Darwin’s Razor

Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, and especially The Story of B and “The Great Forgetting” all point to Darwin’s Razor

I remember reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael close to 20 years ago. It is a great book and made me understand the origins of the bible and Judeo-Christian religions. The Story of B was an even better book.

In his writings, Daniel Quinn talks of The Great Forgetting. To paraphrase, we humans had a way of living in the world that was sustainably working for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact that way of living and the environment in which we lived is really what shaped us to become humans from our pre-human hominid ancestors. But then we started to do larger scale agriculture and small populations could generate way more food than they needed to sustain just themselves. So that allowed larger groups of humans to survive and thrive. And with a small group of farmers/herders providing the food, the rest of the population could focus on non-food-generating pursuits.

And so we gradually moved further and further away from the old way of living and created a society that was in many ways more comfortable and secure, but insidiously was at odds with nature. And of course we interpret the new society to be an improvement, another step along the evolutionary path whereby the remaining nomadic hunter/gatherer societies were stagnant, less evolved and destined for extinction.

This is all exactly on the mark, but falls short in talking about what I feel is a critically obvious missing piece: the fact that the majority of the people living in this modern, "civilized" society are in a near constant state of discontent. Society has made it even easier to active the base of Maslow's hierarchy without requiring what used to be a critical component of human existence: close social and emotional connections with others. The remaining tribes don't have this. And honestly it is this feeling of discontent that drives society forward as we all try to achieve our way to fulfillment. But of course that is not possible.

Daniel Quinn definitely got it right, but it was just slightly incomplete. The answer isn't necessarily give up modern civilization. But we definitely need to start by prioritizing the things that are encoded deep in our genes about what makes a fulfilling existence: being outside, moving your body, connecting on a deep, meaningful, emotional level with others, eating a healthy diet of whole foods in moderation, and spending less time thinking, and more time just being in the world.

The Pleistocene Razor might be a better term

So now that I've had some time to think about it, I feel like Darwin’s Razor might not be so optimal. Darwin can mean so many things and to have it just reflect homo sapien evolution and the environment they evolved in during the past couple of million years is a bit too specific for that.

My current thought is The Pleistocene Razor. The Pleistocene era is the geological era from about 2.5 million years ago until about 10k years ago (aka the Ice Age), and it pretty well corresponds with the human stone age (Paleolithic).

I had considered the Paleolithic Razor, but I think Paleo has a lot of baggage from the diet. And I really do believe that we can do better than simply a paelo diet. Legumes for one.

I know it's not as catchy. It’s still a work in progress and I’m open to suggestions.

The Blue Zones by Dan Buettner validates Darwin's Razor

The research findings of Dan Buettner shows that places in the world where people live their lives more closely to how band societies did during the last half of the Pleistocene and early Holocene. The key components of his Blue Zones theory:

• Moderate, regular physical activity
• Life purpose
• Stress reduction
• Moderate caloric intake
• Plant-based diet
• Moderate alcohol intake, especially wine
• Engagement in spirituality or religion
• Engagement in family life
• Engagement in social life

I don't necessarily think alcohol is required. I'd love to see the data comparing that to simply eating grapes. But if it is a part of social or religious ritual, I can see how it can be considered an integral part. And for stress reduction, I think that is simply a natural component having healthy emotional relationships with other people.

But overall, these points describe a hunter/gatherer lifestyle from when our homo ancestors were evolving into what became us—homo sapiens. Small, close-knit bands of people working together, spending nearly all of their time out in nature moving their bodies in order to provide for the basic necessities of life (the bottom two levels of Maslow's hierarchy).

Emotions and the pitfalls of modern society

Emotions clearly have value for survival and reproduction. They are complex and costly, so if they didn't, they would have never made it this far in the process of natural selection. Fear is an obvious one and that is probably our oldest emotion and we share that with many (perhaps even all locomotive) animals.

More complex emotions that showed up more recently in social mammals—such as envy, guilt, and pride—are useful for keeping societies cohesive. Organisms on a base level are inherently selfish; these emotions help them succeed in groups. If there weren't these emotional governors, then individuals wouldn't be inclined to help one another or to come to a consensus and group living would fall apart. Since there are no living solitary primates, we can presume that any genetic experiments towards that lifestyle were unsuccessful.

I prefer to think of humans as basically an emotionally-driven primate, with a logical cerebral cortex upgraded added on at the very end. If you consider it's been 541 million years since the Cambrian Explosion, the evolution of the logical, sentient portion of the human brain—which happened over maybe the last 1–3 million years tops—took less than a percent of that time. We have a much more refined, real-world validated emotional system that underlies our decision-making than the thinking brain that we all spend most of our time occupying.

And that is the big issue with where we are in modern society. Because the conscious part of the brain is at the top of the stack, it thinks it's in more control than it really is. But underneath the emotional brain is making most of the decisions and the rational brain just confabulates the motivation. This was shown in split brain experiments. I recommend the book Elephant in the Brain for more fascinating details of our actions and underlying motivations.

So we have gotten into a situation where our society dissuades people from expressing their emotions. And it is true that uncontrolled outbursts of emotion are a sign of immaturity. But we have sadly conflated "no emotional outbursts" with "healthy management of emotions" and of course superficially they may look the same but underneath they are anything but. [Well  as Trump and Kavanaugh have shown, displaying anger as a male is acceptable and is indicative of decisive power. Sad.]

In concert, we now have a society that more and more allows you to operate without interacting with many people at all. There is less of a forcing function for people to figure out how to have interactions with people, and thus are more likely to become emotionally stunted. Humans are prosocial or even eusocial beings. But the way society is moving goes against that grain, and I think we all end up feeling less fulfilled as a result.

Social relationships and emotions: Darwin's Razor implications

Darwin's Razor states that since our human bodies and minds evolved over hundreds of thousands of years during which time our ancestors lived as hunter/gatherers in band societies, we will feel most fulfilled living a life that most contains the key components of that lifestyle.

Band societies were the norm back then, with extended family groups living together to survive. In all that time, I'm sure there were people who tried to go it alone. Natural selection plus circumstances such as a member being ostracized, inadvertently separated, or even the last remaining member alive would have created a lot of opportunities to test that scenario out. They all clearly failed.

There are absolutely successful solitary animals who do live alone (save mating and raising offspring), such as bears, moose and most large felines. But nothing even close to humans. All primates are social animals. In fact humans are considered to be at the highest degree of sociality, known as eusocial. While that particular classification is still up for debate, it is still quite well established we are at most just one level below: prosocial.

So by any measure, we have pretty deeply established genetic programming that rewards social behaviors such as “helping others, sharing, donating, co-operating, and volunteering.” It is of course always a balance. Too much attention paid on the well-being of others at your own expense can be bad. You do need to take care of yourself first. But with that done, look to help others how you can. And they, in turn, will help you in your time of need.

There is a reason why solitary confinement in prisons is considers by many to be cruel. Humans need contact and interactions with others in order to feel fulfilled. I'll touch more on the emotional side in another post

What is Darwin’s Razor?

I have a theory.

I am a user experience designer by trade. But I have also done a good amount of work in the last seven years on self-discovery and how to live a fulfilling life (triggered by the unexpected and far too early deaths of both my parents).

Evolution by process of natural selection is essentially a form of design. Genetic variations create alternatives which are then put to the ultimate test in the struggle to survive and reproduce in their environment. Only the best variants succeed to pass along their genes to subsequent generations. From one perspective, organisms are designed over time to be optimally adapted to their environment (compared with all of the alternatives attempted).

So what was the environment that for humans? The Paleolithic and Mesolithic. This is when humans formed mostly into band societies, some as larger tribes. The key is that this period lasted for over 3 million years, with homo sapiens appearing first about 300k years ago, and modern humans about 250k years later. Our species had a long time for natural selection to work it's slow, steady process on our ancestors. How homo sapiens and their homo predecessors lived didn't really change that much in this time, and when it did (like language and cooking), it strongly selected for the successful survivors.

It was about 12k years ago that things shifted from nomadic to farming. In evolutionary terms, 12k years is hardly any time at all. It's at most 500 generations and likely less. But one could argue that even a shift to agriculture wasn't really that much of a shift in lifestyle. It really wasn't until the industrial revolution (c. 1780) and machine power that society was seriously transformed. So I assert that we really need to look to the Paleolithic and Mesolithic (and even Neolithic in many ways) human lifestyle as the one that our bodies and minds are optimized to thrive in; that is the one that went on for hundreds of thousands of years (and in some rudimentary form even for up to 3 million years prior).

Darwin’s Razor: the closer you can live your life to that of a hunter/gatherer band society from the Paleolithic era, the more fulfilled you will feel with your life.

This razor cuts away all the things that might seem important in life, but ultimately are not: academic degrees, a prestigious job, wealth, travel, things, media consumption, politics…

I do believe there are some notable exceptions to this. Modern medicine has clearly made massive improvements; we shouldn't go back to a time where people died of a simple infection or a poorly-healed broken bone. There is already a Paelo diet, but I think that misses the mark. Legumes are clearly a fantastic addition to our diet, and little-to-no meat has been shown to increase longevity. Modern sanitation, homes, and clothing are all big improvements over prehistoric times.

There are 4 areas that stand out to me as needing a serious re-alignment from where we are today in modern society.

1. Social and emotional connections
2. Diet
3. Body movement (what we might call exercise)
4. Being outdoors in nature

I will go into detail on each of these in future posts.