Disclaimer that this is not a definitive guide on human behavior. This essay is just a collection of insights on evolutionary biology and how it shaped our behavior.
Whenever I start explaining myself something from scratch my mind defaults to this quote by Carl Sagan,
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Although I would love to start from scratch, it would raise more questions than it answers.
So, for this essay let's start from here,
Primordial soup (a hypothetical set of conditions) struck by a bolt of lightning, causing elements in the soup to mix up in a way that would create a solid enough structure that would not easily breakdown by its background (environment) and stay (alive).
In simple words, some reaction X caused some elements to engage in a way that it created a thing we call LIFE.
To learn more about the big history, you can start with this crash course.
For life on earth there are forces (Radiation, Gravity, Erosion, etc.) that act upon it and it disperses. When the force that's acting upon life is strong enough to break the life-holding chemical structure, life dies.
In spite of that, Life managed to stay around for 3.8 billion years. How? by creating copies of itself. By reproducing more of its kind.
Now, Whenever Life reproduces, there is a mutation. a tiny change in structure. This mutation may occur due to replication errors or various other environmental changes. That's how different kinds of species come around — due to a change.
To sustain itself, life needs resources. Resources are scarce. With the exception of some species, most life on earth sustains itself by killing others. So now, along with its environment, there are other lives that life has to deal with. It has to survive to leave more of its kind. For that it has to adapt itself to the environment.
Species that are more adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and pass on their genes. This is natural selection.
The environment works as a filter that sweeps out unfit species. So, to overcome this great filter life accumulates strategies and passes it on.
Evolution by natural selection is a very slow process. It took around 3.7B years for life to evolve from a single celled organism to a human being. During this process it developed all kinds of organs and strategies across species — just to survive best and leave more off spring.
Considering all the variables of the environment while taking a decision would be a resource expensive process. It's a lot of data. And just like in computers, processing more data requires more time and energy. So, to solve this problem life found a hack — Patterns. It doesn't need to process all the data. Just the pattern is enough. Every species has a unique shape, a unique print. So that unique print is enough to process and handle the situation.
A body with high contrast dots on it is enough for a monkey to recognize a leopard and flee.
This metaphor strategy isn't always right; sometimes it fires without any cause. But, when it is right, it saves life's ass.
You can learn more about this topic by reading studies conducted by ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen.
One of the strategies that life came up with is — Incentive. Life rewards itself on life sustaining behaviors and punishes itself on life-dispersing behaviors.
Suffering is your body telling you something is wrong. A signal for possible danger or lack of resources.
E.g. There is a tissue damage on your body. So your body generates a feeling of pain. Mainly to do this two things. First, to make yourself out of the way of danger and second, to give it enough attention to heal.
You are walking in a jungle and suddenly you see a tiger. Your body makes you anxious to make you save yourself.
Suffering is a tool that the body has developed to negatively incentivize it self when in the way of danger (lack of resources, loosing mating partner etc.).
Happiness is your body rewarding you to sustain itself.
E.g. Your body needs food to sustain itself. You eat food and it feels good. That's your body rewarding you for the behavior.
You're fielding while playing cricket and just caught a catch. You feel a sense of achievement; you feel happy. That's the same neurons firing when you won a mate from an enemy 300,000 years ago.
When life was at stake behaviors like anger, hatred and envy were life-sustaining. That's why you feel good by repeating those behaviors.
Natural tendencies like hatred, anger, greed and envy were the result of scarce resources when humans were hunters and gatherers. When another of its kind gets a mating partner, it was needed for life to feel envious of it and fight to win a mate. Mating partners were scarce.
Now, these naturally developed tools like happiness and suffering were no more reliable. We couldn't afford our bodies firing these signals without any (valid) cause. Emergence of Civilizations was an attempt to create an ecosystem where actions based on this rudderless natural tendencies weren't encouraged or in some cases weren't allowed at all.
The basis of this ecosystem was, Freedom of choice for everyone. But there is a catch — when does one's freedom to choose end? Quoting something that I first heard from Anand Gandhi,
Your freedom to swing your arm in any direction ends when someone else's freedom to not get its nose struck begins.
To reason the accurate position of arms and noses, we need science. We need evidence-based truth.
Truth is, the fact that my nose is here on my face, it can be seen, touched, and measured. Without evidence-based truth, anyone can untruthfully claim that my nose is in your house and you are hurting my sentiments by swinging your arms. So, with the rise of civilizations, rises the fun problem of determining the truth.
With the help of civilization and technological development, life has advanced so much, that not finding a mating partner is not a major problem our civilization is facing right now.
This old software that we've got must be upgraded by new tools for thoughts. It is no more reliable. A sense of happiness must be replaced by a long sense of well-being. Not only for us, but even for the ones that are not like us. We must equip ourselves with the new ideas to build empathetic systems, to elect better policy makers, to elect better leaders, to build better businesses, and agencies.
There are so many ventures out there that knowingly or unknowingly exploits this primary human behaviors. With less people equipping these new tools for thoughts and more people exploiting our natural tendencies, we are ignoring much urgent problems like poverty and climate change.
The goal of this essay is to present this new tool for thought that I came across a year back. It is really sad that some of these ideas have been around for about a century now. But not more people are aware of it. I hope this new tool will help you to make better choices.
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