Feeling Good

An Evolutionary Perspective on Life Choices

Menelaos Apostolou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351520027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Every day, people make life choices that, ideally, increase their evolutionary fitness the chances of survival and successful reproduction and lead to positive feelings of fulfilment, accomplishment, and happiness. Sometimes, however, individuals experience quite the opposite: feelings of sadness caused by fitness-decreasing choices. Fortunately, many advancements in evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology have increased humans' capacity as a species to address the question of how to live a life characterized by more positive than negative feelings.Feeling Good reveals anyone can learn how to trigger mechanisms that generate positive feelings and increase positive fitness levels. The key is to employ an evolutionary perspective on how mental mechanisms generate feelings in relation to our life choices.From an insightfully evolutionary perspective, Feeling Good examines how to find and keep a mate, make good career decisions, build a solid social network, deal with death and negative influences, and make life choices in general that can lead to better and more sustainable mental and physical health. Menelaos Apostolou deepens our understanding of human nature by exploring what is good and evil in an evolutionary sense as well as in relation to religious dogmas; and whether making fitness-increasing life choices can lead to more good or more evil acts.

1

The Evolved Nature of Positive and Negative Feelings

Giving a plausible answer to the question “how to live a life characterized by more positive than negative feelings” requires addressing first the questions of where these feelings come from and what triggers them. Feelings are the products of specific brain mechanisms or adaptations that have evolved to promote the representation of the genes that code for them in future generations called fitness. More specifically, these mechanisms generate emotions that induce changes in the brain and in other body organs, the experience of which we call feelings. For the arguments in this book, I will focus on feelings as this is what we are aware of.

These mechanisms are triggered by events or situations that affect their fitness. If life events increase the fitness of the genes that code for the feeling-generating mechanisms, positive feelings will emerge, but if life events decrease their fitness, negative feelings will emerge. Feeling-generating mechanisms are, in effect, fitness calculators that respond to the actual or projected fitness consequence of an event. It follows that you need to live your life in a way that increases the fitness of these mechanisms if it is to be characterized by more positive feelings such as happiness than negative feelings such as loneliness.

This chapter aims to develop this argument by exploring the evolved nature of feeling-generating mechanisms and by identifying the primary factors that trigger them. Since evolution is the architect of the brain hardware, the obvious starting point is to examine how evolutionary forces have created this hardware. It goes without saying that this endeavor requires more than the few paragraphs that will be devoted here. If you want to know more, and you need to know more to make good use of this book, you can start by reading Richard Dawkins’ books The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker.

The Evolution of Life

The First Organisms

The origins of life can be traced back in time to around four billion years ago, when a chemical compound—let’s call it protolife—that had the ability to replicate itself in a reliable manner was assembled by chance. This compound had the capacity to resist the hostile forces of its environment, which attempted to dissolve it, at least for a sufficient amount of time in order to be able to make copies of itself. Through replication, many copies of the protolife would be created which would tend to replicate continuously, and in order to do so, they would utilize resources from the environment. However, these resources are not unlimited, and they can sustain only a limited number of protolives. That is, the population of protolives would not increase endlessly as its size would be constrained by the amount of available resources. When the population reaches the maximum, competition arises between the protolives as they keep replicating, without having enough space for each one of them.

No copying procedure is perfect. Therefore, when protolives replicate there would be errors, which means that many protolife offspring will not be identical to their parents. Most copy errors would be detrimental, resulting in offspring which cannot replicate themselves or which cannot remain functional long enough in order to do so. Consequently, these protolives would not be represented in future generations. Nonetheless, there would be rare instances of copy errors resulting in protolife offspring which are better in replication than their parents. They can, for instance, give rise to a trait that enables a protolife to remain functional for longer, or utilize the resources of the environment more efficiently in the process of making copies of itself. This protolife will have a competitive advantage over other protolives, which would be inherited by its offspring that will also have a competitive advantage over other protolife offspring, which do not have this trait. In effect, protolives endowed with this trait would start replacing other protolives in the population, which are not endowed with it.

Eventually, the population will consist only of the protolives that are better adapted to the environment. In other words, evolution has taken place, and the species of protolives has evolved to be better adapted to the environment it inhabits. Evolution is a property of the world. It arises from limited resources being available in the environment, and from organisms with heritable traits tending to produce more offspring than the environment can sustain. As a consequence, selection is exercised and organisms better adapted to the environment arise.

There are many different ecological niches (i.e., slots with resources that can sustain life) that require different types of organisms, some simpler and some more complex, in order to be occupied. Through evolutionary change, protolives become increasingly efficient in occupying the niche in which they originally appeared. But after several bouts of evolutionary change, some protolives are likely to become different or complex enough (i.e., develop living bodies equipped with specific organs that deal with the demands of a specific niche) to be able to occupy other niches as well. These protolives will jump to these niches where they will find a supply of unexploited resources.

They will then continue to replicate until their replication becomes constrained again by the resources available in this niche. In turn, evolutionary change will start taking place, with the rise of protolives better adapted to this niche. Over time, sufficient evolutionary change would have taken place, so that the inhabitants of this niche would become substantially different from their ancestors who first populated it. Simply put, a new species would emerge, which we can call neo-protolives.

After several generations of evolutionary change, some members of this new species will be able to inhabit other niches which require different or more complexity. Through this process and over the millennia, life would be able to inhabit most of the niches available on planet Earth and will eventually seek niches to inhabit outside of it. Humans are a species that through this process came to occupy a specific evolutionary niche; a niche which requires, among other things, higher-order cognitive functions to be exploited.

A Gene-Eye View of Evolution

One important thing that needs to be clarified is that what actually evolves and travels in time is information; the information of how to build bodies which can exploit the resources of the environment to build other bodies to carry this information to future generations. This information is divided into units called genes, which contain instructions on how to build the traits that make a body. A gene can travel in time by contributing to the building of a body trait that increases the ability of the body in which it resides to create other bodies which also carry this gene. As a specific environment limits the number of bodies that can survive at any given time, there is competition between genes for representation in future generations. That is, the best adapted bodies survive and the worst adapted ones die; but what makes a body well adapted to a given environment is its traits which are coded by genes. Therefore, the competition is essentially between genes and not between bodies.

In every ecological niche there is space only for a limited number of bodies and thus, of genes, to be represented. Therefore, genes that affect a body trait in a way that increases their chance of representation in future generations will eventually replace competing genes or alleles which code for a less well-adapted version of this trait. Consequently, evolutionary forces alter gene frequencies in a given population—that is, the genes which code for traits which best promote their replication tend to replace those which do not do so. The result of this process is that the genes that exist in the gene pool today act in a way that promotes their representation in future generations. Still, it has to be made clear that a gene is not thinking about anything as it does not have any cognitive processes; genes in the gene pool today are here because they somehow managed to be represented in future generations; those lacking this capacity are not in this pool.

There are many ways through which a gene can promote its replication, one being to increase the chances of survival of the body which carries it, giving it, in effect, more time to procreate. In sexually reproducing species, another way is to enable the body that carries it to attract and retain members of the opposite sex for the purpose of procreation. A third way is to enable the body in which it resides to help other bodies in which it is also likely to reside, to survive and reproduce. A fourth way is to make the body in which it resides to benefit the group where the body is found to compete successfully with other groups. This fourth way is perhaps the least effective one, mainly because competition between groups is usually less intense than competition between individuals.

The Human Species

Four billion years of evolution gave rise to the genus Homo which appeared on Earth approximately two million years ago. The first member of this genus was the Homo habilis (handy man) which lived around 2.3 to 1.4 million years ago, with our species Homo sapiens (wise man) appearing much later, around 200,000 years ago.

Archaeological, genetic, and anthropological evidence indicate that most of human evolution took place in sub-Saharan Africa where individuals lived in small groups of hunters and gatherers. This evidence also indicates that these bands consisted of around 150 people who were not sedentary, but were moving from place to place. In these bands there was a division of labor: Men were predominantly occupied with the hunting and war effort, and women with gathering plants and looking after the children.

Approximately 100,000 years ago humans started moving out of Africa, and by approximately 10,000 years ago our species had populated all continents. At about this time, in areas of the Middle East, some members of our species started cultivating plants and domesticating animals, which allowed them to become sedentary and form larger groups. People would not move around, but instead they would farm the land and live in villages and cities of thousands of inhabitants. The new environment and the new way of life created considerable selection pressures which triggered evolutionary change, so that we are different from our early ancestors who first left Africa.

In the eighteenth century, yet another major transition took place, namely the Industrial Revolution. In Britain, technological advancements allowed the use of sophisticated machinery to produce goods in mass. This has considerably altered the way of life; cities of millions of inhabitants emerged, and it started to become typical for the population to relocate from the countryside to work in factories or in services instead of cultivating the fields. As this transition matured and more sophisticated technology was introduced, there were further transformations resulting in working in some service industry, living in a flat, residing in a city of a million or so inhabitants, where most of us find ourselves in the Western world. Nevertheless, in evolutionary terms, this happened very recently in order for it to have considerable impact on our genetic makeups.

The important message of this brief account of human evolutionary history is that the human brain, which gives rise to the human mind, was predominantly shaped by selection forces working in an environment which was different from our own. Most of the mind’s evolution took place in Africa in a hunting and gathering context, but considerable evolutionary change took place in an agropastoral context outside Africa. Even though the industrial and postindustrial contexts have created considerable new pressures, these are too recent to have had a major impact on the evolution of the human mind.

Does Life Have a Meaning and Purpose?

The evolutionary reasoning discussed above can provide an answer to the question of whether life has a meaning or purpose. There have been many attempts to provide such an answer, most falling within a religious context, which usually go in the line of: “You are here because God created you to serve His will.” The evolutionary perspective provides a less metaphysical, more down-to-earth answer: the purpose of life is to transfer genetic material in time. The genetic material is not in itself alive—it is just a long chain of chemical compounds without feelings, cognitions, and without the ability to do much on its own. However, what it can do is to provide instructions for building living bodies which have the ability to carry it in time. Thus, in this respect, the purpose of these living bodies is to successfully transfer their genetic material to future generations.

This has important implications because it relates to the question of how I should live my life so as to be more rewarding. If your life’s course is not aligned with your life’s purpose, you will be likely to find yourself doing things that you are not meant to do, and be punished for this. On the other hand, if your life is aligned with its purpose, you are going to do things that you are meant to do, and you will be rewarded for it. For instance, if you are God’s creation and your purpose is to please God, you should live your life in a way that pleases God. If you do not, you will go to hell, and be punished for an eternity. If, on the other hand, you do please God, you will go to heaven, and be rewarded for an eternity.

However, if you are the creation of evolutionary forces, you need to live your life in a way that best promotes the transfer of your genetic material to future generations, that is, to increase your fitness. If you do not do so, you will be punished with negative feelings, which can turn your life into a living hell; if you do so, you will be rewarded with positive feelings that will make your life more pleasant to live. To follow such a life direction is not easy or straightforward, and the evolutionary perspective can provide insights that can act as a compass providing directions on how to do so.

Positive and Negative Feelings

The Human Brain and the Human Mind

Your brain generates your mind. Nevertheless, the brain is not one adaptation but a bunch of adaptations or mechanisms, each evolved to serve a different function. Such adaptations include, for instance, your memory system, your language-generating system, your visual information processing system, and so on. The brain has also been endowed by evolutionary forces with several mechanisms which generate emotions that result in feelings that motivate your behavior so as to increase the chances of representation in future generations of the genes that code for them (i.e., their fitness)—something that usually boils down to increasing the chances of successful survival and reproduction of the body in which these mechanisms reside.

These mechanisms work by generating positive feelings when you do something or something happens to you that increases your chances of survival and reproduction (and thus increases the fitness of the genes that code for these mechanisms), and by generating negative feelings when you do something or something happens to you that decreases your chances of survival and reproduction (and thus decreases the fitness of the genes that code for these mechanisms).

In this way, you are motivated to engage in fitness-increasing behavior so as to reap the reward (i.e., the positive feeling), and not to engage in fitness-decreasing behavior so as to avoid the punishment (i.e., the negative feeling). Many of these mechanisms produce a feeling which can be seen in a continuum, with one end being a very strong negative version of the feeling and the other end a very strong positive version of the feeling. Where you are on the continuum depends on your genetic predispositions, and on how much your behavior increases or decreases the fitness of the genes that code for the mechanism that generates this feeling. Note also that you cannot be at two different points of the continuum at the same time, meaning that you cannot simultaneously experience the positive and the negative version of the feeling.

You can see how this works with the intake of food which is required for survival. How would you know that your body runs out of energy? The answer is you will feel hungry. This feeling is generated by a brain mechanism which monitors the glucose level in your bloodstream, and makes you hungry when this falls below a certain level. Hunger is a negative feeling that motivates you to take corrective action, that is, to eat, in order to get rid of it. And when you take sufficient energy through eating, you are rewarded with a feeling of satiation and contentment. Hunger and satiation are the two ends of the continuum. When you have sufficient energy you are somewhere in the middle of the continuum, neither feeling hungry nor satiated.

This, as all other brain mechanisms, constitutes the product of evolutionary pressures working on our ancestors, to give rise to adaptations that would promote successful survival and/or reproduction. In this case, genes that code for a mechanism that generates hunger in response to low levels of glucose experience positive selection as they increase the chances of the body in which they reside to survive. That is, feeling hungry or satiated is the genes’ (that code for this mechanism) way to travel in time. In the same vein, evolutionary forces have endowed your brain with several more mechanisms that generate positive and negative feelings such as happiness.

The Nature of Happiness

The book or the electronic reader you are holding does not feel happy or unhappy or experience any other feeling, simply because it lacks the hardware that would enable it to do so. The feeling of happiness or unhappiness is generated by specific brain hardware. Without this hardware you would not be able to feel happy or unhappy, the same way that a book does not feel happy or unhappy if you treat it gently or tear it apart. The happiness-generating mechanism exists inside your brain, because it provides fitness benefits to the genes that code for it. If the genes that code for this mechanism received no benefits, they would have been eliminated long ago from the gene pool along with the happiness mechanism in your brain.

This mechanism increases the fitness of the genes that code for it by keeping track of life events, and making you unhappy when you do something, or something happens to you, that impairs the chances that the genes that code for it are represented in future generations. In this way, you are motivated to take corrective action in order to get rid of this negative feeling. On the other hand, this mechanism makes you happy if you do something, or something happens to you, which promotes the chances th...