Essay: Influences of evolution on human behavior

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the influences of evolution on human behavior. The essay will begin with a general consideration of this subject. Then, it will proceed to consider specific examples of the influence of evolution. One such example will consist of xenophobia, and another such example will consist of conditioning. A key conclusion that will emerge here is that while it is important to drawing overly simplistic implications from the theory of evolution for human behavior it is also undeniable that the influences of evolution clearly do exist.
To start with, then, human behavior follows from human cognition; so, tracing the influences of evolution on behavior would imply identifying cognitive mechanisms whose development can be attributed to the process of evolution. As Brown and Richerson (2013) have written: “Evolutionary psychologists aim to describe the evolved psychological mechanisms that underlie human cognition, with an emphasis on domain-specific information processing devices provide human beings with a universal toolkit of mental adaptations” (p. 4). The idea here would be that the evolutionary process itself has naturally selected for human beings to develop and retain certain cognitive capacities and traits that would enable them to function in and adapt to their environments in an optimal way. Following this logic, the implication could be drawn that potentially several or even most aspects of the human mind have been put into place primarily because they fulfill an evolutionary function. Indeed, according to the theory of evolutionary, there is virtually nothing, whether physical or mental, that simply exists in an arbitrary way, without in some way contributing to the holistic success of the animal in question. This is the general paradigm within which scientists and researchers tend to conduct their discussions regarding the influences of evolution on human behavior.
The implications of this perspective, however, can sometimes be troubling. For example, xenophobia, or fear of other race and/or cultures, is a quite problematic phenomenon in the modern world, but it may well have ancient evolutionary roots. As Konnor (2012) has suggested, for example: “I have little trouble agreeing that at some times in the past these [xenophobic behaviors] were adaptive for the perpetrators. Generally, xenophobia must have been adaptive in many times and places, as the people over the hill were surely dangerous, not least because your own people posed a threat to them” (para. 2). This would suggest that over time, humans who were xenophobic were naturally selected over humans who were not xenophobic, due to the fact that the latter would have been inadequate at defending themselves against mortal threats from outsiders.
The same point could also be made from the angle of disease. Back when human communities were considerably segregated from each other, different communities may have built up immunities against different diseases, and some diseases may have only been prevalent within one community and not others. Within this context, if a tribe of people were to welcome an outsider, then they may well have invited their own destruction, insofar as that outsider might have been the carrier of a disease that did him no harm but could potentially decimate the members of the tribe itself. In the modern world, of course, xenophobia is often seen as a form of bigotry that is based on a lack of open-mindedness and compassion. Evolutionary theory, however, would suggest that over the course of human history, people may have had very good reasons for thinking in xenophobic ways and this may have moreover been reinforced by evolution itself. This is one example of the troubling implications that the theory of evolution can have with respect to the influences of evolution on human behavior.
Turning to another example now, it is fairly clear that most kinds of conditioning within the discipline of psychology primarily work because people tend to learn in ways that the evolutionary process deemed to be adaptive. The most primitive example of this would be the technique of operant conditioning, developed by Skinner (1976). The main idea here is that over time, people will learn to seek out stimuli that they associated with pleasure and avoid stimuli that they associate with pain. Of course, learning to think in this way would have conferred huge evolutionary advantages upon human beings. If a human were to have consistently pursued what caused him pain and/or been incapable of learning avoidance from exposure to pain, then he would have probably ended up hurting himself and removing himself from the gene pool. Something similar could be said about classical conditioning as well, which is more sophisticated than operant conditioning but nevertheless relies on the presence of forms of cognition that were developed in order to enable humans to engage with and learn from their environments and experiences in an optimal way.
More generally, the very existence of pleasure and pain, and the influences that these stimuli have in motivating human beings to do a wide variety of things, could chalked up to the process of evolution. Pleasure and pain are directly associated with what promotes the survival of the human and what does not promote his survival. For example, from the perspective of evolutionary theory, one could even suggest that the reason that sexual activity is highly pleasurable is that reproduction is one of the fundamental drives that evolution gives to the individual creature: humans who did not find sexual activity pleasurable would likely fall out of the gene pool, or at least participate at a diminished rate. Aside from actual conditioning techniques, then, the suggestion could be made that life itself tends to generally condition people in accordance with the principles of evolution.
Finally, evolution may also even account for the philosophical impulse that many people have, or the desire to see behind appearances in order to figure out what is really going on in their lives. In part, this may be because evolution may actually train people to ignore reality as such, and rather to merely focus attention on the aspects of reality that are salient for one’s own survival. For example, Hoffman (cited in Gefter, 2016) has suggested the following: “an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth” (para. 12). This would suggest that as a result of evolution, all people may be living within symbolic matrices produced by their own nervous systems—matrices that offer representations of the world on the basis of the imperative of survival, and not on the basis of what the world really is. A great deal of philosophical and cultural activity could probably be traced back to this basic discrepancy that has been produced by the process of evolution.
In summary, this essay has consisted of a discussion of the effects of evolution on human behavior. The essay has considered the general context of this subject, as well as the specific examples of xenophobia and conditioning. The essay has also suggested that evolution may also contribute to the human impulse to seek higher truth, insofar as evolution creates conditions in which it would be advantageous for people’s brains to provide them with a distorted representation of reality. From this discussion, it should be clear that the influences of evolution on human behavior are potentially wide-ranging and immense, insofar as evolution may be responsible for some of the most basic of human cognitive mechanisms. However, care must be taken to not interpret this statement in an overly reductionist way and to remain appreciative of the full complexity of human experience.