Views from Crestmont Drive

One of the emerging themes on this blog over the years is the idea that human nature evolved over millions of years to enable survival in an ancestral environment that most people no longer live in. In my own reading the idea of an actual human nature appeared first, e.g. in EO Wilson’s ON HUMAN NATURE and Stephen Pinker’s HOW THE MIND WORKS and THE BLANK SLATE, along with examination in modern culture of the consequences of the tendencies of that base human nature. Later came books that identified how those tendencies are increasingly unsuitable in the modern environment; e.g. tribalism/racism is a hindrance to large groups working together to fight existential threats. And even later came writers who distinguish between two, at least, poles of human nature, or expressions of human nature: one that clings to base tendencies (tribalism, et al), and another that is comfortable adjusting to the modern world. It’s not there’s any evolution going on here (not in 10,000 years); it’s that the diversity of human nature allows different groups reaching different conclusions to settle out in different directions. These are things I’ve pieced together myself over the past decade, without having read any general book or textbook on psychology.

But here’s piece in The Guardian that I saw linked today on Facebook that seems to summarize the entire issue in ways that have probably been common among evolutionary psychologists for decades.

The Guardian, Alex Curmi, 21 Sep 2025: How modern life makes us sick – and what to do about it, subtitled “From depression to obesity, the concept of ‘evolutionary mismatch’ can help foster self-compassion and point the way to a more rewarding existence”

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