If it ever feels like the stresses of daily life are all getting too much to bear, you’re not imagining it.
Researchers claim that modern life is pushing human minds and bodies beyond their evolutionary limits.
Humanity has seen staggering improvements in technology, medicine, and quality of life over the past few hundred years.
However, this rapid progress has left our individual brains unable to keep up.
Lead author Dr Jose Yong, of James Cook University in Singapore, told the Daily Mail: ‘For more than 99 per cent of human history we lived as hunter–gatherers in small, kin–based communities surrounded by nature.
‘In evolutionary terms, the shift to modern cities happened almost overnight.’
Dr Yong says humans are like moths, whose instincts still haven’t caught up with the invention of electric lights – sending them happily flying to their doom every evening.
And according to the experts, this ‘evolutionary mismatch’ is responsible for everything from the epidemic of chronic anxiety to rising rates of obesity and short–sightedness.
Researchers now say that modern life is pushing human minds and bodies beyond their evolutionary limits (stock image)
Homo sapiens emerged as a species 300,000 years ago and, for the overwhelming majority of that time, we lived in tiny, family–based social groups.
Our instinctive responses to stress, conflict, and social pressure have been fine–tuned by hundreds of thousands of years in these environments.
But human society has now changed so rapidly, and so fundamentally, that our old evolutionary habits no longer help us to thrive.
For example, Dr Yong and his co–authors point out that the horizons of our social landscape now stretch much further than our ancient ancestors could have ever envisioned.
He says: ‘Our ancestors lived in small, relatively egalitarian communities surrounded by people they knew well.
‘Today, many city dwellers are surrounded by thousands of unrelated strangers while constantly being exposed to people with far greater wealth, status, or success.’
At the same time, social media has allowed these interactions to ‘play out to their logical extremes’.
In our hunter–gatherer groups, it was easy to know where you stood in the group’s social order, while competition was generally minimal and healthy.
For the vast majority of our history, humans have lived in small hunter–gatherer societies, like the San Bushman of the Southern Kalahari (pictured), but modern life has changed faster than we can adapt
Today, the vast inequalities and uncertainty that we now face on a daily basis drive people into a constant state of comparison and competition.
The researchers suggest that this has created a vicious feedback loop in which inequality drives competition that, in turn, fuels even greater inequalities.
Dr Yong calls this the Social Evolutionary Mismatch and Competition Hypothesis, and claims that it could be the root of a vast array of problems facing the world today.
In their paper, published in the journal Behavioural Sciences, the researchers explain how this mismatch can be linked to a rise in psychological disorders, overstimulation, cognitive overload, social disconnection, depression, and suicidality.
The scientists even suggest that the mismatch could be the cause of tumbling fertility rates as people spend more time competing for status and resources rather than building families.
But it isn’t just the social world that has changed far faster than our brains and bodies could keep up with.
Dr Yong also argues that the material world around us is now so different to our hunter–gatherer origins that it’s causing serious physical and mental health problems.
The natural environments that humans lived in for most of our evolutionary history have now been largely replaced by artificial habitats filled with technology.
Even our diets have been dramatically transformed in just the last 200 years, replacing natural products with highly processed, high–calorie alternatives.
However, just like the moths that can’t help but fly towards electric lights, our evolved instincts and behaviours haven’t adapted to our new lives.
‘People often report feeling more relaxed after spending time in nature, and we also know, for example, that childhood myopia is more common when children have less exposure to outdoor environments,’ Dr Yong said.
‘Artificial lighting interferes with our natural circadian rhythms, while many people working office jobs spend most of the day sitting down, despite evolving to benefit from regular movement.’
At the same time, the researchers also warn of a bigger and more worrying change in our world.
They argue that the world has now entered the era of the ‘polycrisis’, in which multiple crises entangle and spill over into one another.
For example, climate change increases the frequency of droughts and crop failures, which then drives up the cost of living.
That economic hardship then fuels political unrest, making governments more inward–looking and less willing to cooperate on shared challenges, such as climate change.
Researchers say this ‘mismatch’ has been exacerbated by the ongoing ‘polycrisis’, an interconnected and overlapping web of crises such as climate change, droughts, food shortages, and political instability. Pictured: A farmer surveys his crops during the 2018 drought in New South Wales, Australia
‘As a result, the world feels increasingly unstable, people feel like they’re constantly in crisis mode, and it doesn’t look like there’s any single clear solution that can reverse the overall trend,’ says Dr Yong.
‘Perhaps the most troubling possibility is that some forms of evolutionary mismatch are pushing us towards what evolutionary biologists call an evolutionary trap.
‘An evolutionary trap occurs when behaviours that were once adaptive become persistently maladaptive because the environment has changed, yet we continue responding using instincts that evolved for a different world.’
An evolutionary mismatch creates a world that feels more competitive, naturally making people become more competitive in response.
The problem, the researchers explain, is that when everyone does this, the world becomes much more hostile and competitive for everyone else.
That may seem like a dire picture of the future, but the researchers suggest that change is still possible.
For instance, they suggest that cities could be built with spaces that feel less crowded and overwhelming, while encouraging people to spend time in nature.
Likewise, social media should be designed to reduce the intensity of competition between people, rather than drive it to a fever pitch.
