Many aspects of our evolutionary programming are obsolete. Due to technological and economic changes, our lives are very different from the lives of our distant ancestors. But our genetic programming is largely the same. The result is that many of our impulses, inclinations, and predispositions are outdated. For example:

Sugar

Our ancestors developed a love for sweet foods because those foods provided them with energy. Today, our love for sugar makes it difficult to eat healthy.

Processing Information

Often, our beliefs are not as responsive to evidence as they should be. For instance, we are too quick to reject evidence that does not fit with our existing views, and we are more easily swayed by vivid anecdotes than scientifically significant data. These tendencies are holdovers from a time when scientific data was completely unavailable and revising your worldview on a frequent basis was maladaptive.

Focusing on Negative Feedback

Our ancestors needed to worry in order to survive. In particular, they needed to worry about what other people in their community thought of them. Our ancestors lived in small groups, and ostracization from the group made life very difficult. Today, we interact with a much wider circle of people, and getting along in life does not require pleasing all or even most of them. Still, we remain very sensitive to negative feedback from other people, and this often leads to unhealthy amounts of anxiety. For example, if you post something on social media, and hundreds of people respond positively to it, but a few respond negatively, you are likely to dwell on the negative responses.

Attraction

Human mating revolves around instincts that are now obsolete:
– Women are still attracted to tall, strong men even though physical strength is not as crucial as it used to be for protecting and providing for children.
– In the past, a man could not know for sure whether a child was his. For this reason, when it came to long-term commitment, our genetic grandfathers developed a preference for partners who could demonstrate their faithfulness. Now that we have effective birth control and paternity testing, this preference is obsolete.
– Pregnancy is more costly for women than for men. For this reason, women choose partners more selectively than men. Birth control has made this preference obsolete as well.
– Our sex drive does not play the same role that it used to. Once again, this is due to the development of effective birth control. In the past, a strong sex drive more or less guaranteed children. Today, this is not the case.
– Even romantic love may be moving towards obsolescence. We fall in love because our ancestors needed to form long term pair bonds in order to raise their children. As we have become wealthier, it has become more feasible to raise a child as a single parent. If we get wealthy enough, it is possible that romantic love will become obsolete.
On the other hand, it is plausible that a two parent household has other benefits for children besides economic benefits. Also, it is good for children to have grandparents in their lives, and grandparents who remain together because they are in love are, I guess, more likely to play a role in the lives of their grandchildren. For these reasons, romantic love may not become entirely obsolete, even though the role that it plays in our lives may change.

Conclusion

These examples make it clear that evolutionary obsolescence has a big impact on our lives. This means that we cannot avoid the following questions: Are we morally obligated to reign in some or all of our obsolete instincts? Even if we are not obligated, is it better to do so? Is it ever appropriate to use social pressure or legal sanctions to discourage people from acting on obsolete instincts? Should we use gene modification tools such as CRISPR to get rid of instincts that we don’t like? I hope to address these questions in future posts.