This is from the evolutionary psychiatry book The Moral Animal:
>"What the theory of natural selection says, rather, is that people's minds were designed to maximize fitness in the environment in which those minds evolved. This environment is known as the EEA—the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Or, more memorably: the 'ancestral environment.'...
>"What was the ancestral environment like? The closest thing to a twentieth-century example is a hunter-gatherer society, such as the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, the Inuit (Eskimos) of the Arctic region, or the Ache of Paraguay.
>"Inconveniently, hunter-gatherer societies are quite different from one another, rendering simple generalization about the crucible of human evolution difficult. This diversity is a reminder that the idea of a single EEA is actually a fiction, a composite drawing; our ancestral social environment no doubt changed much in the course of human evolution. Still, there are recurring themes among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, and they suggest that some features probably stayed fairly constant during much of the evolution of the human mind. For example: people grew up near close kin in small villages where everyone knew everyone else and strangers didn't show up very often. People got married—monogamously or polygamously—and a female typically was married by the time she was old enough to be fertile."
--
The idea that modern life is different is obvious.
I get the impression that there's some other conversation going on here that has nothing to do with evolution and you are not saying "lets all live in Igloos...".
>"What the theory of natural selection says, rather, is that people's minds were designed to maximize fitness in the environment in which those minds evolved. This environment is known as the EEA—the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Or, more memorably: the 'ancestral environment.'...
>"What was the ancestral environment like? The closest thing to a twentieth-century example is a hunter-gatherer society, such as the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, the Inuit (Eskimos) of the Arctic region, or the Ache of Paraguay.
>"Inconveniently, hunter-gatherer societies are quite different from one another, rendering simple generalization about the crucible of human evolution difficult. This diversity is a reminder that the idea of a single EEA is actually a fiction, a composite drawing; our ancestral social environment no doubt changed much in the course of human evolution. Still, there are recurring themes among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, and they suggest that some features probably stayed fairly constant during much of the evolution of the human mind. For example: people grew up near close kin in small villages where everyone knew everyone else and strangers didn't show up very often. People got married—monogamously or polygamously—and a female typically was married by the time she was old enough to be fertile."
--
The idea that modern life is different is obvious.
I get the impression that there's some other conversation going on here that has nothing to do with evolution and you are not saying "lets all live in Igloos...".