What to expect this week:

This week’s topic is a little more philosophical than typical.

We are so similar to the rest of the animal kingdom in so many ways. We are biological beings that need food and water to survive. We reproduce and care for our young. A lot of what I discuss in my newsletters and videos, though, is how we are different - how we are unique.

One way we are special is how we can make conscious decisions to improve ourselves as individuals. We can owe much of this ability to specific adaptations we’ve inherited from our evolutionary history.

You can read on to explore those tools and what happens to us when we implement them in our personal lives.

Housekeeping:

Links to my e-Courses

• The Bare Minimum - FREE

• The Adaptive Scholar - $5

Self-improvement is an Evolutionary Process

Self-improvement is an evolutionary process. What do I mean by this? We, as individuals, each represent a variant of our human species. We all fall under the broad category of Homo sapiens, yet we’re not identical. Individuals vary genetically due to things like the recombination of DNA when a sperm and egg meet, or simply through different types of mutation. Different environmental and cultural settings also generate variability between individuals.

Like all species, natural selection has been acting upon humans since our origins, permitting those who were better adapted to their environments to survive and reproduce. The traits these individuals embodied, which led to that success, increased in frequency over time. 

We are now in a position where we can look back and see how evolution has seemingly treated us in unique ways. Our species is capable of organizing into groups and manipulating the world around us in ways unimaginable to other animals, who lack the ability to imagine all together - in any human sense of the word at least. We are not like other animals. Just look around and see what we’ve accomplished. From forming governments and the right to protest them to landing on the moon, we are special.

Evolved Tools for Self-Improvement

The product of natural selection’s choices on past human variability, which made our species so successful, is a toolkit that we can institute for individual success - for self-improvement. Of course, the specific tools you want to use will vary depending on the part of your life you want to improve, whether that’s physical fitness, relationship building, etc. However, I’d like to share some more generalizable aspects of our species that you can apply to any of these domains. All of which have to do with the beauty of the human mind.

Neuroplasticity

The first, and one that I’ve discussed before on my channel, is neuroplasticity. This is your brain’s ability to change in response to experience or your environment. Your brain recognizes patterns in the world, and when those patterns are broken, your brain takes note and will rewire itself to account for that new information. 

For example, if you typically wake up and grab your phone immediately, the neural connections that are associated with that action are likely pretty strong. But if you choose not to not to do so one day, your brain will notice. Maybe you put your shoes on to go for a walk instead. After repeating this over and over again, the neural connections associated with waking up and checking social media will weaken and those associated with grabbing your shoes will strengthen. This is often how habits are made and broken.

Evolutionary neuroscientists believe that the human brain evolved to be especially plastic [1]. We are born with relatively small brains, so they are still maturing even into adulthood. We are able to make new connections between neurons and strengthen old ones later into life compared to other animals. Also, they believe we have genes that code for greater brain plasticity.

Your plastic brain is preprogrammed to learn from your past. You can use it to construct a better future.

Creativity

Second, we are an inherently creative species. From our opposable thumbs that allow us to flint knap and make stone tools, to our ability to coordinate our voices into musical harmony, we create things. With these two examples, we see how creativity can be used for both problem-solving (creating better tools) and art (making music). For ancient humans, the function of creativity likely leaned more towards the problem-solving side - as a tool for survival.

Regardless, being creative and thinking of new ideas requires a balance of defocused and focused attention. Defocused attention allows you to make unorthodox connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. Focused attention allows you to refine those connections. Cognitive psychologist Liane Gabora argues that human creativity truly flourished once we evolved the capacity to efficiently shift between these two states of mind [2;3].

Given the population increases and cultural explosions following that shift, we can presume that creativity enhanced the survival of ancient humans. 

People often refer to individual artists as “gifted”, yet compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, the entire human species is gifted with creative potential. Each of us has a rare, innate capacity for creativity that we can use to solve personal problems with novel solutions.

Cognition

The last tool I’d like to share is our general cognition, which we can largely attribute to our big brains. Many anthropologists have debated what caused our brains to reach their contemporary size. Some argue that it was an adaptation to increased social complexity [4], while others believe that cooking mainly drove our brain growth [5]. Nevertheless, they are significantly larger than what would be expected of a primate our size.

More precisely, it is the neocortex, the outermost part of the brain, that is the most evolutionarily novel and enlarged in humans. This part of the brain deals greatly with higher-level cognition. This includes advanced reasoning, problem-solving skills, and the capacity for abstract thought. These cognitive abilities allow us to set goals, plan strategies, and adapt our behaviors in pursuit of self-improvement. Our ability to analyze past experiences and envision future outcomes enables us to make informed decisions and take intentional steps toward personal growth.

Scientists think they’ve found the genetic foundation of our large neocortices. ARHGAP11B is a human-specific gene, not found in any other mammals. When Michael Heide and his colleagues injected this gene into monkeys, they found that it enlarged their neocortex [6]. Importantly, they note how this gene emerged in humans around 5 million years ago, around our separation from the great apes. 

You are a Microcosm of Evolution

These are just tools. Once implemented, what’s happening? What are we doing when we apply these adaptations to personal growth and development? 

We are now taking on the role of natural selection, consciously choosing the direction of our own evolution. Let me posit an example.

A young man finds himself living at home, a college dropout with no real goals in mind. He spends most of his days playing video games and scrolling Instagram. But, one day he stumbles across a video of something he’d never seen before. It’s a video of someone converting an old van into a camper and traveling across the country on a wild surf trip. This excites him and plants in him a seed of motivation.

Now, he can’t help but think about the excitement of finally leaving his nest. His habit of playing video games is slowly replaced by binge-watching videos of more travelers, even people who live entirely in their vans. He starts putting himself in their shoes - in his creative imagination of course. He creates a variant of his future self in his imagination. However, he creates an anti-vision too - what his future self would look like if he continued down the path of failure, staying complacent under the roof of his parents. 

What he’s doing is playing an evolutionary game in his head. He constructs two “species” (his future selves) and lets his imagination run a simulation to see which variant leads to a more successful outcome. Defining success here is obviously different than the strict survival and reproduction definition of true natural selection, but the general framework still applies. 

These variants are competing for mental real estate in his head. The more he runs through this simulation, the more he realizes that the version of him that takes on this wild van adventure is the version that leads to a more interesting, accomplished, and experienced individual. 

Those abstract thoughts then become embodied as he starts doing research on what type of van to buy, where to buy it, and how to convert it into a livable space. Eventually, that research transforms into action and the man is gutting and renovating his future house on wheels. 

Just as a population of a species is a landscape of variation for natural selection to cherry-pick which variants propagate into the future, your future self is a landscape of possibilities and you are the selector. You are a microcosm of evolution - playing the role of natural selection and species simultaneously. 

Self-Improvement is Teachable

Self-improvement is the process of repeating this over and over again. It is the gradual accumulation of adaptive behaviors an individual makes over their lifetime, resulting in a higher-level version of themself. What’s beautiful about the human species, which almost breaks the rules of Darwinian evolution, is that this micro-evolutionary process of self-improvement does not have to end at the individual.

In traditional Darwinian thinking, changes to an individual over the course of their life are not inherited by their offspring, only what’s stored in their DNA is transferred. The classic example of how Darwinian evolution does not work is this: a giraffe stretches its neck to reach for leaves higher in the tree canopy, its neck will grow as a result, and its offspring will inherit that longer neck. 

Rather, it is the giraffe with the genetic disposition of a longer neck that will have the advantage, and pass the “long-neck genes” to their offspring. It doesn’t matter how hard they try to strive for those higher leaves during their life.

Humans can’t do this either, but because we are an extremely social species, we can transmit information culturally. So while we can’t inherit the speed our parents acquired from years of sprinting after their prey, we can be taught how to craft a broad spear or bow and arrow. 

Similarly, the lessons you’ve learned through your personal evolution can be taught to others. They can adopt the behaviors that led to your success. The traits that define your growth, whether exercise, diet, business, or mental health, can spread to other humans, like natural selection increasing the frequency of adaptive traits through the generations. This can be done ad infinitum.

If you want to improve humanity, start with yourself.

Conclusion

You’ve acquired traits like a plastic brain and high degrees of creativity and problem-solving, which can be applied to your self-improvement journey. These tools allow you to contemplate your future self, and plan strategies to achieve the ideal version of you. Your personal evolution can then influence the trajectory of the greater human population through communication and education. 

References:

[1] Sherwood, Chet C., and Aida Gomez-Robles. 2017. “Brain Plasticity and Human Evolution.” Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (1): 399-419.

[2] Gabora, Liane. 2003. “Contextual focus: A cognitive explanation for the cultural transition of the Middle/Upper Paleolithic.” In (R. Alterman & D. Hirsch, Eds.) Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 432-437), Boston MA, July 31-August 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

[3] Gabora, Liane, et al. 2013. “A computational model of two cognitive transitions underlying cultural evolution.” Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2344-2349). Held July 31 - Aug. 3, Berlin. Houston TX: Cognitive Science Society.

[4] Dunbar, R. I. M. 2003. "THE SOCIAL BRAIN: Mind, Language, and Society in Evolutionary Perspective." Annual Review of Anthropology 32 (1): 163-181.

[5] Wrangham, Richard W. 2009. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York, NY: Basic Books

Fit Fuel Song Suggestion

The Fit Fuel song suggestions are hand-picked by yours truly to elicit the motivation (and possibly aggression) needed to initiate or persist through a grueling workout. They consist of heavy, brutal guitar riffs and gruesomely guttural vocals. Additionally, I timestamp what I believe to be the best riff of the song - one that will kick your nervous system into overdrive when approaching a personal record (PR).