Don’t Fight Evolution. Embrace it.

“Know thyself.” — Ancient inscription on the Greek Temple of Apollo, 525-450 BC, often attributed to Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle, all of whom embraced it as a foundation of their “philosophy” or life’s wisdom.

It’s sad, even tragic, that some offshoots of Western religions, especially American ones, have demonized the science of evolution for contradicting the religious notion that God deliberately created Man. But as a microbiology-professor friend (now retired) confirmed, evolution is the foundation of all modern biology, including the discovery and manipulation of DNA, as well as much of modern medicine. And it’s those things that let me and so many other modern people live past 80.

The tragedy deepens when you begin to understand how refusing to take evolution into account has caused much of our modern American health pathology. (“Pathology” is a two-edged word: it covers both the study of disease and the underlying disease itself. I once won a bet with a lawyer for whom I consulted on this very point.)

Three such pathologies are just now coming to the forefront of our national consciousness. First, a rash of popular innovations in our diets—highly sugared, highly artificial and highly processed foods—is causing an epidemic of obesity and “diseases of civilization,” including diabetes and clogged arteries. Second, social changes wrought by our electronic age are depriving people, especially the young, of the social, sexual and familial connections with which we evolved. That leaves them lonely, depressed, solipsistic, unsatisfied, and sometimes suicidal. Third, ubiquitous overuse of artificial plastics and synthetic fibers in our food, clothing and household wares has led us to a place where dissected cadavers show a plastic spoon’s worth of plastic microparticles in virtually every brain examined. Similar microparticles can be found in the Mariana Trench, the Pacific Ocean’s deepest spot. To put it bluntly, we have polluted not just our environment, but our own bodies and our world; and that pollution may be irrevocable, at least in the short term.

Our health-care system, our science, and our governments are just beginning to come to grips with these tragic failings. It may take generations to fix them. But fixing cannot even begin without understanding that each of these grave problems derives from mostly inadvertent neglect of our species’ evolution.

The most important thing to understand about evolution is that it’s a very slow process. Our species’ entire recorded history, about six thousand years, is too short for any significant evolution to have occurred. It took an estimated 10,000 years for Homo sapiens just to replace Neanderthals in Europe, mostly by interbreeding, and over 400,000 years for Neanderthals to evolve from an earlier ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis. The history of our nation, let alone the average human life span, is but a nanosecond in biological evolution, far too short for any evolutionary change to occur.

So let’s examine how inadvertence to our evolution helped create the three societal problems outlined above, and how attention to it might help resolve them.

You don’t have to be a scientist or demographer to have noticed the stark effects wrought by our Western diet, not only in the United States, but also in other English-speaking nations. You just have to have lived as long as I have (80 years) and be observant. I noticed the effects immediately in 1999, when I moved from Hawaii to Northeast Ohio and saw Cleveland. I also noticed them when, in 2023, I revisited New Zealand and Australia after an absence of about a decade.

My own personal observations were striking. In comparing the physiques of people across those transitions in geography and time, I thought that someone might have blown up the figures (mostly of men) like plastic dolls. The explosion of obesity on city streets was breathtaking.

The changes I observed in moving from Hawaii to Ohio were, of course, heavily influenced by changes in group genetics and traditional diet. (The people of Hawaii have large infusions of Asian genes and enjoy food heavily influenced by Asian cuisine and diets.) The changes in time I observed Down Under were most striking. There the general puffiness had occurred despite a general increase in immigration from Asia in the interim. Although I didn’t take a quantitative survey, it seemed that the obesity explosion had occurred mostly in white people like me, rather than in the native Maori and or Australian Aboriginal populations.

What caused the explosion? The causes have been well-researched. Over the past decade, we have seen a dramatic increase in artificial, manufactured foods designed to self-market by appealing to our species’ evolutionary craving for sugar, salt and fat. In the natural environments in which we evolved, those necessary nutrients were often scarce, so our systems and brains evolved to crave them. Modern capitalist marketers learned to exploit those evolutionary cravings to sell artificial stuff, and the rest is history.

One proof of this hypothesis is simple. Societies like Italy and Japan, which have largely stuck with healthy traditional diets lean in meat, fat, and sugar, if not salt, have by and large escaped the obesity epidemic. They also have world-leading average longevities. So it seems that these nationwide and society-wide health problems elsewhere in the “West” are largely a product of unregulated capitalism and weak culture.

The problem of social isolation is similar but harder to crack. We Homo sapiens evolved as social animals. We came to dominate our small blue planet by virtue of our living and working together, despite being small, weak, and poorly armed naturally (small teeth, no claws and no venom). Individually, we are not nearly as smart as our self-anointed scientific name might suggest; but we have managed to act smart by recording and heeding the thinking of the wisest among us, including people like Socrates and Albert Einstein.

Evolution has given us an ability to socialize, communicate and cooperate as no other species on this planet can. And just as evolution makes us crave the sugar and salt necessary to our physical survival, it has made socializing—in homes, families, parties, schoolyards, churches, political gatherings, restaurants, bars, and playgrounds—a great mental and intellectual pleasure in our short lives, in part to facilitate our societal survival. Socializing, in all its forms, is part of what makes life worth living.

It goes without saying that socializing remotely via the Internet is not the same thing. When we meet in person we use all our senses, including touch, smell and nuances of sight and hearing, to understand and appreciate the people around us. No screen, no matter how many its pixels, can duplicate that. Nor can any remote device yet invented duplicate our unconscious sensing of others’ pheromones of happiness, mirth, fear, distress, or lust, let alone the joys of sex. No wonder the pandemic and its forced resort to remote “classes” and “meetings” caused an epidemic of social discontent!

What makes this problem tricky to resolve is that, in our increasingly overpopulated and crowded world, silence and solitude are also things of value, also with evolutionary origins. As people get richer, they generally prefer bigger and more remote homes, in which they can get away (temporarily) from each other and from the noisy world outside. The English Lord’s grand home, with vast empty halls lined with painted portraits of ancestors, is the paradigm here.

The proper balance is by no means obvious. But the fact that healthy societies have lived in crowded cities cheek by jowl throughout human history, including in today’s New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris and London, suggests that some crowding is not, in itself, a sin against evolution.

In any event, it’s clear that a whole generation with social aptitudes and skills reduced by technology and pandemic isolation is not a good thing. The solutions are obvious but not necessarily easy: remedial instruction and enhanced opportunities for socializing, at home, in school, in extracurricular programs, and at work.

The problem of internal and environmental pollution with plastics and other synthetics is, in theory, the easiest to resolve. As a species, we should do all that we can to get rid of them, especially in our food chain and our clothing and in things we put in our mouths or other orifices.

Clothing and bedding, in theory, ought to be simple. There apparently is no shortage of the cotton, linen and other natural fibers that we humans used for centuries before synthetics were invented. At least a neighborhood Costco offers stylish all-cotton jeans and shirts for lower prices than synthetic ones.

Beyond clothing and bedding, change is not so easy. It took me several months just to replace most of the plastic stuff in our kitchens with metal, wood, glass and (for utensils and containers) silicone, which apparently is more compatible with human biology and more biodegradable. But what about all the plastic brushes (including toothbrushes), plastic combs, and little plastic bottles in everyone’s medicine cabinet? What about the ubiquitous plastic bags in our supermarkets, our refrigerators and in our bathrooms?

Polyethylene fragments comprise the majority of the plastic microparticles found in our brains. That can’t be good, as polyethylene is a synthetic material developed by us in the last 75 years, so it could hardly have figured in our evolution. Consequently, our bodies likely have no means to remove it.

It would be easy (and probably less expensive) for supermarkets to replace their polyethylene bags for fruits and vegetables with paper ones. But few have done so. Replacing the ubiquitous plastic cups and cartons for milk, yoghurt and virtually every product that’s wet would be harder, and those plastic containers come into direct contact with our food for long periods of storage in transit (while also getting shaken!), in the supermarket, and in our refrigerators.

As a general rule, flexible plastics are more foreign to human biology than solid ones, due to the plasticizer chemicals (such as BPA) that make them flexible. But absent a complete scientific study of all the myriad plastics now in production and in our food chain, there’s no way to be sure. A rational society would commission such a study ASAP, publicize its results, and outlaw the worst offending materials and uses by regulation.

That may take a long time. For us Americans, in our current state of political paralysis, it would be all but impossible. So, as is often true in our individualistic society, the task of protecting ourselves and our children from this known and increasing threat to our evolutionary biology falls to each of us as individuals. It’ll be interesting to see how more collectively oriented societies, such as China and Japan, respond to increasing recognition of this very real threat.

In the meantime, we can contemplate three self-evident truths. First, we Americans and many “Western” societies are poisoning ourselves and our planet with artificial stuff alien to our evolutionary biology and need to change our ways. Second, our Health Secretary RFK, Jr. is only half crazy. Vaccines and modern science do work, but he’s right that we are poisoning ourselves, largely for the profit of a few, by eating, wearing, and loading our food with artificial stuff wholly inconsistent with our evolution. Third, we need to be a lot more careful in developing stuff incompatible with our evolutionary biology and putting it in our mouths, on and in our bodies, and abroad in our land, rivers, skies and seas.

If not, we might end up like the ancient Romans, who likely destroyed their world-bridging democratic empire by poisoning their elite with lead. In fact, the danger of any intelligent species developing lots of synthetic stuff incompatible with its evolutionary biology may help explain the Fermi Paradox: so many stars with habitable planets in the Universe, but no contact yet with any other intelligent species. Maybe they all destroy themselves by self-administered poisons, within a short time after they first achieve orbital space flight. After all, we probably couldn’t have made space suits without flexible plastics.