Charles (Darwin) In Charge

My family enjoys your weekly column, but we're wondering why you can't give advice without launching into evolutionary explanations. We aren't always instinct-driven animals like elk or migrating salmon.

--Evolutionary Overkill

It isn't so bad being a salmon. Salmon just wake up one day and swim like mad upstream. There's no existential fretting, "What does it all mean? What will I do with myself after grad school? Am I a bad fish if I sometimes long to put grain alcohol in the sippy cup of that brat screaming on the beach?" Meanwhile, back in humanland, research in cognitive neuroscience (by Michael Gazzaniga, among others) and in social science finds that we humans aren't the highly rational independent thinkers we like to believe we are. In fact, as evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it, "our modern skulls house a stone age mind" -- adapted to solve hunter-gatherer mating and survival problems. This 10-million-year-old psychology, still driving us right now, today, is often a mismatch with our modern environment. Take our sugar lust, for example. This made sense in an ancestral environment, where eating a couple of berries might have helped prevent malnutrition. Today, however, we can drive to Costco and have some guy load a pallet of doughnuts into our SUV while we burn .0003 of a calorie watching him. Understanding the origins of our motivation is not "evolutionary overkill" but our best shot for possibly controlling our behavior -- or at least forgiving ourselves when we fail miserably. As my First Amendment lawyer friend Ken White (@Popehat) tweeted about S'mores Girl Scout Cookies: "I thought they were kind of meh at first but by the third box I ate in the garage they were growing on me."