Evolutionary Wisdom: On Intelligence and the Evolutionary Blind Spot

Homo sapiens is the most cognitively capable organism on record, and it is generating the conditions for its own decline. Evolutionary Wisdom asks how both can be true at once.

The answer proposed here is a mismatch between an inherited make-up and the conditions it now runs in. Human cognition was shaped for small groups, immediate feedback, and direct contact with a real environment. It now operates at planetary scale, across generational timescales, on simulations of the conditions it wa...