Evolutionary Mismatch Quotes

“Evolutionary mismatch may occur when an evolved mechanism encounters a novel environmental context that falls outside of the range that was recently encountered over its evolutionary history (the EEA or environment of evolutionary adaptation). In the new context, a functional mechanism can give rise to maladaptive outcomes or even induce dysfunctions in other mechanisms.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“In modern societies, for example, the media expose people to a relentless stream of images of unrealistically attractive "competitors" -an artificial, evolutionarily novel kind of social stimulus. It has been hypothesized that such exposure hyperactivates the evolved mechanisms that regulate female competition for attractiveness and status, thus contributing to the rising incidence of eating disorders.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“For instance, people who form early representations of the world as dangerous or uncontrollable may become anxious and start avoiding situations that they perceive as threatening. Avoidance is usually an adaptive response to danger; in this case, however, it prevents anxious individuals from learning that the environment is actually safer than they believe, thus locking them in a state of exaggerated anxiety. Even if such catastrophic failures of learning mechanisms are statistically rare, they can be highly maladaptive for the individuals who experience them.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“To the extent that psychological mechanisms rely on information acquired through learning, they are vulnerable to maladaptive outcomes owing to the intrinsic limitations of learning processes. Indeed, the massive capacity for individual and social learning required to exploit the cognitive niche may contribute to explain our species' seemingly unique vulnerability to mental disorders.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Defensive mechanisms can make two symmetric kinds of mistakes: they can fail to activate in the presence of a threat (false negatives) or become activated when no threat is present (false positives). Even when defenses are functional and optimally calibrated, errors cannot be completely avoided; given the tradeoffs between the costs of different types of errors, the smoke detector principle suggests that defensive systems should typically evolve to commit more false positives than false negatives.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“During the initial agricultural -revolution-, people began to cultivate cereals, rice and other plants. They settled into permanent dwellings to tend crops and led more sedentary lifestyles. Some early agriculturalists decreased the breadth of their diet, incorporated more carbohydrates and lived in larger communities, where diseases could spread more easily.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Novel environments may contribute to cancer risk in human and nonhuman populations. In evolutionary medicine, this concept is called evolutionary mismatch and corresponds to when the environment/ecology changes faster than the population can adapt.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Al parecer el apetito humano es sorprendentemente elástico, algo que tiene mucho sentido desde el punto de vista evolutivo: nuestro antepasados cazadores-recolectores consideraban apropiado darse un festín cada vez que se presentaba la ocasión, lo que les permitía almacenar reservas de grasa en previsión de futuras hambrunas. Los investigadores de la obesidad llaman a este rasgo -el gen ahorrador-. Y si bien este gen resulta muy útil como medio de adaptación en un entorno impredecible marcado por la escasez de comida, es un desastre en un entorno donde abunda la comida rápida y en el que las ocasiones para darse un festín se presentan veinticuatro horas al día, siete días a la semana. Nuestros cuerpos están almacenando reservas de grasa en previsión de una hambruna que nunca llega.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Al parecer el apetito humano es sorprendentemente elástico, algo que tiene mucho sentido desde el punto de vista evolutivo: nuestros antepasados cazadores-recolectores consideraban apropiado darse un festín cada vez que se presentaba la ocasión, lo que les permitía almacenar reservas de grasa en previsión de futuras hambrunas. Los investigadores de la obesidad llaman a este rasgo -el gen ahorrador-. Y si bien este gen resulta muy útil como medio de adaptación en un entorno impredecible marcado por la escasez de comida, es un desastre en un entorno donde abunda la comida rápida y en el que las ocasiones para darse un festín se presentan veinticuatro horas al día, siete días a la semana. Nuestros cuerpos están almacenando reservas de grasa en previsión de una hambruna que nunca llega.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Technological advance at high speed combined with moral blindness about what we are doing to the world's societies and to the biosphere is a recipe for rapid extinction.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“We have proven to be enormously successful at adapting. We are now adapting so fast that we can hardly adapt to our adaptation.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

“The more complex, the more fragile. Complexity goes against the second law of thermodynamics, that all complex entities tend to fall apart, and it takes more and more energy for complex systems to function.”
― Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age