An evolutionary cul-de-sac
By: Krystian Galt
Tags: Delayed Gratification, Life, Evolution, Objectivism

We’ve evolved to care about each other. The extent of that caring is unique in the animal kingdom. Not only do we care about our kin, other animals often do too, but also, through feelings like compassion and empathy we innately care about other members of our species. The civilisational progress we’ve come to enjoy enables us to action those feelings by helping those in suffering. But have we ever stopped to ask ourselves: where do our instincts lead to? Is it possible that evolution has come to a point where it works against itself?

For millions of years humans (or their ancestors) have been enjoying a largely uninterrupted evolution. Slowly but surely we evolved from primitive pre-human organisms into ever more advanced ones. At some point we developed a brain capable of experiencing complex emotions and feelings. Human offspring like many other animals’ can’t survive unsupervised which is why those feelings were instrumental to our survival as a species. Somehow in the process of evolution we’ve gradually expanded the group these feelings (or perhaps a softer version of them) were extended to. Today, if you are emotionally sound, you should feel empathy and compassion towards a suffering fellow human even if you don’t know them personally and the only commonality between you and them is that they too are of the same species. We innately want to stop unnecessary suffering and we’ve indeed often taken action to that end.

We’ve evolved into an exceptionally smart species. We’ve outsmarted every other species so that we don’t really have natural enemies except for another human being. But we’ve learned to live peacefully. We’ve learned to maximise our lifespan and survival rates. We’ve eradicated common diseases which historically decimated populations. We’ve learned to cure or live with genetic illnesses. We’ve learned to live with disabilities. We’ve learned to detect and cure life threatening conditions antenatally. We’ve discovered contraception and abortion. We’ve learned to cheat the natural selection. We’ve broken it. Is all this “progress” good? Or more technically: have we ever made a conscious choice of our fitness function by which we (humanity) evaluate our actions or are we blindly following our instincts assuming they ”know” what they’re doing?

What is good? Objectively good is that which supports life while evil is that which destroys it. Traditionally this has been thought of in a short term without much regard for the long term. I mean, by commonly accepted standards of modern ethics choosing to let a baby die of a curable disease would be considered evil (not too far from murder, right?) while curing it would be seen as good, uncontentiously. But life on Earth is not short term by any means. It’s a long term process, a brutal ultra-marathon where instantaneous states don’t really matter for as long as the genetic charge can live through another generation. We’ve assigned a disproportionate amount of ethical weight to the survival of every single life without due regard for the long term consequences of following such a strategy. Consequences that won’t be felt until many generations later.

On a wide scale of human evolution a single lifespan could be thought of as a short term perspective. On the same scale a mid-term perspective would mean a few generations, perhaps three, or ten, something easily comprehensible. On the far end of that scale we’d have the multi-millennial long term — a perspective long enough to capture evolutionary changes in humans.

In psychology sacrificing a reward now for a greater one later is called delayed gratification. We do it when we save money rather than spend it, so it seems we’ve figured it out in terms of our lifespan which is the the short term on the evolutionary scale. Unfortunately the same can’t be said about the other two time frames, the mid and the long term. We seem to be losing the sight of the gratification as soon as it’s not us who will reap the benefits of it. We fail miserably in the mid-term perspective and we haven’t even started to think about the long term. Let me give you just two examples of how we fail in the mid-term: economy — watch the complacency and righteousness with which budget deficits are being funded by imposing a debt anchor on the future tax payers; environment — watch the complacency and righteousness with which we keep depleting our planet’s finite resources despite knowing full well it’s unsustainable. In both cases the acute awareness of the long term issues that come with it and the sense of guilt that inevitably creeps in may make us a little embarrassed, yet here we are centuries into this shortsighted madness unable to break free from it.

There clearly is a pattern to our behaviour. We just don’t seem to care about the future generations. We’ve evolved that way and so did other animals. Putting ourselves first and not taking responsibility for what happens after we’re gone is just very primal to us. In fact we probably wouldn’t have gotten very far if we were preoccupied thinking about the future generations at the time when we were supposed to be chasing our food around. We’ve been excused for many years to have lived oblivious to the profound consequences of our emotionally driven interference with the natural selection. We simply couldn’t grasp the concept of delayed gratification on the evolutionary scale and as a consequence we kept doing what felt right in the short term. We’ve always followed our gut and it’s gotten us here so it must be the correct strategy, right? Maybe, but is it really an uncontentious issue to which answer can be presupposed? In 21st century we’re finally equipped with the right tools and the insight we need to have a meaningful conversation about whether or not the strategy that got us here can get us there, about what it is actually that we’re trying to achieve with all that progress? What is our fitness function? In the face of a choice “a life or life” do we have the maturity to choose consciously, rationally, unemotionally? Have we even discussed it? Are we capable of looking past the immediate suffering and see the delayed gratification which can only be appreciated from a far zoomed out, evolutionary perspective?

Or perhaps we’re just too insignificant to influence in any way such a powerful force as evolution?

There’s much more to be said about this and there’s more eloquent ways to talk about it I’m sure, but I feel on the whole I’ve made my point clear, so I’ll stop here.

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