Today or Darwin Does Dating: Five ways your ancestral past is messing with your love life. [1/15]

Don’t worry. This isn’t a thread about “past lives” or reincarnation. Instead, we’re going to think about how different the worldis now compared to one humans typically evolved in. [2/15]

Here’s the issue: when things in the environment stay the same for a long time, organisms evolve to thrive in that environment – both physically and mentally. [3/15]

Giraffesevolved long necks because trees were a consistent presence throughout their evolutionary history. Longer necked giraffes had better access to food, which then allowed them to survive and pass their long-necked genes to subsequent generations. [4/15]

But what happens if the environment changes drastically – at a speed too quick for evolution to cope with? Long necks confer little advantage if all the trees disappear and food is only a few feet off the ground. [5/15]

Well then we get something called miss-match. And you get it in humans too. The best example is with food habits. We have a massive drive towards sugary and fatty foodsbecause we evolved in a landscape where these things were hard to come by. [6/15]

Now, when Oreos can be bought at petrol stationsat 2AM, that drive doesn’t just switch off. We still approach these foods like they’re going to up and disappear. This miss-match between our ancestral living conditions and our modern ones can cause problems like obesity. [7/15]

So what other types of miss-match are there? A recent article point to several (link at end of thread). But here, I'm going to lay down by top five things that make modern mating less straightforward![8/15]

1: Too many people. Humans evolved to function in small (~150) communities. Applying small-scale psychology to large social networks doesn’t always work well - leading to superficial relationships and giving those we’ll never meet a platform to influence our mating 🗫. [9/15]

2: Temporary relationships. Dreaming of commitment but keep finding one night stands? We evolved in communities where sexual relations led to relationships a lot of the time. Large modern societies make it easy to ghost. We haven’t quite adapted to cope with that yet. [10/15]

3: Autonomy. For most of our history, mate choice wasn’t a solitary decision. Your familywould often get involved. Sound like hell? Forgoing the experience of elders means figuring out who is good for you through trial and error. And that comes with its own problems! [11/15]

4: Not adulting: In the past, those in their 20’s would be seasoned parents with mums and dads young enough to support with childcare considerably. Western society markedly delays “adulting”, meaning some have to look after their parents and their kids, together. [12/15]

5: Information overload. A biggie! Ever felt like a deer in the headlights when buying something in the supermarket? Or even browsing options on a dating website? You could be suffering from information overload. [13/15]

Mate choice (if your family allowed) was limited to a handful of options in the Pleistocene. Selecting from a large pool of suitors is “new” to our stone aged brains, causing it to apply abnormally high standards to cut this number down, or just feeling overwhelmed! [14/15]

Hope you liked the Top 5, though there are even more to consider. This thread was inspired by a new paper about miss-match by Cari Goetz @pillse @ProfDavidBuss and @dconroybeam. You can read it here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6904347/ [15/15]