for: stone age code, similar to - Ronald Wright - computer metaphor, evolutionary psychology - examples, evolutionary paradox of modernity, evolution - last mile link, major evolutionary transition - full spectrum in modern humans, example - MET - full spectrum embedded in modern humans

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insights

• evolutionary paradox of modernity
  • modern humans , like all the living species we share the world with, are the last mile link of the evolution of life we've made it to the present, so all species of the present are, in an evolutionary sense, winners of their respective evolutionary game
  • this means that all our present behaviors contain the full spectrum of the evolutionary history of 4 billion years of life
  • the modern human embodies all major evolutionary transitions of the past
  • so our behavior, at all levels of our being is a complex and heterogenous mixture of evolutionary adaptations from different time periods of the 4 billion years that life has taken to evolve.
  • Some behaviors may have originated billions of years ago, and others hundred thousand years ago.

Examples: humans embody full spectrum of METs in our evolutionary past

• fight and flight response
  • early hominids on African Savannah hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago when hominids were predated upon by wild predators
• cancer
  • normative intercell communication breaks down and reverts to individual cell behavior from billions of years ago
    • see Michael Levin's research on how to make metastatic cancer cells return to normative collective, cooperative behavior
• children afraid to sleep in the dark
  • evolutionary adaptation against dangerous animals that might have hid in the dark - dangerous insiects, snakes, etc, which in the past may have resulted in human fatalities
• obesity
  • hunter gatherer hominid attraction to rich sources of fruit. Eating as much of it as we can and maybe harvesting as much as we can and carrying that with us.
    • like squirrels storing away for the winter.