Evolutionary Change
The Basic Idea
Imagine spending your days foraging for food, preying after wild animals and collecting wild plants. Instead of a fixed home base, you constantly move to new places where more resources will be available. While this lifestyle may seem strange to you, people who lived like this – hunter-gatherers – are considered humanity’s first and most adaptive population.1 This means that hunter-gatherers formed such lifestyles in accordance with their environments, in order to improve their chances for survival and reproductive success. In fact, there are still some contemporary societies that follow hunter-gatherer practices, although with some modifications.
The concept of adapting behavior to one’s environment is a core feature of evolution, which describes changes in the inherited traits of a population through successive generations.2 When living organisms reproduce, they pass on successful traits: traits that ensure their survival and ability to reproduce. These inherited traits, as well as new adaptations that result from changing environments, influence subsequent generations’ survival and behaviors. Applying an evolutionary lens to human behavior, we can understand the mechanisms and drives that underlie many behaviors, as well as the environmental conditions through which they became common.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.
– Charles R. Darwin, creator of evolutionary theory and author of On the Origin of Species
