Since the days of our earliest hominin ancestors, around 6 million years ago, our lineage has been deeply connected with the natural environments in which we evolved. Living in small, close-knit groups, our ancestors formed strong social bonds that were crucial for their survival and ensured the continuation of their genes. They were the original hunter-gatherers, moving constantly across expansive landscapes, living in harmony with the rhythms of nature and the cycles of day and night.
Around 2.5 million years ago, as the first members of the genus Homo emerged, our early human ancestors began exhibiting more complex behaviours, such as the use of stone tools. But the essence of their existence remained tied to their roles as hunter-gatherers. They roamed vast savannahs and forested areas, engaging directly with their surroundings through hunting, foraging and maintaining strong tribal connections while evading the threat of predators.
This lifestyle, characterised by continual movement and direct interaction with the natural environment, persisted largely unchanged until the advent of agriculture over 10,000 years ago. This agricultural revolution marked the beginning of a radical transformation, as human societies developed settled communities and domesticated plants and animals, setting the stage for the profound changes that would follow.
In recent history, we have seen greater change to our environment and cultural norms in mere decades than would be expected across hundreds of thousands of years in the days of our Stone Age ancestors. And with each year that passes, our world diverges further and further from the natural landscapes in which we once thrived.
We live inside concrete buildings, surrounded by strangers in densely packed urban areas illuminated by artificial lights. We’ve swapped the silent stillness of the savannah for the screeching symphony of sirens, motor engines and construction works. Our food is no longer hunted or gathered by ourselves but often prepared, cooked and delivered to us at the touch of a button. Our work, entertainment and social interactions are conducted via electronic devices from the comfort of our own homes.
But the speed of this shift in our environment and lifestyle habits is fast outpacing the much slower evolutionary developments to our brains and bodies. The primitive instincts and impulses that were honed over millions of years to cultivate our species still rule over our thoughts, emotions and decision-making far more than our rational minds would care to admit.
And so despite the great intelligence and apparent sophistication that our technological advancements have afforded us, we remain hardwired to the same goals of survival and reproduction that governed our ancestors’ lives all those years ago.
As the author Robert Wright notes in The Moral Animal, “we live in cities and suburbs and watch TV and drink beer, all the while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter-gatherer population.”
Hidden within this ever-increasing gap between our modern habits and our evolutionary wiring lies the root of many problems we face as individuals and as a society. Many of the quirks of our primitive brains that allowed us to thrive as hunter-gatherers are directly at odds with the environment we now inhabit.
This friction can be found across all facets of our lives, but is perhaps most clearly seen in our eating habits: in preparation for times of scarcity, humans evolved to consume as much as possible when resources were available. In modern environments, where high-calorie food is abundant and readily available, this predisposition leads us down the path of overconsumption and the resulting health issues that come with it.
In evolutionary biology, this concept is known as the 'mismatch theory’, a concept which hypotheses that “a previously advantageous trait may become maladaptive due to change in the environment, especially when change is rapid”. And while the agricultural revolution introduced significant changes relatively quickly, the transformations triggered by the digital revolution are occurring at an unprecedented and exponential pace.
The list of evolutionary mismatches triggered by our digital technologies is extensive, and each deserves its own detailed discussion in the future. However, for now, they can be categorised into the following areas:
Attention and Information Overload
For most of human history, information was scarce and difficult to acquire. Early humans lived in environments where knowledge about food sources, weather patterns, predator behaviours and social alliances was critical for survival. Much like the scarcity of food drove a relentless pursuit for nourishment, the scarcity of information drove a relentless quest for knowledge, making humans highly attuned to new and useful information whenever it became available.
In today’s world, instead of a physical landscape scarce of critical stimuli, we navigate a digital terrain saturated with information. Here we must contend with what blogger Cory Doctorow describes as an “ecosystem of interruption technologies,'' where an endless queue of news outlets, brands, ‘influencers’ and ‘content creators’ compete for every last second of our attention through various social feeds, notifications and advertisements.
While early humans craved new information that was critical for their survival, the constant buzz of our smartphones bombard us with a continuous stream of information that is often totally irrelevant to our lives. And since our brains have a limited capacity for processing information, this overload impairs our mental clarity and overwhelms our attentional systems. The more information we are exposed to, the more we’re required to actively filter and prioritise which sources deserve our attention in any given moment.
Our innate desire for novel stimuli, combined with the digital world’s endless supply of potential inputs, is continuously shrinking our ability to remain focused on a single task for a sustained period. Our devices, apps and platforms create an environment of constant interference, repeatedly tempting us with new, enticing information that diverts our attention away from what we’re currently doing.
Neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and psychologist Larry D. Rosen elaborate on this in their book, The Distracted Mind:
“We engage in interference-inducing behaviors because,from an evolutionary perspective, we are merely acting in an optimal manner to satisfy our innate drive to seek information. Critically, the current conditions of our modern, high-tech world perpetuate this behavior by offering us greater accessibility to feed this instinctive drive”.
Social Interactions
Upon discovering a correlation between the brain sizes of different primates and their respective social group sizes, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorised that there is a limit to the number of meaningful social relationships that a human can maintain. According to Dunbar’s findings, this limit sits at 150, which, in his own words, “seems to be the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us”.
This figure, Dunbar observed, is also consistent with the common size of social groups of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These early humans lived in tightly-knit tribes, typically consisting of 20 to 50 individuals grouped into foraging bands, while also frequently interacting with a few other tribes of similar size within their local environment. Through this lifestyle, the social bonds forged through constant interdependence and deep communal ties became critical for survival.
In the modern age, our social interactions have been dramatically transformed by digital technology, propelling us into vast online networks that far exceed Dunbar’s proposed limit of 150 meaningful relationships. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have expanded our social circles exponentially, granting us access to the lives of millions of people worldwide. But as we push to expand our ‘networks’ far beyond our capacity for maintaining meaningful relationships, our connections become increasingly shallow and superficial. We have thousands of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ on various platforms, but the depth of these relationships often pales compared to the close, interdependent bonds and face-to-face communication we evolved with.
These digital environments encourage us to observe the lives of others with unending curiosity. What they wear, what places they visit, what opinion they share on the ‘current thing’ and even what they had for breakfast has become the topic of immense interest for online communities. Many waste countless hours every day concerning themselves with matters as painfully trivial as the lives of ‘influencers’ and reality TV contestants whose source of income (and ego) relies on sustaining our attention. But all of this is at the expense of fostering genuine, meaningful connections with those around us in the real world. In our attempts to ‘connect’ with the world and all its glories, we’ve lost sight of the importance of the deep bonds that are built through shared experiences and physical presence.
All of this culminates with a young generation that has never before been more connected, yet never before felt more alone. Countless studies show record high levels of reported feelings of isolation and loneliness amongst young people, but so long as they continue to seek a solution to this crisis through expanding their ‘networks’ on digital platforms, they will remain trapped in a cycle of superficial connections and dissatisfaction.
Cognitive Biases
Cognitive biases evolved as mental shortcuts (heuristics) to help our ancestors make quick, efficient decisions in environments that were uncertain and scarce of information. These biases were advantageous for survival and reproduction as the speed of judgement they provided allowed these early humans to avoid predators and capture prey. By simplifying complex decision-making processes, they also saved valuable energy as they allowed for more efficient use of mental resources.
But as the mismatch theory dictates, these biases are a perfect example of previously advantageous traits that often now lead to poor decision-making in the vastly different environmental conditions of the modern world.
The availability heuristic, for example, is a cognitive shortcut that influences our perception of reality. According to the cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman, this bias results in people estimating “the likelihood of events in terms of how easily examples come to mind”. But as Kahneman notes, the salience and vividness of an event makes it more memorable and therefore more retrievable, leading us to overestimate the frequency or likelihood of such events occurring.
So while this bias may have benefited our ancestors in making quick decisions in an information-scarce environment, in our modern world of abundance, the constant exposure to the most sensational, shocking and fear-inducing news stories distorts our perception of how common these events truly are. And the more we allow online media and social platforms into our lives, the more often we are exposed to such events, and thus, the more likely we are to overestimate their frequency. Similarly, this constant exposure puts us at much greater risk of falling for ‘fake news’ or misinformation. “A reliable way to make people believe in a falsehood is frequent repetition,” writes Kahneman, “because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
Another of our common mental shortcuts is the confirmation bias, which leads us to favour information that confirms our existing beliefs. This bias evolved to maintain group harmony and social bonding among hunter-gatherer tribes by ensuring that we conform to group norms. Similarly, our in-group bias creates a tendency for us to prefer and support members of our own group over those who belong to different groups.
But in the age of social media, these biases fosters fierce tribalism and polarisation in online spaces, as we seek out the comfort of digital echo chambers that confirm the righteousness of our existing beliefs and close the door to the nuances and balance of civilised conversations. In this environment, discussions around divisive political or cultural issues are conducted not with the intention of understanding or reaching consensus, but rather as a means to dunk on our opponents and signal virtue to our existing tribe.
Addiction & Dopamine Reward System
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in the brain's reward system that’s involved in the reinforcement of behaviours that are essential for survival, such as eating high-calorie foods, physical activity and reproduction. This system evolved to make these behaviours pleasurable and rewarding, therefore encouraging us to repeat such activities that enhanced our chances of survival and reproduction.
These same pathways that drove our ancestors to seek pleasure are now being exploited by various digital platforms that are deliberately designed to trigger dopamine release. Whether it’s receiving likes on social media or climbing the ranks on a video game, these systems reel us in with a series of short-term pleasures that kickstart our reward system and prime us to return for more. Over time, as the brain starts to crave these dopamine hits, many users develop the frenetic habit of clicking, scrolling and swiping away at their devices, mirroring the addictive tendencies of substance abuse, gambling and other compulsive behaviours.
The ‘tech ethicist’ Tristan Harris has labelled the iPhone as a “slot machine” that we carry around in our pockets. Indeed the design of our digital products and platforms are heavily influenced by the casino, with variable and intermittent rewards are used to keep users engaged. The unpredictable nature of this reward system has been proven more effective at reinforcing certain behaviours. As users don’t know when or what type of reward they will receive, they become more likely to repeatedly engage with the platform in anticipation of the reward. Other concepts from the casino such as near-misses are also often deployed, where users are presented with near-success experiences which are more effective in keeping them engaged and motivated to try again than if they experienced an outright loss.
Stress
As a survival mechanism, humans evolved to experience acute stress as a “fight-or-flight” response to a perceived harmful event or threat. This rapid physiological reaction enabled our ancestors to either confront the threat (fight) or escape from it (flight), with the immediate response being crucial for such hazardous environments.
These moments of acute stress temporarily improve cognitive functions through various means, such as heightened alertness, improved memory and focused attention, facilitating the rapid decision-making required in such occasions. But unlike our ancestors, who experienced these stressors only during these rare fight-or-flight scenarios, we’ve created an environment through digital technology that delivers them in abundance.
Along with many other aspects of modernity, the hyperconnectivity and constant engagement of the digital world overload us with a barrage of acute stressors, like notifications, social media updates and ‘breaking news’ alerts. Our lives are increasingly intertwined with the daily news cycle, which, due to our negativity bias, happily delivers to us more and more of the negative stories that we so desperately crave. Our mobile devices ensure that these stressors follow us wherever we go, leaving us incapable of rescuing even a moment of solitude or escaping from the busyness of digital life.
As a result, this prolonged exposure to such stressors creates a state of chronic stress in the modern human, which can cause or worsen a variety of health issues from anxiety and depression to cardiovascular diseases. To rub salt in the wounds, as the digital ecosystem consumes an increasing share of our lives, it often comes at the expense of the very behaviours that are proven to reduce stress levels, like physical activity or spending time outside in nature. And even when we do manage to venture into natural environments, whether deep in a national park or along a coastal path, the presence of a smartphone means these stressors are never too far away. A single swipe can bring the latest manhunt, political fiasco or global catastrophe to the forefront of our attention once again. And with the hijacking of our attention and reward systems, if there’s anything we can be sure of, it’s that we’ll continue to swipe.
In the coming weeks, part 2 of Techno Sapiens will explore how we can navigate the digital landscape while retaining greater control over our lives and protecting what makes us human.