this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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The hot take I've heard is that our ancient ancestors had a much higher chance of being killed by predators, so being on edge was an evolutionary advantage. According to this idea, the fear and dread of today is a remnant of our past.
Nah, I think that overstates the extent to which our ancestors were the hunter more than the hunted and ignores the social dimension. An early human might have been at risk for predators when they were out alone hunting or gathering but when you're with the group I'd think that's a much smaller threat. Having to deal with social threats from within the group, now, that's ever-present. And still present today!
Also, after reading a book about the evolution of agency that suggests the evolutionary innovation of humans is that we're a goal-seeking system that's able to function as a part of a larger goal-seeking system (collective action)... I wonder how much that can account for existential dread. We have a diffuse drive to be part of something greater than ourselves but it's not always clear what that should be.
I wouldn’t read too much into that, evolutionary psychology is a pseudoscience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psychology
Psychology is already a field full of rough concepts, bad statistics, and low certainties, we mostly have no clue why we’re doing things right now. Adding millions of years and unprovable speculation surely doesn’t help.
If evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience (which is debatable to begin with), it's that way not because our evolutionary history doesn't inform our psychology but because our understanding of both those things is too immature for the questions most people are are trying to answer. But that in itself depends on the questions and the level of answer one finds acceptable. I've found Michael Tomasello's book "The Evolution of Agency" perfectly proportionate in the kinds of questions it seeks to answer given the information it has, and I think the wild speculations I extrapolate from it are totally fine to share in random internet conversations.