The Human Race Can’t Evolve Fast Enough
Healthcare experts talk and write about why humans (and more specifically American humans) are so obese. A prevailing theory is that over millions of years, dating back to when our ancestors were proto primates right up until about 15 minutes ago (in evolutionary time), we basically had two jobs when it came to sustaining ourselves:
1.) Forage and/or hunt for food;
2.) Eat the food.
So that meant we were doing a lot of walking around, looking for food and water, or running after some prey. We had to exercise to eat. We earned our calories by chasing after them. And the stuff we were eating was all natural: leaves, seeds, nuts, berries, small rodents, whatever. It provided the nutrients we needed to survive and evolve into the proud homo sapiens we are today.
But, somewhere in the 20th century, we learned how to manufacture foods. More specifically processed foods. And now, instead of hunting/gathering or even growing it ourselves, we can walk into a store any time and buy a package of Oreos and wash it down with a can of Cheez-Whiz.
Twentieth century homo sapiens flipped the script: Instead of working hard for all-natural sustenance, we now barely have to lift a finger to have processed crap delivered right to our door. (Actually, we don’t have to even lift a finger: “Alexa, order a large pepperoni with extra cheese.”) As a result, we are, in the aggregate, the fattest we have ever been in the history of humanity.
Our brains evolved to enable us to invent junk food, but our bodies and our metabolisms are no different than the Neanderthals who really had to hump it to stay alive.
But I digress. I am not writing about how fat we are. I am writing about how our consumption of information today is effectively the same problem.
Let’s go back to our old pals and ancestors, the Neanderthals. Their communication needs probably never extended much beyond their own dwellings and social group (village, whatever.) They made their cave paintings and maybe spoke some kind of language, but their communications, in whatever form, likely never had to or could travel more than a few feet or miles. The speed of information was limited by the speed of how fast Nate Neanderthal could physically move.
Then (to make a really long story shorter), someone started riding horses and people, and their stories could move faster. And then someone figured out smoke signals. Then carrier pigeons. And wheels. And steam engines. And the telegraph. Telephone. Satellites. Internet.
The pace of our ability to transmit and consume information has grown exponentially in the last, say, 200 years, but our brains are not all that different from some guy telling stories in his hut 10,000 years ago.
And so, our brains, our emotions, our social interactions, our emotional state and even our very concept of what is real and true and what is categorically false, are completely out of sync with modernity.
Because 200 years ago, if a politician told a lie, it could take days, weeks, or years to reach a large audience, if it ever did at all.
Today, as they say, “… a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
Our modern information age is absolute nirvana for conmen, thieves, sociopaths, demagogues – anyone looking for a shortcut to power, wealth, war and murder. So, dictators and despots can easily convince their oppressed subjects that some “other” is ruining their lives, making it necessary for that dictator to do horrible things in the name of “protecting” them.
Maybe that thing is interfering and lying about an election. Maybe it is blaming an entire subset of humans based on religion, or sexual orientation or skin color or nationality. Maybe it is invading another country because… what does it matter? It’s so easy to make up a lie and spread it, who cares how viable the lie really is? If enough people “eat” it, the bad guys win.
I have always been a firm believer in the notion that more information is better than less, and that the best antidote to bad speech is good speech.
But these days, I am not so sure. With the Internet especially, we have in place a frictionless mechanism to deliver instantly the informational equivalent of infinite quantities of junk food to our brains. We are gorging on information. And much of it is pure crap.
I don’t know what the mental analog of obesity is, but I am pretty sure we have it and that’s the world we live in now and there is absolutely no way to stop it. At least not from the supply side.
So that leaves the demand side. Us. The consumers. Every individual must make the decision to not automatically devour every piece of informational junk that social media, cable news, podcasts, streaming videos and email newsletters deliver to us. If we, as individuals, don’t pause to reflect, question, and even reject some of the information we are fed every minute of every day, we may very well drive our entire homo sapien species to extinction. The cockroaches will inherit the planet. (Though I expect at least one cable news network will come up with programming for the little guys.)
Bon Appetit.