Evolved to Devolve (Part 1)

Note: I’m taking a slight detour from my usual Gables-centric content today and suspect some, perhaps even many, of you won't care for it. And that's fine. I understand what brings most readers here, and I'm happy to oblige. But occasionally, I need to let my hair down and write something that's more or less for me, sharing it on the off chance that a few of you might enjoy the detour. I, for one, can’t eat KFC every day.

For those of you settling in with your Sunday morning coffee and in the mood for something a bit more indulgent and introspective, I hope this two-part piece hits the spot.

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"Why does everything that makes me fat have to be so damn delicious?"

One of the many rhetorical questions I'll mumble while reaching for that third slice of pizza, that second slice of birthday cake, or anything else I eat to the point of self-loathing. It’s part of the familiar emotional swing that occurs when I overeat. A swing that typically begins with something like "Wow, these Cape Cod Jalapeño chips are delicious" and ends with "For God’s sake, Aesop, did you really have to devour the entire bag, you miserable gluttonous pig?"

But as I said, it’s a rhetorical question—an exclamation, not an inquiry. There’s an elegant biological explanation for why we crave what we shouldn’t eat, why a Snickers bar tastes infinitely better than a celery stick.

Our cravings aren't random acts of self-sabotage, nor are they a cruel and sadistic ploy of Mother Nature. They're relics of our distant past, one piece in a complicated evolutionary puzzle that explains countless human idiosyncrasies, from how our hunter-gatherer appetites betray us in this world of endless abundance to why we, as a supposedly enlightened species, grow more tribal rather than less.

Oh, and by the way, I know what some of you are thinking. You’re thinking, “OK, I’m like five paragraphs into a seemingly very off-topic post and yet I’ve already encountered words like fat, overeat, and gluttonous…this is going to turn into a hit piece on you know who.”

Well, I’ll have you know you’re wrong. And shame on you for even thinking that. I mean, really, people. I can’t believe your minds even went there.

No, this isn’t a hit piece. It’s more of a lightweight think piece—an armchair exploration of environmental hyper-novelty, evolutionary mismatch, and how these forces ultimately shape our politics. In other words, this one’s about all of us.

When Gluttony Was Good

Genetically modern humans—the version of Homo sapiens that we see in the mirror—are thought to have emerged roughly 200,000 years ago. That's a long time ago by most standards, but everything about us, from our bones to our brains, consists of systems that began evolving much earlier. In fact, if you think of humans as machines, we're running on hardware and software that was largely designed millions of years ago.

Take our dopamine reward system that governs our appetite. This fundamental circuit exists not just in humans or even mammals, but in all vertebrates, meaning it began to evolve hundreds of millions of years before our species came into existence. Since evolution is shaped by environmental pressures, this ancient reward system—the very foundation of our eating behavior—was molded by conditions that persisted for eons, long before humans walked the Earth.

The most crucial of these conditions was scarcity. For nearly all of evolutionary history, finding enough calories to survive was the central challenge of existence. This reality shaped not just our bodies, but the very architecture of our brains.

When we look at the past 200,000 years, we see that humans spent roughly 195,000 of those years (95% of our time on Earth) as nomadic hunter-gatherers. To illustrate this more vividly, imagine compressing all of human existence into a 24-hour day, with our species emerging at midnight. In this timeline, it isn’t until 11:27 PM that we discover agriculture, and industrialized food production—the world of abundant, engineered calories we now inhabit—doesn’t emerge until 11:59:45 PM, a mere 15 seconds ago.

This means that for most of our history, every aspect of our relationship with food was defined by uncertainty. Finding energy-rich food required immense effort, skill, and often luck. Our ancient ancestors didn’t have Publix delis or McDonald's drive-thrus a convenient stone's throw away from their caves. When they did encounter high-energy foods, like fatty meat or sweet fruit, the most successful strategy was to eat as much as possible; those with the strongest drive to consume and store these precious calories were more likely to survive lean times and pass on their genes.

Unfortunately, evolution is a slow and gradual process. The hyper-novel environment that we’ve engineered for ourselves, one in which calorie-dense nutrition is always within reach, emerged much too recently for it to have asserted enough selective pressure on our prehistoric software. This is a palpable example of a concept called evolutionary mismatch: a condition in which an organism’s evolved traits are no longer adaptive to its environment.

In essence, our bodies haven't had enough time to figure out that we're no longer living in caves and roaming the savanna looking for a juicy herd animal to chuck a spear at. Our primitive biology doesn't realize we can grab that Big Mac virtually whenever we want, which is why when it encounters one, it says, "Jackpot! Don't you dare waste a crumb of that mammoth burger, you damn dirty ape.”

But I’ll tell you who has figured it out. The modern food industry. The one responsible for the 1,736-calorie Arby’s burger and the 1,000-calorie Starbucks Frappuccino. The one that funnels you into the center of the grocery store where all the addictive and sugary processed foods are located, and that places the candy bars in the checkout aisle where you are most likely to make one last impulse buy. The one that has helped the developed world achieve this stunning feat:

But that's what happens when nature produces a breakout species differentiated by extreme intelligence. Somewhere in our distant past, our hominin ancestors evolved the cognitive capacity to make tools and control fire, which led to a revolutionary shift: cooked food provided more accessible calories, which fueled larger brains, which in turn enabled greater innovation. This formed the basis of a powerful and ancient feedback loop, one that transformed a clever primate into a species that could reshape its environment faster than evolution could adapt to the changes. Indeed, we are the product of a self-reinforcing cycle of increasing capability and environmental modification; a virtuous or vicious cycle, depending on how you think this human experiment will ultimately play out.

I, for one, lean toward vicious. But not because I think obesity will end us. We can modify both behavior and biology to avoid falling off that cliff. In fact, judging by how many highly visible Gables residents have suddenly come to look like deflated Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, I'd wager the local water department swapped out fluoride for Ozempic.

Rather, I lean toward vicious because extreme calorie abundance is merely one example of the evolutionary mismatches we've created. There are others, far more threatening and insidious, and there's one in particular that parallels our relationship with food in striking ways, one that is far more concerning: hyperconnectivity.

And we’ll look at that, in part 2, next weekend…