ACT I
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Charles Darwin’s discovery of evolution brought together centuries of observations scientists had made of living things into the science of biology. That was with The Origin of Species, in 1859.
In his next book, The Descent of Man, in 1871, he outlined how biology could be used as a starting point for studying human psychology. He was really ahead of his time on that. Studying humanity on a global scale depended on a level of information processing technology that wouldn’t be invented for 125 more years. That was in the 1990s, with the internet.
Evolutionary psychologists have made many big and valuable discoveries. They’re easy enough to understand if you build up to them right.
Evolution, by differential survival rates, has brought us from sunlight shining on muddy water to genes to cells to worms to fish to amphibians to reptiles to chimpanzees. How are we, with all our thoughts and feelings, a continuation of that story?
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We’re looking for a framework that all human mental activity fits into. So where’s the obvious place to start?
Human traits. Traits are the similarities that define a species.
Where’s the best place to start looking for traits? We want to start with the broadest parameters we can and work our way inward from there. Biologists call that taxonomy.
First it’s biochemistry. What traits do all living things have in common that set them apart from geology?
Then it’s the animal world. What traits set animals apart from all other life forms?
Then it’s mammals. Then it’s primates. Then it’s our species.
Evolutionary psychology has three first principles, meaning, three themes that tell the story.
ACT II
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The first is taken from evolutionary biology, but worded for us.
All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to maximize the survival rate of his or her genes.
Or as I’ve been saying: People always make
the best decisions
they can think of
in the situations
they’re in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they care about.
Another way to say that is:
All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her genes by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.
That word perceivable is going to be important. Perception means the partly conscious and largely subconscious interpretation of senses combined with knowledge and instincts.
This means everything we do feels to us like a step along the best path to survival and reproduction. To understand why we make the decisions we make, we have to figure out why we feel, meaning perceive, them to be the best decisions we could make in the situations we’re in.
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This instinct happens at the level of physiology.
Genes are molecules that make copies of themselves. The bodies of all living things evolved the way they did because they’ve made this happen in their environmental conditions.
This is why plants grow their leaves toward the sunlight and grow their roots toward the water. It’s not a decision the plant makes. It’s how the biochemistry of its body reacts to its environment.
This is why the first worms evolved to swim toward food and swallow it. That started out as biochemistry. Brains evolved from that.
With every decision you make you’re making what feels to you like the
best decision
you can make
in the situation
you’re in.
That means you’re trying to take a step toward gaining something that’s valuable to you. That’s the human version of being a plant growing toward the sun and the water.
ACT III
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The second first principle is taken from zoology, adapted for us.
Ninety percent of human mental activity is subconscious.
Unlike plants, animals need to move to get to our food. To do that we need to process a lot more information. That’s what our brains are for. But the biochemistry that makes all of that information processing happen is still based in the physiology we share with all other life forms.
We can say that subconsciousness means all mental activity the person doesn’t notice. Traditionally people have defined subconsciousness as the part of the brain where the person makes decisions without noticing they’re doing it. But that’s not good enough.
All of our mental activity is important, and there’s no clear level where we can say our decision making begins.
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This is where we make the shift from physiology to psychology.
Your brain makes the rest of your body function by directing electricity through your nervous system. At the lowest level of your brain functions there aren’t any decisions to make. You can choose to hold your breath temporarily, and you can choose not to blink your eyes temporarily. But you can’t decide to stop using any of your other organs.
Above that, things get more complicated because sometimes your involuntary systems overpower each other.
Usually when you get hurt you feel pain, and then some or many or all of your thoughts, feelings, and decisions are a reaction to the pain. But if you get hurt badly enough you can block out the pain with adrenaline.
That still isn’t a choice you make. At that level you’re still a plant growing toward the sun and the water.
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What about emotional trauma?
That starts with a threat you feel to your survival or reproduction when you get trapped in a situation where you may or may not be able to make decisions, but either way you can’t see any way to make decisions you feel are going to save you from the threat. Subconsciously you try so hard to process what’s happening so you can deal with the situation that you make connections in your brain that don’t make sense to anyone else. That has a lasting effect on how you think and feel.
Nobody chooses how they’re going to react to emotional trauma. Which means that part is involuntary. But it affects how people think and feel for a long time afterwards. Which means that part does involve decision making.
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Subconsciousness has a number of levels above that. That’s where we do make decisions.
The next level up are our instincts for survival and reproduction. Usually those are such profound feelings we act upon them without noticing them. We eat when we’re hungry and drink when we’re thirsty, and usually we don’t think about why we do it because it feels like the obvious thing to do. Usually we don’t notice that we have the choice not to. Nor do we think about those as life or death decisions, even though our lives depend on eating and drinking.
Sometimes our instincts come into conflict and we do have to think about them. When you’re hungry but you’re in the middle of doing something important, you wait and eat later.
When you’re faced with two choices and both of them are potentially dangerous you have to decide what’s the best way to act on your survival instinct. You do that by comparing the risks you perceive to benefits you perceive for each choice.
We do the same thing with choices about reproduction. Like whether it would be better to stay in a relationship with someone or break up with them.
We do it with choices that involve both survival and reproduction. Like how much you’re willing to risk or sacrifice to help out your boyfriend or girlfriend.
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Above that are more levels of feelings about what you should and shouldn’t do, what you want and don’t want, and what you like and don’t like. Those feelings get easier to put into words the closer they get to consciousness.
Poets and songwriters put feelings into words. The people who like their poetry and songs the best are people who recognize feelings of their own in the words.
Consciousness is intellect. That means the things we know we’re thinking about.
That includes ideas that are easy to put into words, like remembering the lyrics to a song.
It also includes skills you know how to use without putting into words, like how to play a song on a piano.
It also includes things you can recognize without putting into words, like knowing the music of a song without knowing the lyrics.
Our feelings affect what we think about. Meanwhile, ideas we think about can affect how we feel.
When you get good news it makes you happy, and being happy makes you think about your good news. But they aren’t the same thing.
Your good news was a specific piece of information. Being happy is a generalized feeling of things going well for you.
ACT IV
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The third first principle comes from archeology.
All human mental traits evolved in or before the stone age.
People acting upon their feelings worked pretty well 100,000 years ago. Their feelings were the instincts that kept them surviving and reproducing, and that had kept their ancestors surviving and reproducing all the way back to the chimpanzees and beyond.
Today, every society in the world, including stone age societies, have rules against murder, rape, and some other behaviors. That means we can’t look at stone age societies today or in the recent past to see what the stone age was like 100,000 years ago. But that does give us other valuable clues about people.
The first thing it tells us is that everywhere in the world people have figured out that societies function better if people don’t act upon some of their feelings. Wherever we find ideas that people in every society in the world have thought of, that gives us clues about the brain structure of our species.
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This also means that everything people think of today has a stone age origin.
Behaviorally modern humans evolving 50,000 years ago means they did all the same basic things we do. That means they had all the brain components we do. The real difference between us and them is that we’ve had 50,000 years to think of new ways of doing the things they did.
You can see that today in the melting pot of America. Anything Americans can do, children who grow up here can learn how to do. Regardless of which part of the world their parents were born in.
That’s because we’re all descended from the same people. The last time all of our ancestors lived in the same place was 50,000 years ago. Meaning, in the stone age.
ACT V
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There are some simple ways to see, and feel, all three of these themes playing out.
The next time you get into a situation where your feelings get so complicated you can’t figure out what you feel, ask yourself,
“What do I feel is going to happen in this situation, and what do I feel I should do about it?”
That’s the question you’re always asking subconsciously. So asking it consciously can help you find a good answer.
Another way to see, and feel, all of this play out, is to think back on every decision you can remember making in your life. Think about how you felt at the time.
Every decision you’ve ever made felt to you like the best decision you could make at the time, in the situation you were in. Your feeling of that being the best decision you could make was your feeling of that being the best way to survive and reproduce.
That’s easiest to recognize with big, important decisions. But every decision you make, no matter how mundane, feels to you like the best direction you can make your life go at the moment. Every time you make a choice to sit down or stand up, if nothing else you’re making a choice about how to use your energy, and you need energy to survive.
Every physical action, and even mental action, takes energy. Even lying in bed doing nothing takes energy, which is why you’ll get hungry sooner or later.
Living always takes energy, and living means surviving. If nothing else, every decision you make is always a decision about how to use your energy.
The point here is that emotions are virtually infinite, but they all start with survival and reproduction. That means all of our emotions fit into the same framework.
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Once you understand that, you can do something even bigger.
Ask anyone else why they’ve felt that the decisions they’ve made were the best decisions they could make in the situations they’ve been in. If you both know how this works, you can have some really interesting conversations about life that you didn’t know how to have before.
If they don’t know the science behind it but they want to talk about why each of you felt that the decisions you’ve made were the best decisions you could make, you can still have a more profound conversation than you could before. Whether it’s people from another clique in school, or your grandparents talking about what life was like when they were your age, or it’s people from another part of America or another part of the world, there are people everywhere who like to talk when they feel like the other person is really listening.
This is the fastest way to break down stereotypes. When you stereotype someone you assume you already know what they’re thinking, or that you know the most important parts of it.
Really getting to know someone depends on thinking of them as someone who makes their decisions fundamentally the same way you make yours. When they make decisions that are very different from yours it’s because something about their situation is very different from yours.
Even if you’re talking to someone who doesn’t care what you have to say, you can use this to help yourself understand whatever they’re talking about.
Another way to use this is to sort out disagreements with friends and family. The next time you start to get in an argument with someone, ask them what they feel is going to happen in the situation they’re in, and what they feel they should do about it. Now the two of you have the same starting point for talking about your feelings.
ACT VI
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A good, easy to read introduction to evolutionary psychology is called The Stone Age Present, by William Allman.
A more philosophical introduction that still covers all the science is called The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright.
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Another easy way to see this play out is to watch movies.
Movies are stories about people making decisions. You can understand the decisions the characters make, either when they make them or sometime later, because you can see all their reasons for making their decisions.
Action movies are stories about people making a lot of decisions about their survival instincts. They’re faced with a lot of danger and they have to make decisions about the best way to take risks to try to gain benefits.
Romance movies are stories where people make lots of decisions about their reproductive instincts. They try to figure out the best ways to get into relationships, stay in relationships, or get out of relationships.
Family comedies and family dramas are stories about people making decisions about their reproductive instincts too. Reproduction doesn’t just mean having sex and having children. It also means keeping copies of your genes alive in the people you’re related to. That makes people feel connections and make decisions about their family members that wouldn’t make sense with anyone else.
Movies where characters put themselves in danger to save their romantic partners or family members are stories about people making decisions about their survival and reproduction.
We’ve just made it to the starting point for psychology, and we’re already seeing connections between science and art.
