
I’m using the Cambrian explosion as the anchor point for these comparisons because that is when more complex animals appeared. Animals—living beings with locomotion—necessarily had at least primitive emotional systems that guided them towards good things (safety, food, mates) and away from bad things (harm).
Primates (social mammals) appeared at roughly 70 Ma, 470 million years after the Cambrian explosion. That is a long time. Long enough for the primary survival emotions—happy, sad, fear, anger, disgust—to be firmly established. Another 68 million years or so pass before the appearance of our closest human (homo) ancestors. The margins of error at this point (±15 million years) are bigger than the values we are talking about here. So one could say that our primate ancestors were establishing and honing social and emotional connections for 70 million years before we came along.
Modern homo sapiens with language and culture have been established by 50,000 years ago. The ratio of the time between that milestone and now is 0.01% of the time since the Cambrian explosion. Civilization (where we started the transition from bands of hunter/gatherers to agriculture and established settlements) started 12,000 years ago, or 0.002% (2 thousandths of a percent) of the time since the Cambrian explosion. The industrial revolution is only 260 years old and that caused huge changes to the way we live our lives. That is 0.00005%—5 hundred thousandths of a percent of the time since the Cambrian explosion. It is a blip; a rounding error.
My point in all this is to highlight the different layers that have been built up over time, one on top of the other (much like the 7 layers in the OSI networking model), that make up we humans and the outrageous time scales involved in some of them. It’s pretty clear that the primary emotions and the social emotions are pretty well optimized at this point having been refined over tens of millions of years. These systems are in all of us now working behind the scenes without our conscious effort.
Our thinking brain began its major development roughly 2 million years ago (coincident with and likely caused by our ancestors figuring out how to break down food outside the body by pounding, chopping and cooking). The thinking brain is amazing tool, but one of its limitations is that it can believe practically anything by selective attention and/or biased weighting of information. That is to say it can be trained to deceive others as well as itself.
We can think that our underlying emotions aren’t important and that we are more evolved, but the data shows us otherwise. We are at our core social and emotional beings, and living a life aligned with what those systems are doing and telling us is the key to living a healthy and fulfilling life. After all, our brains are the only thing that ultimately determine whether or not we feel like we are succeeding in life or not.