Rosa Rubicondior: Unintelligent Design - Why Humans Are Not Intelligently Designed for Modern life

Saturday, 5 April 2025

Unintelligent Design

Why Humans Are Not Intelligently Designed For Modern Life

"Now look what you've done! The place is not fit to live in anymore!"

Humanity's Real Problem: Accelerating Evolutionary Mismatch | Psychology Today

A sure sign of unintelligent design is one that completely fails to anticipate the future. Biologically speaking, poor design occurs when an organism is adapted to an environment at a specific moment but becomes increasingly maladapted as the environment evolves. This happens either because the organism fails to adapt quickly enough or because it was never designed with future changes in mind in the first place.

A good, intelligent designer, especially one equipped with the power of foresight, would not just design for today but for tomorrow, next year and for the foreseeable future. Failure to do so is incompetence, indolence or sheer malevolence in putting its design on course for ultimate disaster.

In my book, The Body of Evidence: How the Human Body Refutes Creationism, I highlight numerous examples where the human body evolved for past environments — previous diets, predators, and social pressures — leaving us today with various vulnerabilities and compromises.

Human evolution moves at a glacial pace, barely noticeable even over many generations, while our environment has dramatically transformed within just a few decades.

Consider the technology available to our parents and grandparents compared to what we now take for granted—steam trains, landline telephones, no internet or colour TV, no central heating or air conditioning beyond an open fire or window, no satellite navigation, and no instant global communication. Further back, major societal shifts arose from mechanised farming, factory work, innovations in textile manufacturing, and even improvements in wheat milling for bread. Later still came automobiles and mass transit.

Yet, genetically speaking, our recent ancestors who navigated these revolutionary changes remain nearly identical to us today.

Now, we stand on the threshold of another seismic shift: artificial intelligence. Just a decade ago, writing this introduction would have involved considerable time researching, fact-checking, and carefully drafting paragraphs that still might not have fully conveyed my intended message. Today, I can draft my thoughts, then leverage the vast processing power of AI (like ChatGPT-4.5) to refine and clarify my ideas effortlessly. These introductory paragraphs are precisely the outcome of such a collaboration.

The core issue, however, remains that human culture is evolving at a rate several orders of magnitude faster than our biological capacity to adapt, creating an ever-widening gap between how we need to respond to new challenges and how we're inherently equipped to do so.

The consequences of this accelerating mismatch are thoughtfully explored in an article by Mike Brooks, Ph.D., in Psychology Today, Humanity's Real Problem: Accelerating Evolutionary Mismatch.

This question is posed by the author of the article referred to:

To what extent does accelerating evolutionary mismatch explain the patterns of suffering we're seeing in modern society—from rising anxiety and addiction to political polarization and social disconnection?

Accelerating evolutionary mismatch significantly explains modern patterns of suffering, such as rising anxiety, addiction, political polarisation, and social disconnection. Humans evolved to thrive in environments radically different from today's digital, hyper-connected, and information-saturated society. The rapid cultural and technological advances of recent decades outpace our capacity for genetic adaptation, causing psychological distress and social instability.

Anxiety and addiction, for instance, can be viewed as consequences of our brains responding maladaptively to unprecedented stressors—constant digital connectivity, overwhelming social pressures, and limitless access to addictive substances and activities. Our evolved tendencies for vigilance and reward-seeking, once essential for survival, are now maladapted, creating vulnerabilities exploited by modern technologies and consumer environments.

Political polarisation and social disconnection similarly reflect an evolutionary mismatch. Human societies evolved within small, cooperative communities where shared identity and face-to-face interaction were the norm. Today's fragmented, anonymous, and algorithmically curated online environments amplify differences, erode trust, and hinder genuine social bonds, exacerbating division and isolation.

Thus, accelerating evolutionary mismatch powerfully explains why these modern societal challenges are intensifying, reflecting deep misalignments between ancient adaptive traits and rapidly evolving technological and cultural landscapes.

ChatGPT4.5 [Response to user request]
Retrieved from https://chatgpt.com/

Information Continually updated

Humanity's Real Problem: Accelerating Evolutionary Mismatch
We're suffering because we've created a world that we didn't evolve to inhabit.

Key points

Our brains evolved for a simple world. Rapid technological progress is overwhelming our biology.
The attention economy exploits ancient reward circuits, shackling us to our phones for profit at our expense.
True happiness depends on unity and relationships, not wealth, fame, power, or screen-mediated experiences.

Insanity is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

E. O. Wilson.
This accelerating evolutionary mismatch provides the most comprehensive framework for understanding the suffering we're experiencing on both individual and societal levels. The equation is devastatingly simple:

Greater Progress = Greater Evolutionary Mismatch = Greater Suffering.

Source: Mike Brooks & Peeyoos/original work

As Dr. Brooks points out, we’ve created a world we didn't evolve to inhabit.

Think of your five biggest stressors today, then ask yourself whether a hunter-gatherer would have face the same five, or anything equivalent to them?

To a hunter-gatherer, the most important concerns would have been maintaining close relationships with the social group because with group cohesion comes security. he/she would have had no concept of wealth or fame, or the approval of people he or she would never be likely to meet in real life.

Today, it is still close relationships with real people that keeps us happy and healthy, not material goods or the approval of intangible followers.

In repeated experiments, rats with a lever wired to their pleasure centres which are stimulated when the lever is pressed, will continually press it, ignoring food, water and sleep, until they collapse. That lever is your iPhone, and your attention has become the most valuable commodity on the planet, so the AI algorithm keeps your attention as you continually scroll, looking for the next stimulus of your pleasure centre. Your brain is hijacked and sold to the highest bidder.

In just a single generation, smart phone use has rocketed in the USA (and there is no reason to think the rest of the developed world is any different) from zero hours a day to 4-6 hours (30-40 percent of our waking hours). We evolved to spend almost all our waking hours living with and alongside nature; now we spend almost zero time immersed in it.
Dr. Brooks concludes with a call to unity, with:

Humanity stands at a crossroads unprecedented in history. Will we steer our Titanic Humanity toward the safe harbor of unity, or will our divisions chart a course to disaster? The choice between love and hate will determine our fate. We must choose unity over division. We merely need to live this truth to set ourselves free—our survival depends on it.

Ironically, one of the greatest obstacles to unity in confronting an uncertain technological future is religious dogma — the same dogma that insists humans must be intelligently designed, despite overwhelming evidence that we are actually the product of a profoundly unintelligent designer: evolution itself.

Recognising our shared biological imperfections and vulnerabilities could be precisely what unites us in adapting effectively to the challenges ahead.

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