Humans Adapt!

Jason Zhang, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Many years ago, I was sitting in an introductory computer programming course that was required for a certificate. As I had some prior coding experience, and was already familiar with the majority of the content, I was not expecting much from the course.

Then the instructor came in. He was very entertaining and engaging, and was always looking for ways to illustrate things as clearly as possible. When we got to the section on the “nested for loop” (ie, a loop with a counter having another loop inside it), I was expecting the “usual” analogy of a clock with a minute-hand and an hour-hand.

Instead, he said he would give us the best illustration ever.

Choo-choo trains.

Er, what?

After enjoying the blank stares, he grinned, and repeated: “Choo-choo trains”, and then described a large loop of track with a smaller loop within. Goofy, but several students who had been struggling a bit with visualizing the concept suddenly “got it”, so I guess he succeeded in what he was trying to do.

Later in the course, we came to the section on “pointers”, and he was equally entertaining. He looked at the class and shouted: “Pointers point! What do pointers do? Pointers point!” This became a common refrain for the rest of the course.

His point (no pun intended) was that it was easy to get lost in the complexity of referencing and de-referencing memory locations and incrementing array counters, and a lot of (now mostly obsolete) descriptions of how pointers relate to the items they point to. To avoid getting confused, it’s important to remember the truth: Pointers point. That’s what they do. That’s all they do.

Humans adapt.

That’s what we do. Arguably, that’s all we do.

But we’re a bit different. We recognize that fact, and can actually do something about it. As I have mentioned previously, one of the ways we adapt is through metacognition, or being aware of our thought processes and being able to study the patterns behind them. This gives us an enormous evolutionary advantage.

The human brain uses heuristics (ie, shortcuts) to try to optimize our chances of survival, including things like deciding that the rustling in the leaves is a predator, without deliberate consideration. They change slowly, though, and the ones we have are best suited to the environment in which we lived for most of our existence – small groups, limited technology, and near-constant threats to individual survival.

In the past few thousand years, however, the speed of our social and technological progress has far outstripped the speed with which our heuristics are updated, and this may help explain why we are struggling so much in our current society. Look at any collection of cognitive biases, which are generally reflections of the heuristics inherent in the electric meatballs inside our skulls (with thanks to David McRaney for the analogy!).

Consider the way in which we respond to challenges to our beliefs. Studies have demonstrated that people respond to challenges to certain beliefs in the same way they would respond to a physical attack. But which beliefs? And why would this be?

It appears that challenging beliefs which are tied to a group identity are more likely to provoke this response. So, if someone were to say that World War II started on 3-Sep-1939, rather than 1-Sep-1939, we might be curious about why they would say that, but would be very unlikely to get upset about it – aside from a handful of nerdy historians. (The answer is that most historians date the start of World War II from the beginning of the German invasion of Poland on 1-Sep-1939, while others date it from the formal declaration of war by the United Kingdom and France on 3-Sep-1939.)

If a topic is perceived to be essential to a group identity, such as a political party, it becomes important to people who identify as part of that group. Interestingly, this changes over time, as one question asked in 2016 as a “nonpolitical” question (about the effectiveness of fluoride in drinking water) now appears to be political.

How can a response like this be advantageous, though? It’s just an idea, isn’t it?

Yes, but if you again consider small groups, with limited technology, and near-constant threats to individual survival, then group cohesion is vitally important, which means that group identity is vitally important. If the in-group is vital to survival, and trusting an out-group too easily could lead to disaster, an “us-vs-them” approach could be beneficial.

About twenty thousand years ago, things changed, and humans began to cultivate crops. Over time, this led to more permanent settlements and larger populations, which eventually led to our current civilization and extraordinary population expansion.

While our technology and population growth have probably advanced faster than our ability to evolve over the past few centuries, we have not stopped evolving.

This raises fascinating questions around what sort of adaptations may appear in our future, whether through “natural” evolution, or through technology. For the moment, though, I’m interested in those relating to the brain and those pesky heuristics.

To what degree will people be better able to survive if they are able to receive criticism of closely-held ideas without experiencing undue stress? Will it be a positive survival trait to be able to simply ignore online trolls, while being able to receive actual feedback in a constructive way?

What if people are able to better empathize with online strangers from an out-group? What if future attempts to stir up hatred against a group, simply because they are different, are entirely ineffective?

It seems clear that things are quite challenging now, and will get more so in the future, which will increase the evolutionary pressure to adapt.

The question is not whether we will adapt to the future, but rather how.

Adapting is what we do!

Cheers!