KPAO by Dave Cortright

The outrageous time scale of evolution shows us what is really driving our behaviors

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.

Managing emotions—the forest fire management analogy

For the better half of the 20th century, the forest fire management policy in the United States was complete suppression. If a fire starts, put it out. However there was no one around to put out the fires in the preceding 300+ million years and somehow the planet managed just fine despite lightning-induced fires. In fact some species of plant/tree require fire to reproduce, like the giant sequoia. It turns out that recurring ground fires actually are a vital part of the ecosystems in which they occur. That’s how nature works. It takes whatever environmental conditions exist and it adapts to them.

So what this policy ended up actually doing is allowing a lot more kindling to build up, reducing a supply of essential nutrients, and preventing some species from reproducing. When a fire does break out in these conditions with so much fuel available, the fire burns far hotter and intensely than it would otherwise literally leaving nothing but scorched earth. It takes so much longer for such a landscape to recover, whereas a typical low intensity ground fire might burn dead kindling and some quick-growing plants and grasses, leaving the larger, mature specimens.

One might say we are in our “suppression” phase when it comes to emotions. Our society tells us that some emotions are ok to express and others are not. And in more public forums, this holds true. However all emotions are designed to be expressed and shared with another, if only the innermost circle of your Dunbar relationships. However this subtle nuance can be lost on people, and they end up in a state where emotions have been bottled up for so long that  when they do come out, they do so in an explosion of anger and rage. Look to the mass shootings we've had as a horrifyingly large set of examples.

It is possible to get back to the natural state of things, just as we did with our forests. It takes a fair amount of effort and courage to process the backlog of emotions. But once that is done, emotions can be managed as they come in real-time the way that nature intended. It gets easier.

The historical trend of progress in knowledge and understanding should make us more cautious about our certainty

There certainly has been enormous progress in our understanding of how things work in the world. Yet at any given point in the past, there are numerous examples of things we (or at least some reasonable population of us) collectively thought we knew but turned out to be wrong. The fact that some primitive societies still hold erroneous beliefs (like the “cargo cults”) only further reinforces this idea: we should always approach a subject with the humility recognizing that what we currently believe to be true is likely based on only partial data.

One of these areas is how dinosaurs actually looked and moved in the world. There are some very clever artistic renderings of modern animals that were extrapolated only from their skeletons, and it’s dramatic how different they look based on faulty assumptions of the artist. One of my favorites is the whale, which if you didn't know that it had a lot of soft tissue filling out certain parts of the body, you could easily presume the body was “shrink wrapped” around the skeleton leading to a sleeker creature:

Here are some more shrink wrapped projections based only on skeletons: baboon, zebra, and elephant. With no bones in the ears or trunk, we have no way of knowing iif they even exiisted or how bigi they were. The original source is here, and there is more here.

What we were designed to do—an owner’s manual for human beings

As anyone who happens to be reading these recent blog entries can see, I’m trying to synthesize my thoughts on human nature and living life fully. The catalyst for all of this was a realization that humans—and really all forms of life—were designed. I don’t mean that an intelligent creator designed us. Rather, the environment that our ancestors lived in—all the way back to the proto-lifeforms that emerged from the primordial soup—placed constraints upon them that made some succeed where others failed. That process repeated a trillion times (by some estimates) to bring us to where we are now. It is that process of evolution through natural selection shaped by the environmental factors that “designed” us.

So what are the implications of that? What were we designed to do? Like all life forms, the most basic requirements are to survive and reproduce. Actually I think Maslow did a pretty good job of a high level summary. But this only covers the what, not the how. (For the record, the why are the basics already mentioned: survival and reproduction.)

Anthropology shows us the essence of the how. Edward O. Wilson’s book The Social Conquest of Earth gives a really good overview of it. His descriptions of the behaviors of how our ancestors lived their lives leading up to 50k years ago when modern humans with complex language and culture were established clearly shows us what we were designed to do. The lifestyle foundations of hunter/gathers living in band societies (which I previously outlined here) are the baseline for which we operate most effectively on life.

Dunbar’s donut—our all-too-common lack of skill in intimate relationships creates a unfulfilled hole in our emotional lives

I previously blogged about Dunbar’s Number. I was speaking to a guy friend about this and he joked about having a “Dunbar’s donut”; he didn’t have anyone that really qualified as a member of his support clique, so the closest he really got with friends was in the sympathy group. I think this is far too common in our society—especially for males. I feel like I was there for a lot of my life. Or maybe better said that I had friends I considered in my support clique, but I didn’t really have the skills or understanding to feel entirely comfortable express myself with them.

We need to fill the hole in Dunbar’s donut so that everyone out there has a complete Dunbar Disk.

A couple of quotes on the relationships between humans and animals, and honoring your ancestors

The biggest difference between humans and other animals is that humans arrogantly believe the difference to be much bigger than it really is.

The best way to honor your ancestors is to learn from their experiences—both successes and failures.

Indeed it is also the best way to honor yourself. 

The Best Path to a Long Life Has Nothing to Do With Diet or Exercise; it’s good relationships

https://www.thrillist.com/health/nation/healthy-relationships-live-longer

This meta-analysis that is linked to in that article is particularly compelling data.

The implications of the book “Elephant in the Brain”

My summary of the book The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson:

Once our ancestors figured out how to cook food using fire, we had more calories available. Through natural selection, this extra energy was diverted into creating bigger brains in an arms race that pitted the ability to deceive against the ability to detect deception. Our detection skills got so good that the best way to effectively deceive others is to deceive ourselves as well.

So humans are essentially masters of deception. But there’s a pretty big problem with this: the world is the way it is and works the way it works regardless of what you, I or any other person believes. It takes courage and skill to continually challenge your beliefs and be willing to change them given new information. There is a lot of noise in the world: things that we believe (or very much want to believe) matter but don’t. Or maybe it’s more subtle in that things do matter but not to the extent we believe they do.

The process of natural selection is extremely slow compared to our individual lives. That is especially true today in this post-industrial revolution where mechanical energy provides so much for us. The truth is our genes have changed very little since modern humans with language and culture first appeared 40–50,000 years ago. Some of us have different shades of skin, and different shaped noses and eyes which help in different climates. Some have lactose tolerance for digesting milk and dairy in adulthood. But for the most part, our genes were well established to succeed in a particular environment: living in small hunter/gatherer bands in Southern and Eastern Africa during the Pleistocene.

The fact that we don’t thrive as well when living outside of those parameters shouldn’t come as a surprise. Our genes don’t know anything about this new environment we’ve constructed and not nearly enough time has passed for the genes to have adapted to it. And yet we fool ourselves into thinking that one superficial change or another will make us happier and healthier. (That doesn’t necessarily mean we have to live without any modern conveniences. Antibiotics and other health care advances are certainly a huge step forward in quality of life.) But really the only way to do that is to move to a lifestyle that share common attributes with that of our Pleistocene ancestors. 

Overcomplexification within the Blue Zones with Dan Buettner and Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Let me start by saying that the Blue Zones research and the new CNN series Chasing Life where Dr. Sanjay Gupta visits the Blue Zones are great. It’s data-driven and there are important take aways.

But I feel like the relative weight of the various findings are not well articulated. Take this video where Dr. Gupta attempts to summarize. He immediately talks about diet. And don’t get me wrong, diet is important. And then he moves onto positive visualization and meditation (stress reduction). And again, there is value to that. But it’s disappointing that he focuses on these things because there is one factor that trumps all others: close, healthy, positive emotional relationships with others.

As a program manager, one of the most simple yet valuable tools was the stack-ranked list. Not everything can be high priority, and by forcing a ranking of the relative importance of items, it helps significantly with decision-making when constraints force hard decisions.Here is my stack rank the nine recommendations from the Blue Zones research:

1. Social connections that also value the items on this list
2. Family connections
3. Spiritual community
4. Move naturally
5. Plant-based diet
6. Moderate caloric intake
7. Proactive stress reduction
8. Life purpose
9. Moderate wine consumption

Social connections by far is the most important factor. The Harvard Longitudinal Study on Adult Development has proven this. It’s the foundation upon which all of the others are built. So if you can put your energy towards one thing on this list today, make it social connections (which is really the first 3 items).

Letter sent to MIT Technology Review Editor-in-Chief, Gideon Lichfield RE: 2019 breakthrough technologies

Gideon,

 

I’m taking you up on your request for feedback on the 10 breakthrough technologies in 2019. I think the list is a great one, and as an ex-Microsoft employee, I was amused—but not surprised—to see that BillG had his own ideas about the list. 😊 As a vegan environmentalist, it’s great to see the “cow-free burger” on the list. The recent announcements of meat-free options by Red Robin, Carls Jr, and especially Burger King make this definitely a turning point year for meat alternatives. 

 

I do have a suggestion for an item that didn’t make your top 10 low tech solutions list: emotionally healthy face-to-face connections with loved ones. I was cleaning out some old papers and found a physical copy of James Surowiecki’s Technology and Happiness article from 2005 I had clipped and saved. He gets at a lot of the issues that still exist (and in some way even more amplified) in our increasingly technological society: it’s not making us any happier.

 

The data is finally coming into focus, and as crazy as it sounds, the only thing that truly matters to lead a happy, fulfilling life is having quality relationships with others.

1. “The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is that good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.” 
   —Robert Waldinger, Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development
2. “Contrary to the belief that happiness is hard to explain—or that it depends on having great wealth—researchers have identified the core factors in a happy life. The primary components are number of friends, closeness of friends, closeness of family, and relationships with co-workers and neighbors. Together these features explain about 70% of personal happiness.” 
   — David Niven, “The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People”
3. “Love Someone. Commit to someone compatible with you who shares your interests and values and whose company you enjoy. Research shows that you’re more likely to be happy if you’re married or in a committed relationship. Loners are mostly unhappy… Create a circle of at least three friends with whom you can have meaningful conversations, who you can call on a bad day for help, and who are generally happy… For every new happy friend that enters your social network, your own happiness increases by about 15 percent.”
   —Dan Buettner, “The Blue Zones of Happiness.”

Dementia treatment is on your list of 10 big challenges tech could solve. But we already have a low-tech way to do so: healthy social connections with others. We also have a low-tech cure for myopia: sunlight.

 

I have an engineering, computer science, and design background so to use that as a metaphor—our own "operating system"—human DNA—got its last major upgrade 50k years ago, many millennia before the agricultural revolution and the rise of civilization as we know it. Our genes were optimized to survive and thrive and reproduce in a certain environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). And that environment was a time when small close-knit bands of hunter/gatherers lived during the Pleistocene in Southern and Eastern Africa.

 

I know this is going to sound very crazy and controversial since we don’t yet know all of the specific mechanisms behind it, but from logical deduction: our bodies naturally have systems in place to keep us healthy and free from the common modern ailments: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia... The further we stray from our EEA way of living, the less effective these systems are at keeping us healthy. Since we are social creatures, our genes select for hosts that do the best job at being social. I believe that the reason shamans and medicine men (and the placebo effect for that matter) work is because our bodies are positively responding to the validation of a respected member of our social group reaching out to us, connecting with us, and essentially saying: “You are an important and valued member of our social group. We want you to get better so you will stick around and continue to be part of the group.” And that validation triggers all of those defense and repair systems to kick into high gear.

 

Time on screens equals time away from healthy social connections. And while I understand that correlation does not imply causation, I think we have less socially connected people who then feel lonely, isolated, depressed and suicidal.

 

Of course I don’t mean to imply that all technology is bad; That would be a false dilemma. But I think we all need to recognize that we are first and foremost people that need to pay a bit more attention to maintaining a solid foundation of our core needs (e.g. Maslow’s Hierarchy) and then add in technology to build on top of that foundation.

 

Thanks for your attention and consideration. So maybe this can be on your 2020 list? 😊

·Dave