The environment humans developed in shapes the way we are. Not just our bodies (like walking on two legs instead of four) but how we think and feel as well.
Some people talk about “social Darwinism”, meaning that we adapt all the time and that society changes us. But natural selection doesn’t work that way. It works through reproduction, which means it takes thousands of years to make a difference (about 11,300 years – if you want to check, have a look here). [amazon-product]0691029059[/amazon-product]
People have been around in their current form for about 60-70,000 years (depending on who’s figures you believe for how old homo sapiens are). If you add to that all the years of previous hominids (like homo erectus, homo habilis and so on), we end up with something like:
Hunter-gatherers – about 1.75 million years
Cities – about 7,000 years
Banks – about 400 years
Welfare state about 50 years
Which environment do you think we’re evolved to deal with – what sort of “environmental selection pressure” formed the way we look, think, make decisions, register emotions?
Right, hunter-gathering.
We’re not “evolving” into different types of people. Socially, we might change a little. For example, as hunter gatherers we might have killed outsiders. They were a different tribe, who looked different and had a different accent and therefore were potentially dangerous. Nowadays we probably wouldn’t kill them, just laugh at their funny accent and odd colour skin, and refuse to have them in our club or our country!
It would take thousands of years for changes in our more basic functions, like emotions, thinking patterns and all the cues that make us distrust those who are different. It might be socially useful not to make snap judgments, but while we might adapt our behaviour (in the same way as refraining from killing an outsider) we don’t really change the fact that we do make very rapid decisions.
If we were going to change by natural selection, the environment would have to make the changes more successful for breeding. So if money was going to make us “evolve” the wealthy would have to have more surviving children than the poor. There is no evidence that they do (and quite a bit that the poor have more children than the rich, bearing in mind ages at first parenthood etc.)
So the environment might have changed socially, but we don’t change fundamentally, we’re still well adapted to be good hunter gatherers, not to be good bankers.
