TL;DR | Stone Age Wiring
Humans evolved to outwit lions, not atmospheres. Our brains prioritise immediacy, emotion, and tribal cues. This was a boon on the savanna, disastrous for slow-moving catastrophes. Climate change, institutional decay, and soil collapse don’t trigger fight-or-flight; they whisper us into paralysis. Rational persuasion, the favourite tool of professionals, fails because it flatters our self-image and ignores our cognitive limits. The uncomfortable fix isn’t more evidence or logical argument with a side of persuasion. The fix needs better manipulation of our existing wiring through stories that feel, institutions that think ahead, and psychological scaffolding that bypasses bias. If reason can’t move us, perhaps it’s time we stole the playbook from Coca-Cola.
I am not religious at all. Deities and the various creation mythologies that believers follow have never interested me. I am the cliche son of a minister of religion who became secular in a heartbeat, probably my first.
Perhaps it was the church upbringing that drew me toward science, or maybe it was innate, but I became a scientist. I am the softer kind, who has solid logical circuits but can’t read mathematics, yet can see an inference from a hundred yards away.
My field of science is ecology, and the Bible I chose was published in 1976.
Richard Dawkins upended my understanding of evolution. For me, it was like wiping a foggy lens. By shifting the focus of attention from organisms or species to genes as the primary units of natural selection, The Selfish Gene didn’t just tweak evolutionary theory; it detonated the cosy idea that species or individuals were the vehicles. Nope, genes were. Relentless, self-serving little replicators, hijacking bodies as vehicles. Kin selection, altruism, and even apparent cooperation were just clever accounting tricks for genetic persistence. This was reductionism I could use, and it was the cleanest framework I’d seen for explaining ecology, and by extension, us.
The Selfish Gene was both groundbreaking and controversial. While it does not deny the role of cooperation and complexity in evolution, it insists that these must be explained through the lens of gene-level selection. Critics argue that this perspective may oversimplify or overlook the roles of organisms, ecosystems, and multilevel selection processes. Nonetheless, Dawkins’ work profoundly influenced modern evolutionary biology and public understanding of natural selection, and it remains a foundational text in discussions of genetics, behaviour, and evolution.
I was so smitten and for so long that I even offered my father, in his retirement, The God Delusion, a later book by Dawkins, published in 2006. Oh, my, I shouldn't have done that. In his polemical critique of religion, Dawkins argues that belief in God is both unnecessary and detrimental, and that science, particularly evolutionary biology, provides more compelling explanations for the complexity and wonder of life.
In that, I still agree. The selfish gene, which I have taken to be the mechanism for Darwin’s natural selection, still explains it all for me. There is no need for the existence of God to explain nature, but we may need one or more to maintain our morality.
My father, not so much.
Now that I had a reliable evolutionary framework that was logical, likely and agreeable to Friar William of Ockham, it was easy to accept what my ecological studies were showing me. It also allowed me to believe where humans came from and that the following description was a reasonable inference.
Our lineage didn’t appear overnight. We were hammered into shape over millions of years of upright apes in Africa, splitting and re-splitting, until something recognisably us walked the savanna. Fossils tell the story of Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus, cousins who carried fragments of what we would become. By about 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had arrived with bigger brains and the peculiar trick of symbolic thought. What mattered wasn’t just survival, but storytelling through language, tools, and culture that let us spread far faster than biology alone could manage.
We lingered in Africa for most of our evolutionary history, then sprinted across the globe in a geological heartbeat. That speed left us little time to evolve by selecting genes, so we had to improvise instead. Fire for the cold, stories for cohesion, memory for where the snakes lived. Archaeology and genetics confirm the pattern, but the lesson is the simple one that we survived not by foresight, but by vigilance.
Anthropologists will mention key developments, including the ability to walk upright on two legs, which freed the hands for tool use, and then be lyrical about brain expansion, which enabled complex thought, language, and social coordination. They will point to the living in groups, shared knowledge, and division of labour, and these are true and explainable by the selfish gene theory. But before a gene can be greedy, it must persist.
All the fireside chats and stories might be uniquely human, but that was only possible because early humans were vigilant. They focused on immediate threats, and for millennia, on the savanna, there were plenty of them.
I had the privilege of living in Africa for a decade from the mid-1980s. On one of my many expeditions into the bush, I came face to face with a pair of young lions. Not on purpose, but I was walking down a sand road in Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe, and they were there, partially hidden behind some dense bauhinia bushes.
A local by-law reversed the more sensible rule of ‘not getting out of your vehicle in a national park’ because Mana Pools was originally a fishing camp. It is hard to tackle Tiger fish in the Zambezi River from your truck, so walking was allowed. My assumption that it was safe enough to go for an early evening stroll revealed what a greenhorn I was and that I had a considerable amount of arrogance stemming from the biblical dominion I was told humans possess.
Fortunately, I was with friends, and the lions were more startled than I was. They snarled, crouched down with their ears back, did a quick calculation, and retreated from the mad humans.
I confess that this had all happened before I even realised it. My Western upbringing had eroded my instincts for vigilance. If the lions had realised, these words might not have appeared on the screen. I had forgotten that my cognition and perception are profoundly shaped by evolutionary pressures that favour survival in environments where acute, immediate dangers from predators, sudden changes in weather, or threats from other humans require fast, decisive action.
I had forgotten it through nurture, but my nature was still there.
And so, to the initial premise in this journey through our Stone Age Wiring…
Humans evolved to respond to immediate threats, not gradual changes
My ancestors were able to detect and react to threats quickly. I know this because some of them made it; I am here.
In Darwinian terms, they had a higher chance of survival and reproduction than their less vigilant fellows. As a result, modern humans are neurologically wired to be alert to sudden, novel, or emotionally intense stimuli, with brain structures such as the amygdala playing a central role in threat detection and the fight-or-flight-or-freeze response.
As Daniel Kahneman put it, we are good at thinking fast.
In contrast, gradual or abstract threats, such as climate change, creeping authoritarianism, or long-term health risks, typically trigger strong emotional responses or behavioural urgency. These slow-moving challenges lack immediacy in our minds and the feedback mechanisms that reinforce action. It’s also energetically expensive to think about them unless the threat is imminent, so we tend not to bother.
For example, a slight year-on-year temperature rise or the incremental erosion of civil liberties will not feel threatening on a visceral level, even if the cumulative effects are severe. This mismatch between evolved psychological responses and the nature of modern global risks is sometimes referred to as the evolutionary lag.
Evolution works on the timescale of millennia, not election cycles. Natural selection hones slowly, but we’ve accelerated change beyond its reach. That’s why Stone Age bodies now sit in office chairs, metabolically tuned for scarcity but surrounded by plenty. Obesity, anxiety, and social isolation are symptoms of a mismatch, not moral failure. As E.O. Wilson reminded us, we are running Pleistocene firmware on twenty-first-century hardware, and the system keeps glitching.
Our brains are a little different, though. Brains bought us time. Unlike bones or teeth, they rewire within a single lifetime. Neuroplasticity enables us to adapt to new languages, norms, and technologies. This behavioural plasticity is highly adaptive, which is one reason Homo sapiens has thrived in such a wide range of habitats and social structures. It also means we can develop technologies, languages, institutions, and coping mechanisms that help buffer the effects of evolutionary lag at a psychological level.
However, many deeply ingrained evolutionary traits, such as our preference for high-calorie foods, tribal loyalty, or immediate rewards, are not easily overridden. They persist even when they lead to addiction, anxiety in overstimulating digital contexts, or susceptibility to misinformation. Even with useful brain plasticity, there is still a lag between our evolved cognitive biases and modern conditions, which can generate what some psychologists term evolutionary mismatches, where behaviours that once enhanced survival now undermine wellbeing or societal cohesion.
And while individuals can adapt quickly through learning and socialisation, societies and institutions are less nimble. Cultural evolution, admittedly faster than genetic evolution, is constrained by tradition, ideology, and inertia. While our psychological flexibility allows us to recognise and sometimes work around evolutionary lags, it doesn’t eliminate them. Instead, we often live in a state of tension between inherited tendencies and the demands of a rapidly transforming world. This tension is a central feature of the modern human condition.
Evolutionary lag is particularly significant today because anthropogenic change outpaces the speed of natural selection. Urbanisation, synthetic chemicals, global warming, and even the pace of technological innovation are changing selective pressures faster than genetic adaptation can respond. The energy surges of modern civilisation from fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial agriculture all act like thermodynamic accelerants, amplifying entropy across ecosystems faster than they can recover or re-equilibrate. On evolutionary timescales, our actions have been a disturbance to the force. This has implications for conservation biology, public health, and the future trajectory of many species, which I go on at length about here…
We are in a pickle of our own making, and we have busted the limits of our evolutionary responsiveness. But we still think in the immediate.
Climate change proves the wiring problem. We’ve known about CO₂ rising, ice melting, and seas creeping higher for decades. Yet consensus barely moves us because the threat is abstract, distant, invisible. Our brains light up for hurricanes and wildfires, but not for parts per million. We treat disasters as freak events, not symptoms of a chronic condition. We react to the roar, not the rumble.
In the 1930s, many Germans and international observers failed to respond decisively to the creeping authoritarianism of Adolf Hitler’s regime. Each new step, from the Reichstag Fire Decree to the suppression of political opponents, the expansion of state propaganda, and a host of other measures, was rationalised or minimised as an aberration or temporary measure. Only when the threat became overt and violent, such as during Kristallnacht or the invasion of Poland, did a broader alarm set in. By then, the gradual erosion of democratic institutions had already solidified into a dictatorship. This exemplifies how incremental changes often escape strong resistance until it is too late—Americans take note.
In the mid-20th century, smoking was widespread, even as evidence mounted that it caused long-term health problems like lung cancer and heart disease. Because these effects were delayed, often taking decades to manifest, they failed to trigger behavioural change in individuals or policy-makers. Tobacco companies capitalised on this delay to cast doubt and maintain profitability. It took decades of concerted public health campaigns, graphic warning labels, and regulatory action to overcome the public’s inertia. Again, the slow nature of the harm meant it didn’t elicit the same urgency as a more immediate threat.
The evolutionary inheritance that once ensured our survival now complicates our capacity to respond effectively to the most pressing threats of the 21st century. The premise that humans evolved to respond to immediate threats, not gradual changes, holds because the heuristics and biases of thinking fast, once evolutionarily advantageous, now serve as psychological distortions when applied to the slow, complex challenges of modern life. Our inherited tendency to discount future consequences, ignore incremental change, and overreact to immediate stimuli creates a blind spot. We struggle to address risks that unfold gradually or require sustained, coordinated effort.
This baggage promotes the second premise…
Because humans evolved to prioritise immediate survival, we developed cognitive biases that now systematically impair our ability to perceive and act on long-term, abstract risks.
A casual glance at the billion or so people living in liberal democracies of the Global North reveals that we are more comfortable in the present than in the past or the future. We'd like to have our cake and eat it, as long as we can enjoy it now. What happened today we expect will happen again tomorrow, mainly because the recent past seems so familiar. We settle into this present bias, relax, and reach for the remote.
Psychologists have mapped the mental shortcuts that skew our sense of risk, but knowing their names doesn’t immunise us. Hyperbolic discounting makes us impulsive economists who’ll trade a distant safeguard for a sugar hit today, undermining everything from retirement planning to climate policy. The availability heuristic adds drama bias to the mix, convincing us that plane crashes matter more than vanishing topsoil, simply because the former makes better television. And then there’s normalcy bias, the comforting lie that tomorrow will mirror today, lulling us into paralysis even as institutions erode or ecosystems unravel. Together, these biases cloud judgment and shape a distorted map of danger, calibrated for a world that no longer exists.
In essence, our evolved mental shortcuts are poorly calibrated for an era in which many existential threats do not announce themselves with immediacy. It’s the evolutionary lag. There is a mismatch between what we instinctively do and the perception of long-term, abstract risks, which creates significant challenges for governance, communication, and collective action. A sudden cyberattack or pandemic surge prompts swift global responses, while more pressing distant risks, such as antibiotic resistance or freshwater depletion, struggle for political and public attention. When was the last time you heard a politician campaign for soil health?
The result is a systematic underestimation of slow-burning threats, compounded by short election cycles, media attention spans, and human impatience.
Overcoming these distortions requires intentional cognitive scaffolding. We have to think more slowly with tools like long-term scenario planning, nudging, institutional foresight, and public narratives that make the future feel emotionally real. Without such interventions, our biological inheritance risks becoming a liability in the face of civilisation-scale challenges.
What made us nimble on the savanna, enabling us to be vigilant for lions and jump out of the way of a snake, also makes us sluggish to react when the risk is systemic and existential.
And our social norms exacerbate the problem, prompting the next premise…
Social identity significantly shapes how individuals process information about complex threats and institutional structures amplify the cognitive limitations of the individual, and these become barriers to adaptation. We are less nimble than we should be.
My buddies saved me from the lions on that sunny afternoon in Africa. We chatted away, making a group noise, and luckily, nobody panicked and ran.
At the individual level, our sense of belonging to groups such as political parties, religions, or cultural communities profoundly shapes how we interpret complex or uncertain threats. Psychologists call this identity-protective cognition, where people accept or reject evidence based on whether it aligns with their group’s values. We have all seen it and done it.
In polarised societies, even factual consensus can become fragmented. Climate change becomes not just a scientific issue but a cultural battleground, with each side interpreting data through its ideological filters. This distorts risk perception and makes coordinated action more difficult. In other words, human cognition does not operate in a vacuum; it is embedded within social contexts where identity, group affiliation, and cultural norms heavily influence how we perceive and process information.
Research in social psychology and behavioural science tells us that individuals tend to align their beliefs about complex issues with the views of the groups they identify with. People use motivated reasoning to filter information, preserving group coherence and personal identity unconsciously. When complex risks become politicised or linked to identity markers (such as nationalism, religion, or political affiliation), individuals are more likely to adopt the interpretations endorsed by their in-group, even in the face of contrary evidence.
This tendency is reinforced by social epistemology, the idea that we rely on others for knowledge. In-group trust can override individual evaluation of expertise, leading to echo chambers where misinformation or oversimplified narratives spread more readily. A striking example is how responses to COVID-19 public health measures varied not by individual risk assessment but by political affiliation, with mask-wearing or vaccine acceptance becoming symbolic acts of group loyalty. Similarly, debates about climate policy are often filtered through ideological worldviews rather than scientific consensus. As a result, cognitive biases are not only reinforced but also socially sanctioned, making it even harder to confront nuanced or long-term risks with clarity.
Institutions, rather than correcting for these biases, often amplify them through design and inertia. Short-term political cycles, profit-driven media, and bureaucratic silos foster reactive and superficial responses. Most modern political institutions reward populist simplifications or crisis exploitation rather than long-range planning, while media, especially algorithmically driven ones, favour emotionally charged content; they thrive on identity divisions.
Even well-intentioned scientific institutions can be slow-moving, fragmented, or overly specialised. They lumber along, affected by evolutionary lag as much as our selfish genes. Instead of acting as systems of cognitive correction, many institutions now serve as amplifiers of our worst tendencies toward simplification, denial, and tribal reasoning. When complexity is fragmented or overly siloed, it becomes brittle rather than adaptive, much like an over-engineered machine that fails under unanticipated stress, unable to reorganise in the face of disruption.
A mindful sceptic baulks at another challenge presented by identity-driven thinking. It limits the kinds of questions that can be asked. A stifled curiosity is a terminal symptom.
Adaptation to change requires cognitive flexibility, institutional learning, and cultural frameworks that enable reevaluation and transformation. Back on the savanna, we were good at all three. However, without reform at both the individual and systemic levels, we risk being cognitively and institutionally outpaced by the accelerating complexity of our world.
If fast-thinking responses are insufficient to cope with systemic risk, and the social system further amplifies this approach with the help of tribes, then we must assume the following premise holds…
Overcoming these barriers of fast-thinking responses to better cope with systemic risk and existential threats requires psychological interventions. We can’t achieve the coping mechanisms with the savanna brain we inherited.
The savanna brain metaphor captures the idea that our cognitive architecture was shaped in environments vastly different from today’s interconnected, technologically advanced, and highly abstract world.
Our ancestors evolved in small groups facing immediate, visible dangers, leading to a suite of cognitive biases favouring short-term, emotionally salient decision-making. Status quo bias, present bias, and threat detection were a boon back then. They were abilities tuned to local and immediate survival in ancestral environments, only they leave us poorly equipped for assessing and responding to modern threats like nuclear proliferation, ecological collapse, or AI risk. We are not well-equipped psychologically for probabilistic, slow-building, and often invisible threats.
But because these limitations are deeply embedded in our neural wiring, it is unlikely that rational argumentation alone can recalibrate our responses. What is required are psychological interventions, deliberate strategies and tools for more reflective, long-term thinking.
For example, mindfulness to expand present-moment awareness and reduce reactive thinking, cognitive training to build metacognition and emotional regulation, and structured debiasing techniques such as scenario planning or red-teaming. Additionally, reframing risks through narrative, metaphor, and emotionally resonant stories can help bridge the gap between abstract data and what we feel. In essence, these tools extend our natural capabilities, much like literacy did for memory or maps did for navigation.
Importantly, these interventions cannot exist in a vacuum. They must be embedded within supportive cultural and institutional systems that reward foresight and restraint rather than reaction and simplification. Education, governance, media, and leadership structures all need redesign to reinforce slower, more deliberative forms of thinking.
The savanna brain is not a flaw to be eliminated, but a foundation that must be consciously upgraded if 8 billion humans are to survive and thrive.
Itemised lists are not how I usually do it, but here is a curated one of psychological interventions designed to help overcome the fast-thinking limitations of the savanna brain and enhance our capacity to address systemic and existential risks:
Mindfulness and metacognition training help individuals observe their thought processes, recognise biases, and reduce impulsive reactions through practices like mindfulness-based stress reduction and cognitive-behavioural techniques. A practice of enhancing self-awareness and emotional regulation helps us come up with more deliberate responses to complex problems.
Scenario thinking and future visualisation encourage long-range thinking by simulating alternative futures and imagining long-term consequences. Imagining the future makes abstract systemic risks feel more tangible and emotionally relevant. Counterfactual thinking is a good example.
Debiasing techniques and decision aids identify and counter specific cognitive biases. Methods such as pre-mortem analysis, red-teaming, and decision checklists, can improve judgment under uncertainty.
Narrative framing and moral expansion use emotionally resonant storytelling and identity-bridging language to shift values and expand empathy to future generations and distant others. Stories, especially those with morals, can help us bypass innate defensive or tribal reasoning.
And because it is challenging to do things alone, especially when attempting to rewire a brain that has had hundreds of thousands of years of success operating in a certain way, we will also need institutional changes. Here is a preliminary list…
Long-term governance mechanisms that build institutional structures designed for foresight, continuity, and resilience. We will need innovations such as Future Generations Commissions and climate adaptation authorities to embed intergenerational thinking into law and policy.
Deliberative democratic models that facilitate slow, informed decision-making through citizen assemblies, panels, and juries. We need to discuss divisive issues, such as nuclear policy and climate mitigation, more effectively.
Reform of incentive structures to shift economic, political, and informational systems from short-termism to stewardship. Here, we need long-term compensation in business, non-renewable resource caps, and journalism that rewards depth over speed, aligning institutional behaviour with planetary boundaries and future-oriented values.
Cognitive infrastructure in education that cultivates epistemic humility, systems thinking, and ethical foresight. We are going to need programs that teach complexity science, decision theory, and ecological literacy from early stages to build societal capacity for adaptive intelligence.
These interventions work best in combination, forming a distributed cognitive ecosystem that enhances our collective intelligence. Much like literacy and numeracy became foundational for industrial society, cognitive resilience and futures thinking may become essential for humanity to survive the next century. Like mycorrhizal networks in forests, such cognitive ecosystems thrive on redundancy and distributed processing, traits that allow them to absorb shocks and sustain function while dissipating informational and social entropy more evenly.
But as all mindful sceptics do, we pause. We don't want to jump at the evidence and let our enthusiasm carry us off into a total revamp of the social contract.
Not all researchers agree with the dominance of evolutionary psychology and its lag behind the times. Critics argue that the complexity of individual development and experience fails to fully explain the influence of genes on behaviour. It is easy to oversimplify complex behaviours by reducing them to simple evolutionary imperatives. The deterministic scientists also ask for definitive experimental evidence, which, of course, is impossible to obtain.
It is also not as simple as a 'biology vs. environment' or 'genes vs. culture' dichotomy might imply. Indeed, such a polemic might be false or at least misleading, partly because we know that biology and environment interact in complex ways to produce what we see.
While neurobiological research supports many of the assumptions of evolutionary psychologists that higher-level systems in the neocortex, responsible for complex functions, are massively modular, brain plasticity may be more significant than we acknowledge.
Evolutionary psychologists argue that the brain evolved as a collection of specialised modules designed to solve specific adaptive problems, such as language, face recognition, or threat detection. This view is supported by some neurobiological evidence showing that distinct areas of the neocortex are involved in different cognitive tasks, suggesting a form of functional modularity. However, contemporary neuroscience has increasingly emphasised the role of neuroplasticity—the brain's ability to reorganise itself in response to learning, experience, or injury. This suggests that while the brain may initially have a modular structure, these modules are not fixed in place. Instead, they interact, adapt, and even repurpose themselves according to the context.
Despite evolved biases, human cognition may be capable of adapting to abstract, long-term, and statistically framed risks through cultural scaffolding, education, and reflective reasoning. While evolution has shaped our brains, it hasn’t locked them; adaptability remains one of our species’ most significant assets.
We might be able to bend our minds to the probabilistic risks.
So, what would you do if you walked into a pair of young lions minding their own business on the African savanna?
Most likely, your amygdala would fire, and you would shout your head off, screaming obscenities at the innocent creatures. Alternatively, you might back off and run. The third limbic option is to freeze, which may also be effective, given that young lions likely lack some life experience and the aggression of adults.
You wouldn't have time to consider your choice. You just react.
You can’t pause and ask what crazy decision put you out in the open in lion country? Should lions be managed for tourists or be confined to zoos? Is it time to revoke the bylaw? Whatever your musings, the long thought is an expensive luxury in the moment.
The thing is that the economic and social equivalent of bumping into lions is coming. Emergencies are no longer just lions on the path. They're the slow erosion of our climate stability, the quiet depletion of aquifers, the degradation of agricultural soil, the gradual rise of authoritarianism, and the incremental collapse of ecosystems—all happening at speeds our savanna brains register as business as usual until the sudden moment they're not.
Our greatest existential threats don't roar; they whisper.
What saved me from those lions wasn't my quick thinking, as I didn’t have any. What saved me was the group, the safety in numbers and a bunch of chit-chat that disturbed the lion’s siesta. Similarly, our salvation from slow emergencies won't come from individual vigilance alone, but from deliberately constructed cognitive ecosystems that expand our collective ability to perceive, understand, and respond to gradual change.
We need to build scaffolding around our evolution-shaped minds to enhance them for challenges they never evolved to face. And for that, we need each other, especially members of different tribes and groups.
I know, it sucks.
But here is the thing…
If our Stone Age wiring makes us immune to rational persuasion about long-term threats, perhaps we need to abandon the moral high ground of evidence-based discourse entirely.
The marketers figured this out decades ago. While environmental educators waste time perfecting infographics about carbon emissions, Coca-Cola triggers rapid threat detection with "Don't be left out," builds tribal loyalty through lifestyle branding, and creates immediate response through social proof. They understand that humans don't make decisions with the rational mind; something most of us intellectuals have been too proud to admit.
Consider the brutal effectiveness gap. Advertisers can make millions of us crave sugar water that destroys our health. Climate scientists, armed with overwhelming evidence of a planetary emergency, struggle to generate concern about atmospheric chemistry. The soil scientists, who are all aware that soil degradation is a pending catastrophe, have no voice at all. The difference can’t be the urgency of the message.
This suggests a deeply uncomfortable pivot for environmental action. Real sustainability might require fear-based messaging that bypasses analytical thinking, tribal identity formation around green behaviours, and emotional storytelling that makes climate action feel immediate and visceral. We'd need to become the very thing we criticise—manipulators of psychological triggers rather than educators appealing to reason.
The meta-irony is inescapable. This essay itself demonstrates the thesis. I didn't convince you with statistics about cognitive bias research. I used a personal story about lions, appealed to your intellectual identity, and created emotional resonance through narrative. Even arguing for rational limitations, I had to abandon a purely rational argument.
The evolutionary insight isn't how to transcend our cognitive architecture, but how to harness it. Are we willing to fight biological fire with biological fire? Because the alternative is watching our rational discourse fail while the planet burns.
That's the choice our Stone Age wiring has left us.
And time is running out for moral purity.