Mankind achieved civilization by developing and learning to follow rules that often forbade to do what his instincts demanded…Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to become so. Man became intelligent because there was tradition (habits) between instinct and reason…
Friedrich Hayek
The Fatal Conceit, 1988
Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, or the integrity of our public officials.
Robert Kennedy
Speech, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968
Below is a slightly adapted excerpt from The Well-Tuned Brain: Neuroscience and the Life Well Lived by Peter C. Whybrow, MD.
It is abundantly clear that humanity must shift its modern view of progress and relationship with nature if we are to have any hope of living sustainably on this planet. But in completing the jigsaw essential to reimagining progress, and regaining balance within the natural ecology, it is necessary to understand the roles that biological and cultural evolution play. In our social evolution as a species, biology and culture run on parallel tracks, but they do so at different speeds. Thus biology, quickly and disruptively, can be outpaced by cultural change. As I have detailed in The Well-Tuned Brain, a significant number of the challenges that we face in the developed world are rooted in this mismatch.
To better grasp how this puzzle comes together, I take you back to a primary source of knowledge about evolution. In the Pacific Ocean, straddling the Equator approximately 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador is found the Galápagos archipelago. This remote collection of volcanic islands, as Charles Darwin described them when he traveled there, is “a little world within itself.”
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