‘Civilization’ and the human maladaptation syndrome

We are not normal and can never be

Photo: Marcus Lindstrom

Setting the stage

The starting point for this reflection is that human beings are a product of natural selection: H. sapiens has evolved over time just like every other species. Human exceptionalism, the idea that humanity stands uniquely apart from nature, is a dangerous delusion. If this doesn’t sit well with you, then the rest of the story will be really upsetting—better go do something else.

To make sure everyone else is paddling the same canoe, it’s worth reviewing just how ‘natural selection’ works. It’s really quite simple but does require four conditions:
1) A largish population of interbreeding individuals;
2) The existence of heritable traits: genetically influenced physical characteristics or behaviours that are important to the survival of those individuals;
3) Significant variation among individuals in the degree of expression of these traits;
4) Environmental characteristics that favour some variant(s) over others.

When these conditions are satisfied, individuals possessing the more viable variations of a trait will survive longer and produce more offspring on average than less favoured individuals–i.e., the environment ‘naturally selects’ those individuals who are best adapted to prevailing conditions. Since the favoured variants are heritable, the subsequent generation will be more heavily populated by individuals with advantageous versions of selected traits (see Box 1). Of course—and this is crucial—should the environment change significantly, then so does ‘selection pressure’. What was once adaptive may become dangerously maladaptive—it’s a whole new ball game.

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Box 1: Natural selection in real time

Anyone wanting evidence for natural selection need look no further than so-called ‘pest’ control. Consider mosquitoes—these adaptive insects exist by the billions in many regions and carry vectors for such important human diseases as malaria and yellow fever. DDT, pyrethroids, organophosphates and other biocides have been/are used since 1945 to ‘control’ mosquito populations and reduce the risk of disease to humans. Of course, sustained broadcast biocide use represents a significant chronic change in the mosquitoes’ environments and the target species have responded accordingly. There is significant variability in the thickness/penetrability of the exoskeletons and in the production of metabolic enzymes among individuals in large populations of mosquitoes. The more ‘thick-skinned’ Individuals, or those with enzyme systems better able to immobilize particular biocides, are more likely to live to populate the next generation. Because of such ‘natural selection’ the new generation is better able, on average, to resist the poison. Rinse and repeat.
A single female may produce up to 1000 eggs in her brief several-week lifetime. Many mosquito species can go from egg to adult in less than two weeks so there can be several generations of breeding females per season or year. This enables natural selection to operate very quickly. Some malaria-transmitting species acquired resistance to DDT within a few years of first contact and the effectiveness of several other biocides has also rapidly declined. The same process of ‘evolution-by-natural-selection’ explains how many agricultural pests, disease-causing bacteria, and even rats and mice have become serially resistant to numerous biocides, antibiotics or poisons that were initially effective in controlling their populations. The evolution of resistance by agricultural pests and disease vectors to chemical control represents a significant threat to both food production and public health.

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Some populations or whole species can acquire an adaptive trait very rapidly (see Box 1) but, because of our life history, natural selection operates glacially slowly in humans. H. sapiens is a long-lived species with a typical generation time of ~20 years and relatively low fertility. For these reasons, it typically takes several thousand years for a moderately adaptive trait to gain significant ‘traction’ in a regional human population and many thousands more to become universal. For example, it took as much as 10,000 years for Caucasian Europeans to acquire the ability to digest milk sugars as adults (lactase persistence), a trait that has not yet fully spread to other human populations.

So why is this important? In a previous post, I suggested that for the past 10 millennia, the period since the adoption of agriculture, hardly anyone has lived in evolutionarily or ecologically ‘normal’ environments. Understand that by ‘normal’, I am referring to the social and biophysical conditions that prevailed for 97% of anatomically modern H. sapiens’ evolutionary history (and for that matter, for most of the several million years of the Hominidae family history before that). Paleolithic humans evolved as highly social animals living in family to tribal groups of a perhaps a few tens of individuals that only occasionally met with other bands for ceremonial purposes, mate-finding, cooperative hunts, etc. Humans occupied a wide variety of climate niches from tropical to temperate but, apart from seasonal cycles, the biophysical environment experienced by any individual or band would be relatively stable on human-relevant time scales. Our distant ancestors would be deeply familiar with the geography and practical ecology of their limited home ranges and would probably die within a few kilometers of their birth-places. In short, humans are adapted for life in predictable, virtually unchanging, all-natural, small-scale social and biophysical settings. These are the ‘normal’ environments that shaped modern H. sapiens’ physical stature, instincts, behaviours and emotional repertoire.

Everything was upended with the spread of agriculture and even more spectacularly with the renaissance and scientific revolution. Reliable food supplies fed larger populations which enabled the emergence of ‘civilization’ with its hierarchical social structures—division of labour, class stratification based on wealth, complex governance organizations, etc.—and large-scale permanent settlements. Most recently, the industrial/scientific revolution brought improved population health which lowered the death rate and fossil-fueled technologies which supplied everything needed for medieval towns to morph into today’s major cities. From a mere ~450 million people in 1500, the global population ballooned 18-fold to 8.2 billion in 2025. By then, almost 60% of humanity was urbanized. The modern techno-industrial (MTI) world now has 83 cities with populations in excess of five million—i.e., each has more people than existed on the entire planet 10,000 years ago!

Obviously, the contemporary urban MTI world is not a ‘normal’ human environment. Contemporary urbanites live in artificial caves in crowded concrete ‘communities’ 100,000 times more populous[1] than the typical hunter-gatherer bands they left behind. Significantly, unlike their free-range ancestors, city dwellers are spatially and psychologically isolated from the ecosystems that support them. Most couldn’t name the weeds that pop up in the sidewalk cracks outside their doors let alone describe the ecosystems displaced by their home ‘towns’; many don’t even know—and don’t seem to care—where their food comes from. These nature-strange humans are also typically alienated from 99.9999% of their urban ‘neighbours.’

If we compress all of anatomically modern humans’ 350,000-year history into a single day, the entire transition from paleo-natural to neo-urban life-styles happened in just the 40 minutes before midnight. Even more spectacular is the ever-accelerating pace of cultural change. Virtually all of modern science, political organization, geopolitics (including global exploration and colonization) and economic development (including resource extraction/depletion and pollution) has occurred since 1500; most of the major technologies we consider indispensable today, from television, the internet and personal computers, through jet aircraft and satellites, to the James Webb space telescope didn’t even exist a century ago. In short, on our compressed time scale, the scientific revolution began just two minutes before midnight and the techno-avalanche in only the past 30 seconds.

On being maladapted

What this thumb-nail sketch describes is not merely an historically interesting cultural transition; it is an unprecedented and under-appreciated rupture in H. sapiens’ evolutionary history. It marks a sea-change in humanity’s social and biophysical environments. Most importantly—and predictably— there has been a corresponding transformation of selection pressures acting on the human genome. H. sapiens is still playing at Darwinian ‘natural selection’, but “it’s a whole new ball game” with a revised rule-book in an unfamiliar arena.

Hypothesis: modern humans, who have been physically and psychologically shaped by life in small groups occupying simple, predictably unchanging habitats, are utterly maladapted to life in the over-crowded, mind-bogglingly complex, rapidly convulsing MTI urban world that has unfolded particularly in the most recent few centuries. It is truly remarkable—and alarming— that people are not generally aware of this fact of their own evolution. Because so much that we—and many generations before us—have known is abnormal, it is precisely this aberrance that parades in our minds as the usual ‘plain vanilla’.

Consider the effect of dramatically transformed selection pressures on general well-being. For example, whether conscious or not of specific triggers, modern humans arguably live much of the time in states of elevated stress. Stress is our physiological response to instinctive discomfort, ominous warnings, unfamiliar situations, social pressure, threats to safety, etc. Stress has widespread effects on physical and mental health; it affects hormonal output including cortisol and adrenaline which in turn increase heart- and breathing rates, blood pressure and general anxiety. Long term or chronic stress can lead to physical and mental illness. Significantly, emotional stress “has been worsening at an accelerating pace worldwide over the past few decades”. In the US, there is a marked increase in emotional, mental health and related behavioural disorders particularly affecting low-income groups, rural communities and ethnic minorities.

Studying stress responses in rodents at Montreal’s McGill University in the 1930s, Hans Selye mapped out what he called the general adaptation syndrome (GAS) and suggested that humans react similarly in stressful situations. Selye identified three stages of reaction to stress: 1) ‘alarm’, characterized by the release of cortisol —the ‘stress hormone’—and adrenaline which trigger the ‘fight or flight’ response to immediate/short-term danger; 2) ‘adaptation’, in which the body may gradually return to normal or, if the threat persists, will subconsciously maintain elevated cortisol levels, blood pressure, etc., as if on high alert; and 3) exhaustion, which include more extreme responses (including death) to chronic, elevated stress lasting weeks or months.

It is the persistent adaptation and exhaustion stages that are most likely to concern modern urbanites. Ordinary folks today are personally afflicted by such on-going stressors as mounting household debt, overdue bills, the threat of job loss, rising health care costs, inflation generally, intimate partner violence, substance abuse, divorce/family break-up, overcrowding, fear of homelessness, geo-political uncertainty, climate and environmental anxiety, etc., etc.,[2] any one of which—or together—can result in deteriorating physical and mental health. Some stress responses beg comparison with the neurotic behaviours of zoo animals denied access to their natural habitats. Research has identified numerous physiological symptoms of stress exhaustion, including high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, stroke, mass obesity, compromised immune system, weakened digestive tract, and enhanced cancer risk. Mental health hazards include poor sleep/fatigue, loss of interest in sex, emotional burnout, broken relationships, cognitive lapses, deep depression, low self-esteem, self-harm and even suicide.

Sound familiar? We needn’t wonder why so many ‘moderns’ resort to tranquilizers, antidepressants, sedatives, and like prescription drugs—not to mention the other kind—simply to remain (in)sane.

One obvious lesson here is that individuals should strive to avoid situations that lead to the long-term ‘adaptation’ or ‘exhaustion’ phases of the stress response. But the really important point is that these toxic modern tensions are not normal as defined; they were totally absent from the social, physical and emotional environments of our paleolithic ancestors. Almost all contemporary stressors are emergent phenomena of modernity.

Let’s take this a bit further: consider such chronic/contemporary socio-cultural phenomena as epidemics and pandemics,[3] school shootings and other mass killings, random street violence, youth gangs, extortion rackets, organized crime syndicates, seemingly normalized white-collar/corporate fraud (which is more costly than organized crime), political corruption, male dominance/patriarchy, pedophilia and human trafficking for sex (the Jeffry Epstein cult being just the best-known example of such common naked depravity)[4], oppression of minorities, resurgent racism, the emergence of wealthy oligarchs and fascism, the increase in government-sanctioned atrocities, genocide, and territorial conflicts/war.

In a different vein, should we not add economic growth addiction and climate change/science denial to the list of contemporary cultural diseases?

And let’s not forget about egregious inequality, increasing poverty, homelessness and homeless camps, and the related overdose crisis. Illegal opioid and other toxic street drugs typically kill ~6000-7000 Canadians ,~100,000 Americans , and hundreds of thousands more around the world annually. These maladapted sufferers are just the first and most obvious among us to be ‘selected out’ by the modern environment.

Which brings us back to the evolutionary connection. Many of the above indicators of population ill-health are universal across MTI societies, but that does not mean they are part of the ‘normal’ human condition. These problems are arguably all symptoms of gross cultural dysfunction, of what I would call human maladaptation syndrome. They constitute a species-wide cry of anguish as H. sapiens continuously struggles to make sense of a ‘novel’, rapidly changing and ever more hostile unnatural social and physical environment.

The role of natural selection

What I am arguing here and previously is that H. sapiens ‘loses it’ with increasing social, institutional and physical scale. How might this work? We can get an idea by examining just one human behavioral axis and the ongoing debate over whether H. sapiens’ evolution is driven more by competition or by cooperation. As is usual in many such controversies, the answer is, “it’s both”—but in this case there is also another answer, “it depends”. It’s both because humans are obviously capable of deadly competition (e.g., between tribes at war) and life-saving cooperation (e.g., among individuals within the tribes fighting the war). It depends because which end of the ‘cooperate-compete’ spectrum comes to dominate a social system or organization is contingent on particular circumstances.[5]

It turns out that cooperative behaviours prevailed by necessity within evolutionarily normal-sized human groups. H. sapiens is a fangless, clawless, slow-running, relatively weak naked ape for whom solitary life is not an option. We need to be—and collaborate—with others. Research shows that “the puzzle of human cooperation is best understood within the context of the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers… and the adaptive problems that it solves.” Cooperation among band members in fending off predators, hunting dangerous prey, gathering other foodstuffs, care of offspring and the injured, and in learning by example and language, were either necessary for, or contributed to, our species’ success. The enhanced longevity and reproductive legacy of cooperating individuals ensured the survival of hunter-gatherer bands and thus the species as a whole.

There is much more to learn from small-scale group dynamics. In contrast to MTI societies where power is concentrated and the wealth/income gap is steadily widening, hunter-gatherer bands tend to be highly egalitarian. One study argues that within-group dynamics are such that egalitarianism emerges spontaneously “as the optimal power-sharing arrangement in a population of selfish individuals without any inherently altruistic qualities.” Moreover, evidence suggests that foraging groups used collective pressure to maintain both within-group equality and mutual security. Aberrant behaviour ‘sticks out’; defectors are obvious and known to all. A variety of behavioral mechanisms including shaming, banishment, ostracism, and even capital punishment were/are employed to curtail the rise of wannabe alpha-dominators and suppress the emergence of destabilizing social hierarchies. Errant individuals trigger negative sanctioning by being too bossy or aggressive, showing favouritism in a leadership role, hoarding what should be group resources, behaving immorally, etc. By ensuring that such anti-social behaviours are costly to violators of social norms, small-group dynamics works as behavioural negative feedback that counteracts defection and reinforces group cohesion.

In short, the most important lesson from the ‘particular circumstances’ created by small-group dynamics is that natural selection rewards cooperation, reciprocal altruism and equality. This helps ensure group success and longevity.

(Un)natural selection?

Not all psychopaths are in prison. Some are in the boardroom (Hare 2002)[6]

Contrast this with the situation for large-scale human societies, especially the ‘particular circumstances’ of contemporary MTI culture. Remember, modernity is an utterly novel configuration that emerges in just the last minute or two of our day-long compressed time-frame of human evolution.

With this in mind, I have previously argued that much contemporary cultural malaise emerges inexorably from the clash and convergence of complex large-scale cultural and biophysical systems. Immersed for life within these systems, people are inclined to see slowly-forming early-stage symptoms as normal or at least manageable (e.g., global heating), but cannot fully comprehend either the causes or potential future consequences. One problem is that our paleolithic brains don’t do complexity.[7] We tend to think in simplistic one-cause, one-effect terms; we can really focus on only one thing at a time; we don’t generally connect the dots among related problems. In short, MTI peoples are arguably cognitively obsolete; we not up to parsing the challenges posed by such unprecedented and potentially chaotic phenomena as anthropogenic climate change, biodiversity loss/ecosystems collapse, eco-overshoot, egregious inequality or even geopolitical conflict.

It gets complicated. In another earlier post I observed that, in MTI societies, psychopathic personalities are disproportionately represented among occupants of head offices in finance and business and at high levels in government, i.e., at centers of wealth creation , prestige and power. As noted, the negative results of this asymmetry would be actively suppressed by egalitarian group dynamics in normal-sized groups or organizations. Everything changes at larger scale. Today, multi-layered hierarchy prevails; complicated institutional structure obscures individual actions; behaviourally bent personalities can operate beneath the radar, or otherwise exploit virtual anonymity within the organization.

In particular, contemporary large-scale corporate and government architecture enables psychopathic traits to become positive assets. As Greg Elliott hypothesizes, in certain of today’s bloated social institutions, psychopathy is not just an occasional psychological aberration. It is “a cognitive profile that becomes selectively advantageous once societies cross a certain threshold of scale, abstraction, and anonymity” (emphasis added). For example, in multinational financial organizations that manage symbolic instruments and derivatives, executive performance is evaluated primarily through familiar metrics such as quarterly returns, asset growth, deal volume etc. This makes such organizations particularly attractive to traders high in psychopathic traits. Such individuals “tend to focus strongly on achieving rewards and strategic advantage, while experiencing less emotional hesitation or guilt [inhibition] about the harm their actions may cause, especially in situations where the likelihood of detection, sanction, or social retaliation is low.” Since success is measured by the ability to exploit the system, “emotional detachment, comfort operating within abstraction, strategic risk externalization, and impression management can become competitively advantageous. Individuals less inclined toward those dynamics may self-select out or plateau” (quoting Elliott from a personal note). Meanwhile, responsibility for downstream consequences associated with success [or failure] is diffused across layers of hierarchy and geography. In effect, risks and damage costs are ‘externalized’.

Significantly, when individuals with aberrant profiles gain disproportionate influence, their cognitive biases are effectively externalized onto the organization’s rules, attitudes and incentives—virtually its entire corporate culture—which subsequently mirror and reinforce the psychopathic mindset. This is a form of structural positive feedback. Thus, while ‘normal’ small-group dynamics suppresses deviation and selects for equality and cooperation, contemporary ‘abnormal’ large-scale organizations amplify it and select for manipulative charm, emotional detachment, guiltless deceit, personal advantage, and strategic dominance. In this light, consider the Trump administration which is increasingly being compared to a criminal organization ruled by a manipulative authoritarian mob boss.

Normalizing the abnormal

Without identifying the positive selection process, others have shown that once corruption has become normalized within an organization, even “morally upright individuals” may drift to engage routinely in corrupt practices without experiencing emotional conflict; that these behaviours will persist even after the departure of the initial perpetrators; and that current emphasis on individual evildoers misses a point (which Elliott actually emphasizes in relation to psychopathy) that individuals and systems are mutually reinforcing.

The metastasis of unscrupulous behaviour within large-scale organizations helps explain the ubiquity and severity of organizational corruption in MTI society. But the fact that initially innocent employees can become entrained in a ‘continuum of destructiveness’ that turns them into devious law-breakers reveals something else about both the process and ­­humans themselves. And this brings us back to the evolutionary connection.

Various innate behavioural tendencies, that are present to some extent in each of us, exist on a bi-polar spectrum at the population level—for example: cooperative/competitive; submissive/dominant, generous/miserly; altruistic/selfish; kind/mean, honest/devious, honorable/corrupt. Most people can be located most of the time closer to one or the other end of the spectrum on any of these qualities. While small-group behavioural dynamics helps ensure that potential miscreants stay ‘in line’, there are other circumstances that nudge or force anyone toward the dark end of the spectrum. Social facilitation can even have epigenetic effects (influencing which genes are ‘turned on). In the ‘right’ environment people can be conditioned, virtually permanently, to act ‘out of character’. So it is that, steeped in a profoundly corrupt corporate culture, even the most naively innocent employees may eventually morph into hardened fraudsters.

A speculative but plausible take-away

By extension, this reveals that all manner of grotesquely anti-social activities, even the repugnant human-trafficking and related atrocities of child-abuser Jeffrey Epstein and his coterie of billionaire pedophiles (and princes and would-be presidents), can be effectively normalized among active participants.[8] Evidence also suggests that seemingly perverse and morally repugnant behaviours, including the worst products of Dark Triad traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy) are not merely weird aberrations. They are evolutionary constants associated with particular genes or gene complexes whose expression is normally repressed in normal-sized groups but which will flourish when the ‘right’ circumstances—e.g., large-scale social organizations—arise. Unsavory behaviours, including selfishness and ruthless cruelty, have likely had periodic adaptive value (natural selection isn’t moral) in the course of human evolution. They can therefore persist in populations even if the associated genes have had to hide for generations at a time.

All of which leads to a final speculation. It is plausible that human behavioural dynamics at scale has a role in the curious pattern of growth-to-implosion of large human societies. Most so-called civilizations (‘abnormal’ all) have ended in ignominious decline or collapse often preceded by extreme social hierarchy—wealth, corruption and decadence at the top; poverty, despair and disengagement at the bottom—and ecological destruction all around. Arguably, socially stable, egalitarian, eco-compatible large-scale societies cannot emerge from the ancient human behavioural genome. H. sapiens has simply not had time to evolve the psycho-cognitive capacity to live sustainably or for long in large complex societies.

This is the ultimate expression of the Human Maladaptation Syndrome.

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[1] Our largest cities like Tokyo are up to 760,000 times more populous than typical hunter-gatherer bands.

[2] If you live in certain the US cities, you can add quasi-occupation and state-sponsored kidnapping by violent ICE-thugs to the mix.

[3] Most human diseases are zoonotic, contracted from intimate contact with domesticated animals, i.e., they are post-normal. Even today 75% of new and emerging diseases cross over from non-human species as we crowd into their habitats or ‘harvest’ wildlife, for example. Epidemiologists expect more pandemics in coming decades.

[4] Lurid accounts of such activities among privileged elites throughout the ‘civilized’ ages are common. Even the church and Vatican are not exempt—remember the Borgias?

[5] Interestingly, cooperation within groups or species can be interpreted as a means of enhancing their competitive advantage over less cooperative groups/species.

[6] Hare, R. D. 2002. The predators among us. Keynote address. Canadian Police Association Annual General Meeting, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, August 27, 2002.

[7] I distinguish here between merely complicated systems such as jet aircraft, automated assembly lines, the electrical grid (i.e., engineered systems which are essentially Newtonian/mechanical) and truly complex systems such as ecosystems, the climate system, the global economy and large-scale societies. Complex systems are characterized by ‘extreme sensitivity to initial conditions’ and subject to lags, thresholds (tipping points) and other essentially unpredictable behaviours. They tend to behave chaotically and, pushed beyond some unseen tipping-point, may shift irreversibly into a new ‘domain of stability’ or simply collapse catastrophically.

[8] But should not be normalized by society at large. When will we see justice unfold with a raft of prosecutions?