“Show me an animal that has succeeded in surviving and reproducing in a hostile environment for millions of years, and I will show you a rational animal.”
Homo sapiens has not been around for millions of years. Yes, the hominid lineage, including the genus Homo, has been here for millions, but can we speak intelligently about the "rationality" of our pre-Sapiens ancestors?
An interesting essay. But in my view it sidesteps an elephant in the room of the modern intellectual and epistemological environment. All the way from Hobbes to Kant, intellectuals were a tiny part of the societal elite and their audience was similarly an elite one. But the vast 20th century expansion of institutions of 'higher education' has serious diluted and devalued non-STEM intellectuality.... created a vast surplus of self-appointed humanities 'intellectuals' and their equally vast self-refering intellectual audience.
The same tiny number of genuine profound-thinkers still exists but is drowning in that pseudo-intellectual sea to the extent that most of the most perverse and counterproductive political and philosophical thinking in our time has come more from the graduate professional middle class than from the school-leaver 'ignorant' masses. A Madness of Intelligentsias in other words as I explore in this essay series: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
Well said. I think the problem with assuming we are rational animals is that we can rationally end up at an irrational result.
As rational animals, we can have people reach the diametrically opposed conclusions that (1) COVID is a significant threat to health, and we should all be vaccinated to protect ourselves and the vulnerable members of our community, and (2) COVID is not a particularly dangerous virus and the unknown long term risk of the vaccine outweigh the benefits for most people. How can we rationally get to such different results? To me, the answer is that people aren't solving for health outcomes, they're solving for how to fit into their community, how to rationalize their behavior, and/or how to sooth their anxiety. Sure, we're rational, but our rational brains will often lead us away from the truth and toward convenient conclusions.
I largely agree with this essay, but I don’t think what we’re seeing is an evolutionary mismatch between so-called “Stone Age brains” and modern complex societies. It’s closer to something like upgrade pressure: modern environments create real, visible opportunities to improve on strategies that were once the most effective solutions—things like confirmation bias and tribalism.
It’s not that they are not effective anymore. There is no maladaptation. It’s just that through cultural and developmental change, scientific progress, economic development, and (crucially) a growing understanding of human psychology, nature, and complex systems, we’re discovering that we can do better. The modern world raises the ceiling: it reveals attainable alternatives—better epistemic tools, better institutions, better norms—and that’s what generates the feeling of mismatch.
So the “mismatch” isn’t a fact; it’s a perception produced by expanded possibility. What gets labeled as “Stone Age biases” could still be adaptive shortcuts—yet now placed under upgrade pressure to be refined, scaffolded, or sometimes left behind for
As always with your writing, there is enough to think about in this single essay to last one a lifetime. Here are some things that strike me:
First, I wonder if, for many, the maladaption is a response to being constantly overwhelmed, and common sense born of personal experience becomes a life raft to which one holds on in sheer desperation.
Second, I’m reminded by this of Ritchie Robertson’s 2020 book on the Enlightenment, and particularly his discussion of David Hume. I wonder what you might think of these observations of his (partly paraphrased by me): Hume made the “bold move” of comparing people to animals. [p. 280] “Animals rely on experience, and base their conclusions on custom, just as we do. . . . People admire the instinct of animals and contrast it with human reason,” but “[i]nstead of granting animals reason, Hume is suggesting that humans rely on instinct.” [p. 280] Hume’s thesis “is supported by some present-day psychologists, who argue that we arrive at most of our beliefs not by logical deduction, but by intuitive inference . . . . As innumerable psychological tests have shown, people are not naturally good at logical reasoning; it is a specialized ability that requires training.” [p. 281]
Last, I recently, finally, read Ziblatt and Levitsky’s How Democracies Die. A major theme in that book is about the necessity of norms, consistent with what you describe here: “Liberal norms and institutions, products of hard-won, counterintuitive discoveries, function to channel our self-interest and ambition into cooperation and progress . . .”. What’s so interesting about norms, at least as I ponder this, is that they are not express, but implicit. That is, unlike laws and regulations, they course along beneath the surface of our consciousness—until they are broken, and then, as we see now in the US, all hell breaks loose.
Which brings me back to Robertson on Hume: “It is commonly said that passion should be guided—and, whenever necessary, suppressed—by reason. The function of reason, however, is to discover abstract relations, whether between our ideas, or among the objects of our experience. Abstract relations between ideas—for example, mathematics—may enable a merchant to balance his books, but will not in themselves motivate any of his actions . . . . to do anything, I must want to do it, and wanting to do something is the product of the passions, not of reason.” [pp. 278-9]
Thank you, yet once again, for a tremendously thought-provoking essay.
Terrific essay! Too bad the premise undermines itself.
“Show me an animal that has succeeded in surviving and reproducing in a hostile environment for millions of years, and I will show you a rational animal.”
Homo sapiens has not been around for millions of years. Yes, the hominid lineage, including the genus Homo, has been here for millions, but can we speak intelligently about the "rationality" of our pre-Sapiens ancestors?
An interesting essay. But in my view it sidesteps an elephant in the room of the modern intellectual and epistemological environment. All the way from Hobbes to Kant, intellectuals were a tiny part of the societal elite and their audience was similarly an elite one. But the vast 20th century expansion of institutions of 'higher education' has serious diluted and devalued non-STEM intellectuality.... created a vast surplus of self-appointed humanities 'intellectuals' and their equally vast self-refering intellectual audience.
The same tiny number of genuine profound-thinkers still exists but is drowning in that pseudo-intellectual sea to the extent that most of the most perverse and counterproductive political and philosophical thinking in our time has come more from the graduate professional middle class than from the school-leaver 'ignorant' masses. A Madness of Intelligentsias in other words as I explore in this essay series: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
Well said. I think the problem with assuming we are rational animals is that we can rationally end up at an irrational result.
As rational animals, we can have people reach the diametrically opposed conclusions that (1) COVID is a significant threat to health, and we should all be vaccinated to protect ourselves and the vulnerable members of our community, and (2) COVID is not a particularly dangerous virus and the unknown long term risk of the vaccine outweigh the benefits for most people. How can we rationally get to such different results? To me, the answer is that people aren't solving for health outcomes, they're solving for how to fit into their community, how to rationalize their behavior, and/or how to sooth their anxiety. Sure, we're rational, but our rational brains will often lead us away from the truth and toward convenient conclusions.
I largely agree with this essay, but I don’t think what we’re seeing is an evolutionary mismatch between so-called “Stone Age brains” and modern complex societies. It’s closer to something like upgrade pressure: modern environments create real, visible opportunities to improve on strategies that were once the most effective solutions—things like confirmation bias and tribalism.
It’s not that they are not effective anymore. There is no maladaptation. It’s just that through cultural and developmental change, scientific progress, economic development, and (crucially) a growing understanding of human psychology, nature, and complex systems, we’re discovering that we can do better. The modern world raises the ceiling: it reveals attainable alternatives—better epistemic tools, better institutions, better norms—and that’s what generates the feeling of mismatch.
So the “mismatch” isn’t a fact; it’s a perception produced by expanded possibility. What gets labeled as “Stone Age biases” could still be adaptive shortcuts—yet now placed under upgrade pressure to be refined, scaffolded, or sometimes left behind for
As always with your writing, there is enough to think about in this single essay to last one a lifetime. Here are some things that strike me:
First, I wonder if, for many, the maladaption is a response to being constantly overwhelmed, and common sense born of personal experience becomes a life raft to which one holds on in sheer desperation.
Second, I’m reminded by this of Ritchie Robertson’s 2020 book on the Enlightenment, and particularly his discussion of David Hume. I wonder what you might think of these observations of his (partly paraphrased by me): Hume made the “bold move” of comparing people to animals. [p. 280] “Animals rely on experience, and base their conclusions on custom, just as we do. . . . People admire the instinct of animals and contrast it with human reason,” but “[i]nstead of granting animals reason, Hume is suggesting that humans rely on instinct.” [p. 280] Hume’s thesis “is supported by some present-day psychologists, who argue that we arrive at most of our beliefs not by logical deduction, but by intuitive inference . . . . As innumerable psychological tests have shown, people are not naturally good at logical reasoning; it is a specialized ability that requires training.” [p. 281]
Last, I recently, finally, read Ziblatt and Levitsky’s How Democracies Die. A major theme in that book is about the necessity of norms, consistent with what you describe here: “Liberal norms and institutions, products of hard-won, counterintuitive discoveries, function to channel our self-interest and ambition into cooperation and progress . . .”. What’s so interesting about norms, at least as I ponder this, is that they are not express, but implicit. That is, unlike laws and regulations, they course along beneath the surface of our consciousness—until they are broken, and then, as we see now in the US, all hell breaks loose.
Which brings me back to Robertson on Hume: “It is commonly said that passion should be guided—and, whenever necessary, suppressed—by reason. The function of reason, however, is to discover abstract relations, whether between our ideas, or among the objects of our experience. Abstract relations between ideas—for example, mathematics—may enable a merchant to balance his books, but will not in themselves motivate any of his actions . . . . to do anything, I must want to do it, and wanting to do something is the product of the passions, not of reason.” [pp. 278-9]
Thank you, yet once again, for a tremendously thought-provoking essay.