"Americans have not replaced one form of interaction with another; they have reduced social interaction across the board. These findings point to a temporal reorganization of social life marked by the disappearance of the "night out."" - The End of Friday Nights with Friends, Neal Caren, August 2026
Maybe this? This can't be adaptive? Or maybe due to Covid, those monkish habits were optimal? (this is on top of the invisible hand pushing down fertility). I think Robin brushes with big strokes, and he hasn't proven his larger claim 'that evolution is broken', when evolution itself says it is presumed to work.
Well, greed works against evolution, so it's a nice theory but it's at odds with economics.
I don't anticipate folks will be taming their addicted compulsion to accumulate wealth. They were told it's totally "rational." You're supposed to get as much money as you can, no matter what damage it was going to do to their brains.
Their mPFCs are shot from decoupling because you have to do cognitive defense mechanisms, not actual logic to justify anxiety, aka greed. Greed basically is cognitive bias, but denial income in 3...2...1...
I agree with the counsel. I want to push on one sentence.
You grant that evolution is "blind in many ways, and so maybe you can see things that it cannot." The next sentence puts the deliberation back — the process has "taken into account" things you don't appreciate, your package may be a better bet than you realize. The concession doesn't survive its own paragraph. I don't think that's carelessness. Saying it is easy; adjusting your thinking to run on it is hard, and I couldn't do it a year ago either. A blind process has no objective, so "seeing what it cannot" has nothing to compare against. You and it are not two forecasters looking at the same board. There is no board.
That matters most for your last paragraph. If the process is unusually broken right now, what broke isn't only the inherited instincts — it's the return signal. Differential retention is the thing that tells you your steering was wrong. Take it offline and conscious analysis doesn't get sharper, it gets unchecked. It can grow more internally consistent every year while quietly losing contact with anything that would correct it. A broken window is the worst moment to trust the wheel, not the best.
On Henderson's question in his comment, the strongest example I know is the high-fertility religious enclaves. But look at what they actually show: a deliberately loaded package riding a host society they neither maintain nor could reproduce. That's mixing what you love with somebody else's life. It may be the honest version of your slogan, and it's a weaker one.
Rather than “make peace with Darwin” , perhaps we should try to “domesticate Darwin.”
We should take advantage of its discovery mechanisms and of the power of selection while building welfare-enhancing systems that persist and spread. However we need to be careful to not mistake whatever wins the evolutionary contest for what is good.
Half of that we already do — make a lot of variants, cull against a test we wrote. That works because the test is ours and nothing can rewrite it on us.
But I don’t think Darwin is the kind of thing that can be domesticated. You domesticate a population, not the process. What we did with wheat and dogs wasn’t taming selection — it was starting a new line whose filter is us. And the old filter never paused. Wolves are still out there. Stop farming and wheat is gone in a season.
So a domesticated line lasts exactly as long as its keeper does. Propose it for a culture and you’ve proposed something that persists only while the domesticator persists — and nobody is keeping us. Which is why your last sentence matters more than the first. We’re not outside the pen picking winners. We’re in it.
> I actually think that we now live at a special time when our Darwinian evolution process is unusually broken, making conscious analysis unusually good at figuring out how to be more adaptive
The comedy! In a post about making peace with Darwin we get this hand grenade in the final paragraph.
Making peace with God means: Accepting the greater wisdom of a higher power. You don't get to keep shaking your fist at God when something happens that you don't like or understand. To make peace is to let go of ego.
I would ‘replace it’ with what it pretends to replace: Creation. As the holes in evolution get more and more evident, I am wondering what atheists will replace it with.
You might wish to examine your statement logically. Those two things do not contradict. It is perfectly possible the holes in evolution are getting more and more evident (as they are, as the literature continually shows under the surface), and yet belief in creation declines. Belief in creation is not related to holes in evolution. Evolution gets taught unquestioningly by more and more people… regardless of the evidence for or against.
If it's "evident", then to who is it evident? Not the people in aggregate being surveyed. And certainly less so the people who've actually read "the literature", as that's anti-correlated with belief in Creation.
I think you're making a good point. Like much of your writing, it's pretty abstract. Can you give an example or two and show how you would mix it?
"Americans have not replaced one form of interaction with another; they have reduced social interaction across the board. These findings point to a temporal reorganization of social life marked by the disappearance of the "night out."" - The End of Friday Nights with Friends, Neal Caren, August 2026
Maybe this? This can't be adaptive? Or maybe due to Covid, those monkish habits were optimal? (this is on top of the invisible hand pushing down fertility). I think Robin brushes with big strokes, and he hasn't proven his larger claim 'that evolution is broken', when evolution itself says it is presumed to work.
Well, greed works against evolution, so it's a nice theory but it's at odds with economics.
I don't anticipate folks will be taming their addicted compulsion to accumulate wealth. They were told it's totally "rational." You're supposed to get as much money as you can, no matter what damage it was going to do to their brains.
Their mPFCs are shot from decoupling because you have to do cognitive defense mechanisms, not actual logic to justify anxiety, aka greed. Greed basically is cognitive bias, but denial income in 3...2...1...
I agree with the counsel. I want to push on one sentence.
You grant that evolution is "blind in many ways, and so maybe you can see things that it cannot." The next sentence puts the deliberation back — the process has "taken into account" things you don't appreciate, your package may be a better bet than you realize. The concession doesn't survive its own paragraph. I don't think that's carelessness. Saying it is easy; adjusting your thinking to run on it is hard, and I couldn't do it a year ago either. A blind process has no objective, so "seeing what it cannot" has nothing to compare against. You and it are not two forecasters looking at the same board. There is no board.
That matters most for your last paragraph. If the process is unusually broken right now, what broke isn't only the inherited instincts — it's the return signal. Differential retention is the thing that tells you your steering was wrong. Take it offline and conscious analysis doesn't get sharper, it gets unchecked. It can grow more internally consistent every year while quietly losing contact with anything that would correct it. A broken window is the worst moment to trust the wheel, not the best.
On Henderson's question in his comment, the strongest example I know is the high-fertility religious enclaves. But look at what they actually show: a deliberately loaded package riding a host society they neither maintain nor could reproduce. That's mixing what you love with somebody else's life. It may be the honest version of your slogan, and it's a weaker one.
The mechanism is variation without direction plus selection by
environment, which makes adaptiveness a property read off after the
fact. Existing now is not evidence of having been selected, and the
package is not a bet the process placed. Drift, hitchhiking,
developmental constraint, and traits that simply have not been
eliminated yet all sit in the gap between surviving and being adapted.
Rather than “make peace with Darwin” , perhaps we should try to “domesticate Darwin.”
We should take advantage of its discovery mechanisms and of the power of selection while building welfare-enhancing systems that persist and spread. However we need to be careful to not mistake whatever wins the evolutionary contest for what is good.
Half of that we already do — make a lot of variants, cull against a test we wrote. That works because the test is ours and nothing can rewrite it on us.
But I don’t think Darwin is the kind of thing that can be domesticated. You domesticate a population, not the process. What we did with wheat and dogs wasn’t taming selection — it was starting a new line whose filter is us. And the old filter never paused. Wolves are still out there. Stop farming and wheat is gone in a season.
So a domesticated line lasts exactly as long as its keeper does. Propose it for a culture and you’ve proposed something that persists only while the domesticator persists — and nobody is keeping us. Which is why your last sentence matters more than the first. We’re not outside the pen picking winners. We’re in it.
> I actually think that we now live at a special time when our Darwinian evolution process is unusually broken, making conscious analysis unusually good at figuring out how to be more adaptive
The comedy! In a post about making peace with Darwin we get this hand grenade in the final paragraph.
Making peace with God means: Accepting the greater wisdom of a higher power. You don't get to keep shaking your fist at God when something happens that you don't like or understand. To make peace is to let go of ego.
I will have peace with Darwinian Evolution, when the idea is settled permanently in its grave.
What exactly do you imagine replacing it with?
No imagination needed :)
I would ‘replace it’ with what it pretends to replace: Creation. As the holes in evolution get more and more evident, I am wondering what atheists will replace it with.
It is not the case that "the holes in evolution get more and more evident". Belief in Creationism has declined over time rather than risen.
You might wish to examine your statement logically. Those two things do not contradict. It is perfectly possible the holes in evolution are getting more and more evident (as they are, as the literature continually shows under the surface), and yet belief in creation declines. Belief in creation is not related to holes in evolution. Evolution gets taught unquestioningly by more and more people… regardless of the evidence for or against.
If it's "evident", then to who is it evident? Not the people in aggregate being surveyed. And certainly less so the people who've actually read "the literature", as that's anti-correlated with belief in Creation.