When Human Evolution Collides With The Modern World - Professor Adam Hart - #192

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Professor Adam Hart, and we are talking about how unfit for purpose the human species is for the world that we find ourselves in now. You see, our species has been around for far longer than the modern world. And this leads to imbalances between our evolutionary heritage and the environment that we find ourselves in. So today, expect to learn how obesity might be an evolutionary adaptation gone awry, how the flight and fight happens in the workplace, the misalignment of technology with our brains, the evolutionary basis for violence and much more. Adam is a presenter for BBC as well, so his delivery today is just so cool. I'm really, really impressed by him. And the book is really fun. So if you're into this evolutionary biology stuff, I would very much suggest that you go and pick it up. In other news, it's Patreon. Patreon coming this Monday. I'm so, so excited to get this live. If you love the show and you want to help support us make more of the content that you love, then please consider joining the Patreon. Dean has a shopping list for camera and lighting upgrades that is literally longer than his leg. So I think it might take quite a while for us to finish that off. But oh my God, once we finally complete all the upgrades that we want for this show, it is going to sound and look absolutely world class. The plan is to make Modern Wisdom the prettiest looking podcast, the most overtly, obscenely cinematic visual experience that we can muster. So it's just gonna be awesome. I'm mega, mega excited as you can hear and the opportunity to release the new recap series and to involve you guys in voting for upcoming guests and topics and all this sort of stuff is hopefully going to repay you for your support and help to level this show up to where it needs to be. The guests that we get on, the volume, the consistency, consistency? Yeah, the consistency. Like I was thinking about a cake there. Yeah, the consistency of guests that we get at the volume, at the pace. You know, I really do think this show can become one of the best in Europe. And as we continue to level up the quality, we're only going to grow faster and faster. So thank you to everyone who is going to become a part of that on Monday. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Adam Hart.
Are you feeling fit for purpose this evening?

**Adam Hart** (2:49)
To be honest, at the moment, I'm not sure I'm feeling fit for purpose at any given point, but I'll give it a go.

**Chris Williamson** (2:55)
That's fantastic. So today we're talking about human evolution and what happens when it collides with the modern world, the imbalance between who we are and where we exist, right?

**Adam Hart** (3:08)
Yeah, exactly. That's what the book is fundamentally about. Basically, we're an evolved animal, and we're pretty decent, right? We're a pretty good evolved animal.
We fit very well to the world, and we've achieved global dominance as a consequence, but we have created now a modern world environment that seems to clash, and we've got lots of problems in the modern world that we can trace back to our evolutionary heritage to greater or lesser extent. Sometimes it's quite a playful thesis, sometimes it works quite nicely, but we can see those evolutionary echoes in the modern world. So that's the kind of overall idea.

**Chris Williamson** (3:38)
I get it. So how much of an imbalance is there between humans and the modern world? because sometimes I think that I'm doing pretty or right, and then sometimes I feel a bit like an alien. Yeah.

**Adam Hart** (3:52)
I think we have to understand that we've changed the world in such a massive and dramatic way. In some cases over the last decade. I mean, if you think about it, we're having a conversation here over Skype. I've got my Twitter feed open. We can talk about things going viral and social media stress and Fofo and all that stuff.
This would have been meaningless even 10 years ago. That's just in one small aspect of our life. If we look across the piece, I mean, COVID-19 has exposed, of course, how globally connected we all are. We got used to the idea of going on flights and moving around. The world now is a very different place from what it was a generation before. Of course, if we look back over the last 100 years or so, it's a very different place. We've always changed our environment. That's almost a feature of humanity. But the changes that we produce now and the environment that many of us now live in and what we call the modern world is a very, very different world from, well, even a century ago, but actually the world in which we evolved. If we look at our post-agricultural revolution ancestors 10,000 years ago and we compare it to our lives now, it's a very, very different sort of setup. Although, of course, many aspects of it are also the same. So it is a different world that we live in. I think we have to accept that.