Homo sapiens have always been a little fucked. Recent evidence suggests that our road to fuckdom was the perfect confluence of nurture and nature, some chance, and a bit of bad timing.
Our hominid ancestors left traces that they were always, to some degree, fucked. Like the token-drunk friend who leaves behind a trail of puke and debauchery after a night out on the town, when early humans migrated outside of the African savannah in search of new lands roughly 125,000 years ago and started colonizing Eurasia, Oceania, and the Americas, the fossil record shows a curious rise in the extinction rates of megafauna — or large-bodied mammals — across all continents. Conventional wisdom learns us that correlation does not equal causation. But in this case, the science is crystal clear. We murdered the fuck out of the megafauna like the secret sociopaths we keep deep down inside.
Our sociopathic tendencies led us to eat and murder our way to the tippy tops of food chains worldwide. Think of it this way. I tend to have a threshold for murdering spiders based on their size. If they’re a big fucker that can do my family harm, then I murder them faster than Freddy Krueger on a Prom night. But if they’re small and silly, more like Charlotte’s web-esque, I usually let them carry on their merry path. Early humans were much the same way. Anything big and seeable to the human eye is now extinct or on the brink of extinction because humans + climate change = extinction for any longer-living and therefore slower-evolving animals.
What this suggests is that perhaps we were “born this way”. Perhaps modern humans were genetically determined to be fucked from the get-go. Going further into our evolutionary history, we see similar sociopathic tendencies latent in our ancestral cousins. Primates are well-known for being some of the most vicious murderers on the planet, who not only murder but are unique in their propensity to kill on a mass scale (i.e., genocides). Not to mention, we are also infamous in the animal kingdom as baby murderers (i.e., infanticide). Most animals know better than to murder babies — but not primates. We murder babies on the reg (relative to other species). Primates are some violent mofos.
Primates are also infamous in the animal kingdom for being one of the few biological orders to engage in intergroup conflict, where members of the same species go to war with one another. Other mammalian species are known as vicious murderers who tend to focus their murdering tendencies on species outside of their biological order, but not primates. Recent research has suggested that primates kill within their own species nearly six times more than the average mammal does. And to add onto that, we primates are the only biological order that sends reproductively viable males into battle. That’s how much we hate each other.
Underlying our propensity for war and violence is one of the greatest fuck-ups in our not-too-distant evolutionary past: the evolution of tribal politics or the psychological adaptation of an us-versus-them mentality. Our closest living relative, Chimpanzees (Pan troglodyte), with whom we share over 98% of our DNA, are also known as a particularly violent species who regularly engage in intergroup conflict and war between neighboring factions under the specific intent of murdering any Chimp that one deems as outside of their social tribe. Like our Chimp brothers, humans evolved complex psychologies to readily identify, vilify, and consequently hate other types of humans that we deem as outside of our social tribe. Primates evolved advanced social recognition software at one point in our relatively short evolutionary past because it was advantageous and led to the survival of certain groups over others. Yet in our modern context, such neuropsychological mechanisms underpin all racism and prejudice, thus impeding any chance that we have to come together and work together to solve the imminent issues that transcend our tribal boundaries and threaten our existential existence — e.g., climate change, impending pandemics, the looming threat of AI, or the increasing fame of the Kardashians.
There is a glimmer of hope. Recent empirical figures from anthropology have found that our levels of lethal interpersonal human conflict tend to fluctuate over time, suggesting that we can turn off our warring buttons if and when we truly want to. In different eras and epochs in our past, we have curtailed our proclivity towards war and violence — from characteristically low levels during our “nomadic” periods, to excessively high levels when conquering and conquest became profitable, and dipping down again to lower levels in our modern “civilized” era.
Such findings imply that our road to fuckdom was a notorious development in the evolutionary story of humans — and as a development rather than some genetically deterministic event, it can be just as easily overturned as it was learned. As with all human endeavors, our pathway to fuckdom was paved by the harmonious workings of nature and nurture (since nature versus nature is a false dichotomy). In one respect, our genes constantly push us towards being fucked since ignorance, racism, and selfishness have an undeniable genetic component to them.
Nevertheless, our genes respond to environmental cues. Given the right environment, humans not only survive but thrive. Given the ideal circumstances, humans can combat their genetic impulses and maladaptive evolutionary tendencies. Place any given human in a bad situation, however, and within each and every one of us lies the limbic lizard waiting to unearth itself. It matters not if you’re genuinely “a good person” in the right social context or environment. Human psychology suggests that depriving any human of their basic needs to survive will bring out the instinctive limbic monster that drives them to survive at all costs — hence why there is no such thing as bad people, just bad environments that bring out the worst in people.
Thus, our road to fuckdom was the perfect confluence of nature (genetic) and nurture (environment), some chance, and a bit of bad timing. Our evolutionary history played a significant role in our road to fuckdom, but it did not determine us becoming fucked. Humans became fucked when we began to alter our story and see ourselves as the center of the mothafuckin’ universe (i.e., Anthropocentrism).
As previously published on Medium
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