execute adaptations by doing things that feel good.
If it feels good, do it, right?!
Summary: So how does this adaptation execution manifest in the modern world? So simply, it might frighten you.
Because of hormones and neurotransmitters, those behaviors most correlated with ancestral success — status, sex, conquest, novelty, belief, — ‘feel better’ than activities which might be beneficial in today’s environment, but which have no historical analog. Dogs, via intentional breeding, were adapted towards fetching, hunting, working, playing and being human companions. It would not feel good to a dog to climb a tree or lie in wait for hours to ambush a bird - but it would to a cat. There wasn’t the evolutionary selection for dogs to feel good doing things which weren’t historically “doggish”. Similarly, humans evolved on the Pleistocene savannah in small groups which had utterly no biological or cultural reason to evolve feelings about world-scale problems they could not imagine or affect. But we did evolve to “not think about” stressful things beyond our control, believing happy stories instead. What happened on the savannah,
51
Powered by FlippingBook