The Irony Of Technology

How our astonishing technical sophistication enables people to embrace crude simplistic ideas

Image credit: CBS

We humans are the product of a long evolutionary history going back many millions of years, to long before our particular branch of the primate tree split off from the branch that would later give rise to our close cousins the monkeys and the chimpanzees. Our brains have been shaped by eons of selection pressures that were relatively constant and therefore resulted in behaviors that were adapted to meet those pressures. Each of us carries a repertoire of largely unacknowledged behaviors that, on average, enabled our ancestors to survive and mate and thereby pass their DNA into the future. Within that DNA is encoded genes for proteins that even today, in our modern complex high-technology world, shape most of what we feel and do.

All animals are adapted to the fundamental economics of their environment. While it may seem strange to talk about economics when discussing life, the fact is that economics (in the broadest sense) is responsible for every adaptation and every behavior that evolves to meet environmental challenges. Every living creature has a limited amount of energy it can expend in its quest for survival, and so that energy must be devoted to whatever gives it the best chance of getting through each day. Although…