1.4 - Evolutionary Thinking: Adaptation: Why it is Problematic and How to Recognize it

"Evolutionary Medicine" Sinauer Associates (2015) is the textbook that supports these lectures.

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I assert that there were two distinct and fundamentally different types of Homo Sapiens to come out of the natural world, which is a fact that has been largely ignored by those who frame our reality (scientists, politicians, etc.). We see it all around us, and it is reflected back to us in all our creative works,  those odd creatures who seem both amazing and somehow quite different from the majority. They constitute most of the movers and shakers in the world, as well as the criminals (sometimes both simultaneously), because they share the same gene mutation that mutes fear, emotions, olfactory sensitivity, and empathy to a greater or lesser degree. They are human, but not humane. The great illusion here is that their defining characteristic is violence, rather than the underlying characteristics that facilitate violence under the correct circumstances (narcissism, lack of empathy). The only difference between a murderer and a hero is often circumstance, and many of the high functioning of this type are absolutely lethal, but may have never been "physically" aggressive. In the natural world they were the anti-predator-predator, which likely evolved to deal with the super-predators of the time, including other hominids. They were not deterred by the con-specific scent of death as were the others, which made them ideal to fearlessly address any man-eaters that developed a taste for us. Not only were they unafraid, research shows that they are excited by the scent of fear, and very likely the death scent as well. I have often wondered how the learned men of science ever came up with a figure of a meager 10, 000 scents that they claimed (for a century) we are capable of detecting with our so-called vestigial olfactory system. My own research strongly indicated that their figure -must be- off by several orders of magnitude, which unsurprisingly turned out to be correct, but likely not for both types, which would explain the huge discrepancy between these and subsequent results. Current estimates suggest a figure as high as 30% of the global population (much higher among males in some locations) may be physiologically incapable of both empathy and olfactory sensitivity, which explains why we have been unable to rid ourselves of war, an activity that is as natural to one type as parenthood, love, hearth and home is to the other. No my friend, there will never be a true understanding of ourselves, nor peace in the world until we recognize the facts and achieve the oversight and transparency we had in the natural world. The deception is that "we are all the same, " which even at face value, is absurd! The fact of the matter is, we are obviously not all the same, and there has simply been insufficient time and selection pressures to change this uncomfortable, yet irrefutable fact. Nature evolved us to be wary of others who are different from ourselves, but superficial difference that we are all so fixated on are meaningless compared to understanding that the two types occupying the same home will have less in common than the same type half way across the world. Peace.