, but it usually takes a bit more time. You know, you look back to the 50s and people were predicting we were living on the moon and whatever by the 1970s, but in fact, they didn't predict half of the things that we managed to do. They just got the timing wrong.

So I think it's going to take us a bit longer. This is not going to be a shift that's going to happen overnight, but hopefully we're going to be heading in the right direction. I love it. Unfit for purpose, when human evolution collides with the modern world will be heading in the right direction. I love it. Adam, unfit for purpose when human evolution collides with the modern world Will be linked in the show notes below. Have you got any other websites? Any other stuff you want to plug? No, just that one for now There is a radio for program coming out. There's not linked to this actually, but it's quite interesting and sort of arose out some of the ideas where we look at humans as prey

so we're looking at how we are eaten around the world, actually, by various animals and how serious that can be in certain areas. But also we look back to our evolutionary history and look at the influence of not man the hunter, which is the sort of glamorous way that we used to think of it, but man the hunted and the importance of that environment on our evolution. So some links there as well. What's that called? That program is going to be called on the menu and it's out at the end and the importance of that environment on a revolution. So some links there as well. What's that called? That program's gonna be called On the Menu.

And it's out at the end of June and that's on BBC Radio 4. Amazing, that sounds awesome. I've never seen any ancestral historical analysis of what happened, of how we would have acted as prey, the ways that we would have hidden from animals. You told you, right, we get this sort of hyper-romantic view of the berry picking while the wife's at home and then the killing, the saber-toothed tiger and all this sort of stuff. You don't get the, how did we cower in caves narrative very much. So that sounds absolutely

fascinating. On the menu, BBC Radio 4, I'm excited, man. But look, thank you so much. Unfit for purposes is sick. It's an awesome book. Everyone that has been listening, if you've enjoyed this, if you've got an interest in evolutionary theory and all of the stuff that we've gone through today, then head to the show now to below and grab it.

Feel free, I'll also link Professor Hart's Twitter below. So feel free to hassle him on there and tell him what you think he got wrong, or what you think he got right. Adam, thank you so much for your time, man. Thank you, you're a bit of pleasure. you