A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
This week’s book is A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein.
Heying and Weinstein are evolutionary biologists. This information is highly relevant to understanding where they are coming from in writing this book. The opening premise of this book is that it’s NOT nature vs nurture. Its nature AND nurture work together to make us who we are. And who we are includes millions of years of evolution. And bundled into evolution, is culture.
And this is really key to understanding so much of what is going wrong in the world around us. See, the WEIRD countries, and that is an Acronym of Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic countries, have seen this bizarre, anti-logical thought take over that culture is essentially fake. That our culture is entirely a social construct, and so it is ripe for deconstruction under post-modernist philosophy.
Heying and Weinstein carefully explain the full spectrum of why that thought is so wrong it’s practically backwards, starting with the very first zygotes we all were billions of years ago. Culture is very much a part of our evolutionary history.
So, each chapter is laid out with an overarching theme, and then Heying and Weinstein explain how that theme developed evolutionarily over the last millions of years leading up to modern life, and where we have gone so very wrong with that theme. It’s not quite what one would call Luddite, more of a cautionary tale, leaning heavily on the ideas of the Chesterton’s Fence and the Sucker’s folly. In fact, these two ideas are almost central themes to the book, so let me spell them each out.
Chesterton’s Fence is the idea that reforms should not be made to a system until the reasoning behind its current state is understood. Originally described by G.K. Chesterton in 1929. Basically, we are so hung up on innovation and the next new thing, that we aren’t aware of what we are destroying in the pursuit of novelty. Beware of the tradeoffs. The example they use in the book is the appendix. Long assumed to be a vestigial organ with no use in modern world, it turns out the appendix is entirely useful in “third world” countries. See, the appendix is a repository of healthy gut flora. In countries with high levels of diarrhea, the appendix helps replenish your gut flora to a healthy working order. In the west, where such disorders are virtually obsolete, we have appendicitis. In the ‘third world’ countries, they do not have appendicitis. The appendix still serves a purpose there. Being quick to just remove an inflamed appendix ignores Chesterton’s Fence. If there ever comes a day when modern medicine is not so readily available in the WEIRD countries, having an appendix might be a very good thing indeed.
Sucker’s Folly is the tendency of a concentrated short-term benefit not only to obscure risk and long-term cost, but also to drive acceptance even when the net analysis is negative. Take for example...and this is my example, not one specifically from the book, electric cars. WEIRD cultures are obsessed with electric cars, to the point that California has pushed to ban gas cars in the next decade, insisting all cars sold in California must be electric. But one of the major components in the batteries of electric cars is cobalt, which can only be found in very specific regions of the earth, primarily the African Congo. And the mining of it is done in horrific, subhuman conditions. But all these WEIRD cultures with their noses in the air about their moral superiority in driving electric cars care not one bit about the Congolese miners who die daily either digging this cobalt out of the earth or from lung disease because of breathing in the cobalt dust. Additionally, in order to keep the electric cars charged, they rely on coal power...good old coal or diesel generators to charge their cobalt/lithium batteries. Lithium batteries are also the result of open pit mining. No one in the western world is innocent, by the way. Cobalt and lithium are found in your smart devices. So the short term benefit of the electric car does not take in to account the long term cost of cobalt and lithium mining and the need for deeper coal reserves to keep powering those cars.
The other overarching theme is how wonderfully adaptable humanity is, but how the WEIRD cultures are steadily and rapidly ignoring the wisdom of elders. Now, there is give and take here, push and pull. The beauty of having generations of family in close proximity is that the younger generations have the chance to determine which boundaries can be pushed safely, with minimal impact on the family unit or larger tribe of humanity. I feel like I’m paraphrasing that badly here, but that’s sort of the gist of it. And the book is peppered with anecdotes from their own lives spent as field researchers and what they have learned in the field as evolutionary biologists. The book covers in turn the human niche, history of our lineage, how our bodies evolved over time, medicine, food, sleep, sex and gender, parenthood and relationships, childhood, school, adulthood, culture and consciousness, and where do we go from here. And most of the chapters include a bit at the end called The Corrective Lens: What can you do now to help offset some of the turbulence around you that is the result of modernity and the ever increasing pursuit of novelty for the sake of novelty.
I found those corrective lenses to be particularly useful and basically just a balm on my soul, as I am already doing quite a few of the things recommended therein. Things like:
Be skeptical of novel solutions to ancient problems, especially if the novelty is difficult to reverse. Spend time in nature. Look, it’s a good thing to break away from the screen sometimes...daily actually. This....this is not real life. Resist pharmaceutical solutions for medical problems if you can. This is not to say you never need to see a doctor. But we are all way to prone to running to the doctor at the first sign of a sniffle. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is rest...no doctor needed. Eat more fruits and vegetables, or as they put it, shop around the edges of the supermarket. The food in the middle, in the boxes on the shelves, is packed with preservatives which violate Chesterton’s Fence in the extreme. Preservatives like that in food are less than 100 years old. We have NO long-term studies on their side effects on the population in general.
Get good sleep and sleep early enough, you don’t need an alarm to wake you up. Keep your bedroom dark with no blue light i.e., your phones. Blue light is such a well-known sleep disruptor, there are apps you can use to change the light on your phone to red spectrum. But you’re better off just leaving the phone in the kitchen to charge.
Easy sex has been a catastrophe for stability at home. Women...there are a lot of evolutionary reasons we used to be treasured and guarded as the gems of the family, reasons that had less to do with being men’s property and more to do with home life stability. Also, and this is a big one: Do not interfere with children’s development by trying to block, pause, or radically alter their development. It’s been said before but bears repeating...this is not reversible. You are doing permanent damage to your children in the name of being Wokest in the Land. You’re gonna wake up one day and realize you ARE the evil queen, and not the fairy god mother.
Turn the sound down on your conversations and watch the actions. Literally, actions speak louder than words. When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Do not let inanimate objects babysit your children. They drew an interesting and entirely believable parallel between the rise of using TV, tablets, and computers as child rearing tools and the rise of autism. A much stronger parallel than the vaccine myth that was so thoroughly debunked. You had the kid. RAISE them! Spend time with your kids. Don’t plop them in front of a box to be raised by whatever propaganda is being shown today.
A University cannot simultaneously maximize the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of social justice. The two are mutually exclusive. And truth is far more important.
Always be learning. Be aware of the alarming statistics about college graduates not reading after they complete their degree. They shut their minds down as soon as they have that paper in hand. And it’s inexcusable. The worlds information is available for free. And I’m not talking about the internet, with carefully curated content shown to you by your preferred search engine. I’m talking about your local library.
Be Asch-Negative. That means speak the truth, even in the face of adversity.
Dispense with anything predicated on a utopian vision that focuses on a single value. When someone tries to maximize a single value...like for example social justice...you know they are not an adult. Strive to be an adult. Look at the big picture, not just individual brush strokes.
This book was fascinating. Tracing our shared evolution across millions of years and seeing how it applies to us today and how we can take back a sense of self in a world gone crazy with self-centeredness, was a unique perspective. Learning how to take a step back from the hyper-novelty that is 21st century life in a WEIRD country is important to, I think, everyone’s well-being. I enjoyed reading this book. I enjoyed the history, which was written such that even a non-biologist like me was able to be pulled into a compelling story. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a connection to the past as a way to the future.
This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on March 19, 2023, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.
