The Scientific Foundations of the New Darwinism

So let us sketch out the field and the forces arrayed within it, and what this means for business leaders. In a nutshell, evolutionary psychology says three things.

• It reminds us that we are truly animals, clan dwelling hunter-gatherers who evolved to fill a new environmental niche that emerged during a global cooling period around five million years ago. We have a very refined genetic profile^[9]—there is less difference between any two humans, say, an aboriginal and a Wall Street banker, than between any two chimpanzees. This is due to a cataclysmic narrowing of our gene pool caused by an environmentally triggered population collapse around 60,000 years ago (probably a short “nuclear” winter caused by a massive volcanic eruption).

• The cornerstone of much social philosophy and psychology of the last century is a big falsehood—the idea that the human capacity for learning means we can endlessly reinvent ourselves, socially engineer whatever we can imagine, and shape the identity of our young as we please. We can only do these things to the extent that our nature will allow, for far from coming into the world with minds as naked as our bodies, we arrive with a well-stocked brain, brimming with biases, needs, routines, and skills. Many of these are programmed to emerge on a timed schedule—like language—when we most need them.^[10] Evolution does not leave to chance or to the labor of learning what the survival of previous generations has shown each new member of species will need to survive and reproduce.

• For most of our existence this psychological design was in close congruence with our economy and lifestyle as hunter-gatherers, but then a short while ago—around 10,000 years—the world changed. A warming period at the end of the Ice Age created a new problem of population pressures through a rising sea level and loss of savanna, which agriculture and fixed settlements solved by feeding more mouths efficiently. The rapid march of what we call civilization followed this.^[11] The incontrovertible key corollary to this is the fact that we stopped evolving long before we started building cities and organizations. There has been far too little time and no consistent pressure to change our basic psychology, forged over five million years, and fully formed 250,000 years ago. We may have taken ourselves out of the Stone Age, but we have not taken the Stone Age out of ourselves.

So what do we have to contend with as we move forward? Here's a short summary of what is on one side of the equation—the key features of our evolved psychological design.