ACT I
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What does biology show us about psychology?
At the level of molecular biology, genes are molecules that keep making copies of themselves. That’s why we all feel that the purpose of life is to keep on living. That’s why we feel that the good ideas are the ones that keep us alive.
At the level of history, literature, and current events, 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.
So what happens in between those two? How do we get from biochemistry to world history?
Our next stop is zoology.
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We, like all other animals, have two basic instincts: survival and reproduction. But those words get a little confusing here because people use them differently in everyday life.
Most people would tell you there’s more to life than survival and reproduction. It’s not like we spend all day having unprotected sex in burning buildings while fighting off hordes of zombies and evil ninjas.
Really, our two instincts for survival and reproduction are just two different manifestations of one, even more profound instinct, to maximize the survival rates of our genes. On that level, we’re talking about the biochemistry we share with all other living things, where genes create bodies that live long enough to have children and create more copies of the genes.
Surviving and reproducing are the two things genes have to do to evolve. They’re also the two things organisms have to do to make that happen. That’s why we call animals’ instincts to do them their survival and reproductive instincts. I call them that for us too, just to keep humans on the same page as the rest of biology.
We could just as easily call our reproductive instinct our sex and family instinct. We could call our survival instinct our everything else in life instinct. They mean the same thing.
Any feelings you have that relate to sex or family in any way are instincts that relate to keeping copies of your genes alive in other people. Any feelings you have about anything else in life are instincts for keeping your own genes alive. Some feelings are both of them at once, like wanting a safe place for you and your family to live.
We can also say we have other instincts, like social instincts that make us want to be part of a group. But one way or another, all of those instincts lead back to survival and reproduction.
Being part of a community means having people on your side. Those are people who can help you get many of the things you need to live, like safety from enemies, food, shelter, clothes, medicine, information, and advice, just to name a few. It also means they can help your family with those things. Or if you’re trying to have a family, a community of people on your side is a good place to meet someone to have a family with.
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The next step toward understanding how we think and feel is to see how we process information.
Our two instincts of survival and reproduction are our ultimate goals. Intelligence lets us process ideas in three basic ways to help us reach those goals. Again, this is zoology applied to us, because all animals have these three basic mental abilities. We just have much more of all three of them than any other species.
We remember. We learn from things that have happened to us.
We imagine. We think in the abstract, about things that could happen. We also try to find ways to visualize things that do happen.
We communicate. We learn ideas from other people. We also spread ideas to other people.
All the things we think about come from these five sources. Everything you think about is some combination of two basic instincts interacting with three basic mental abilities. Your instincts give you your feelings about what’s important. Then you use your three mental abilities to figure out what to do about it.
You do a lot of that subconsciously. That’s why we can say that everything we feel is an instinct about survival or reproduction, and at the same time we feel there’s more to life than survival and reproduction.
Everything people feel that doesn’t seem like a feeling about survival or reproduction is a feeling about survival or reproduction wrapped up in subconscious abstract thinking. That’s why your social instinct seems like such a simple, obvious thing, but it leads to so many things that help you survive and reproduce.
Emotions are instincts + intelligence.
ACT II
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That brings us to perceptions. We can say that you always make what feels to you at the time to be
the best decisions
you can think of
in the situations
you’re in,
for yourself
and the people
and things
you 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.
Emotions are attitudes toward your situation. Even if you don’t know why you feel the way you do. Emotions prepare you to make decisions by focusing your attention on things you believe could happen.
For you to make a decision depends on you clarifying the situation in your mind to the point that you believe you can see a best course of action. You don’t walk up to someone and kiss them on the neck because you’re sexually attracted to them. There are many things you can do when you’re sexually attracted to someone. You walk up to someone and kiss them on the neck because you’re sexually attracted to them and because all the things that went into your perception of the situation made you feel that was the best thing to do.
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Our perceptions are the result of the information we take in through our senses, combined with our knowledge and instincts.
When you learn to drive a car, or learn how to do anything else, it doesn’t change your instincts. You get better at it by learning more about what’s happening.
That includes learning how to get information you need to make good decisions.
When you first learn to drive you have to think consciously about all the new things you’re learning and all the things that are happening. But the more practice you get, the more you develop habits— and hopefully good habits. Then you start making a lot of your decisions subconsciously because you’ve learned that there’s only one best decision to make in that situation.
ACT III
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All of this means that the next step in understanding evolutionary psychology is understanding the evolution of our perceptions.
The easiest way to do that is to talk to people and listen to each other with the attitude that the other person has good reasons for whatever they think, feel, and believe. Even if you don’t agree with them, all their thoughts and feelings came from Being Human on Planet Earth just like yours did.
Perception leads to decision making. To perceive a course of action to be the best is to choose it. We make decisions that way subconsciously all the time. Information goes into your brain and a decision comes out of your brain. If you immediately perceive an obvious best choice, your brain doesn’t need to do anything else.
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Consciousness is the part of our brain we use when we don’t perceive an immediate, obvious best choice. Then we have to think about multiple possibilities to try to figure out which one is best. But once we do reach a point of perceiving one course of action to be better than all the others, again, our decision is made.
Consciousness is also the part of our brain we use to process information that we feel could be important but that we don’t immediately know how to use. Processing information is a decision in itself.
You’re doing it right now. You know what each of these words I’m saying means, but I’m fitting them together into ideas you haven’t thought of before. So you have to think about what they mean to decide if they relate to anything you care about, and if so, how.
ACT IV
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The next step in understanding people’s perceptions is to work backwards, to our two instincts and three abilities.
That starts by asking:
Why would
this person, with
this life history, in
this situation,
feel that
this idea, emotion, belief, or decision
was the
best thing they could do
at the moment to
survive and reproduce?
Evolutionary psychologists have been asking those questions for a long time. They’ve discovered many specific ways our instincts are wrapped up in our subconscious abstract thinking.
Our instincts evolved in the conditions our ancestors lived in. That made some parts of our instincts evolve to be more specific than others.
People all over the world are wary of snakes and spiders. People who live in parts of the world that don’t have snakes and spiders and who have never seen them suddenly feel like there’s something very important about them when they see pictures of them.
We evolved that feeling because poisonous snakes and spiders lived in our ancestors’ habitat. Over the course of thousands or millions of years they killed everyone who wasn’t wary of them.
We don’t have instincts like those for electrical wires, cars, or guns. Those things are much more dangerous to us now. But cars and electrical wires have only existed for about a century, and guns for about five. We haven’t had any of those things long enough for them to kill everyone who isn’t naturally wary of them. We wouldn’t want that anyway. That’s why we have to teach people about the dangers of those things.
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Memory, imagination, and communication aren’t just general abilities either. All of those evolved in the conditions our ancestors lived in. We can remember, imagine, and communicate some things better than others.
One obvious example is our perceptions of people.
It’s often easier to imagine a story and remember words when we hear people say them than when we read them. That’s how a poem made Amanda Gorman famous.
It’s easy to imagine that our computers or cars can hear us like people could when we talk to them. Now computers and cars can hear us when we talk to them, and that makes them much easier for people to interact with.
It’s easier to make people feel that stories are important when they’re about people, or when they’re about non-human things with human qualities, than when they’re about animals or plants or events with no relation to humans. That’s why the idea of sending astronauts to Mars is so exciting to us, even though it would be easier, safer, and cheaper to explore it with remote controlled probes.
And just look at how many ways people have found to make emoticons out of ordinary keyboard characters. Three marks that could be two eyes and a mouth are all we need to imagine we’re looking at a face.
🙂 🙁 😉 :p :0 :] =} ¯\_(0_0)_/¯
ACT V
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These five traits interact in much more complicated ways too. There are many things that almost everyone does because we just feel like they make sense. It might take some unusual situation to make us notice there was a different way we could’ve been looking at it all this time.
For instance, how do you know who your siblings are? You can’t see their genes.
One way you can tell is that you have a lot more in common with them than you do with people you aren’t related to. Another, even bigger, way is that you have the same parents and you grow up together.
So what does that mean for adoption?
If a couple has one child and adopts another child, both children will grow up in the same house. Because they have the same parents and grow up in the same house they’ll have more in common with each other than they do with people they’re not related to. They would have more in common with biological siblings than they do with each other, if they had them, but they don’t. They grow up thinking of each other as siblings because all the things that make them feel like someone is their sibling happened between them.
Usually those things happen between people who are genetically related. But sometimes they make people feel like they’re related to people they aren’t genetically related to.
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Things like that happen a lot. We naturally interpret our sensory input in ways that correspond to our ancestors maximizing the survival rates of their genes in the conditions they lived in. But most of the world today is very different than it was for our ancestors.
Genetic evolution for us is slow, because it only happens generation by generation. But we’re all smart enough to think of many ideas over the course of a year, or even a day. We try out new ideas, decide which ones we like best, and use them to help us think of more ideas.
In the past 10,000 years people have thought of farming, domesticating animals, metal working, writing, architecture, governments, money, sailing the oceans, gunpowder, mining coal, steam engines, factories, railroads, drilling oil, internal combustion engines, airplanes, automobiles, radios, nuclear energy, computers, space travel, the internet, and smart phones, just to name a few.
Physiologically we’re almost identical to the people who lived 11,000 years ago. But with every invention we come up with, we make our lives different from the way they were back then.
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Look around you.
How many things can you see from where you are right now that were created by people?
Every single thing that was invented by people has a story behind it that goes back 50,000 years. It’s a story of people looking for better ways to live and have families, by remembering things they’d seen and done and heard about, by imagining what they could do and what could happen, and by talking about ideas and learning ideas from other people. Every one of those stories leads back to the first behaviorally modern humans, who had all the brain components they needed to think of the original idea.
Farming is a more efficient version of gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals.
Metal is an improvement over making things out of stone.
Money makes trading a lot easier.
Driving cars and flying airplanes is a faster version of walking.
Books help us remember and communicate information.
Computers help us process information and remember it.
The internet helps us remember and communicate even more information.
But that’s only half of the story.
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Everyone else in the world is descended from the first behaviorally modern humans too. Everyone else has stories that start with the same original ideas yours do.
It’s like we’re playing a game, bouncing a tennis ball against a wall.
The wall is an idea people had 50,000 years ago. You throw the ball back through time, and that’s a story that connects you to the first behaviorally modern humans.
Then it bounces off the wall, and on its way back it’s telling a different story that starts with the same original idea. Anyone in the world today can catch the ball, because everyone today has a story that starts with the same original idea. They’re all stories about people using their imaginations, memories, and communication to look for better ways to live and have families.
Also known as making
the best decisions
they can think of
in the situations
they’re in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they care about.
ACT VI
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Evolutionary psychology is built up from discoveries like these. A long and very thorough introduction to evolutionary psychology is called How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker.
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This fills in an important piece of the story of Being Human on Planet Earth.
Psychology is a science, but we aren’t just talking about science here. Great writers and playwrights, like William Shakespeare, understood this in their own ways. That’s why the stories they told are timeless classics, that people today can still relate to.
So once again, we’re talking about science, English class, and history class all at the same time.
