Children, Chimps, and Chips: What Evolution Teaches Us About Today’s World

 If you’ve ever watched a child stubbornly choose candy over carrots, you’ve witnessed evolution whispering through human behavior. Children, by nature, optimize for short-term convenience and pleasure rather than long-term gains. It sounds irrational to us “grown-ups,” but if you rewind to the hunter-gatherer era—where life expectancy was short and tomorrow was never guaranteed—grabbing joy in the moment was the smart move. Live fast, have fun, survive the day. Evolution coded that into us.

Fast forward to the last hundred years: technology has rewritten the rules of life. We now routinely live decades longer than our ancestors, but evolution’s pace is glacial. Genetic change takes countless generations, while medicine, AI, and silicon chips advance in decades. Put differently: our bodies and instincts are still running “Stone Age 1.0,” while our technology is already in “Silicon Age 10.0.” That lag explains why we often feel out of sync with the modern world.

This mismatch is also why two systems of thinking—psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s “System 1” (fast, emotional, intuitive) and “System 2” (slow, deliberate, rational)—coexist within us. System 1 is our evolutionary autopilot; System 2 is our attempt to override it with planning and foresight. Even our politics reflect this tension. Progressives push visions of a future unbound by our evolutionary baggage, while conservatives appeal to instincts and traditions rooted deep in our primate DNA. That’s why movements like MAGA resonate: they feel aligned with our “chimpanzee core,” even if they don’t sound futuristic or visionary. Progress is rarely a sprint—it’s a tug-of-war with the past.

But here’s the twist: artificial intelligence isn’t shackled by gene-based evolution. Built on silicon, GenAI doesn’t need thousands of generations to “learn” a new behavior. It may outpace us in reaching higher levels of intelligence—perhaps even superintelligence. While humanity crawls forward on the slow escalator of biology, AI is racing up the jet-powered elevator of technology.

The world feels dizzying because, in truth, it is. Everything is happening fast—too fast for our hunter-gatherer brains to process. The challenge for us, then, is humility and patience: to accept our evolutionary roots while carefully building a future where human civilization can grow alongside new forms of intelligence.

After all, evolution may be slow, but the story we’re writing now is unfolding at lightning speed. And it’s going to be fascinating to see where it takes us.

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