The problem is, evolution generally doesn’t build in large buffers. Human brains are “pretty functional” in the sense that they just barely managed to be adequate to the challenges that we faced in the ancestral environment. Now that we are radically changing that environment, the baseline “barely adequate” doesn’t have to degrade very much at all before we have concerningly high rates of stuff like obesity, depression, schizophrenia, etc.
(There are other larger problems, but this is a first gentle gesture in the direction of “I think your point is sound but still not reassuring.” I agree you could productively make a list of proxies that are still working versus ones that aren’t holding up in the modern era.)
The problem is, evolution generally doesn’t build in large buffers. Human brains are “pretty functional” in the sense that they just barely managed to be adequate to the challenges that we faced in the ancestral environment. Now that we are radically changing that environment, the baseline “barely adequate” doesn’t have to degrade very much at all before we have concerningly high rates of stuff like obesity, depression, schizophrenia, etc.
(There are other larger problems, but this is a first gentle gesture in the direction of “I think your point is sound but still not reassuring.” I agree you could productively make a list of proxies that are still working versus ones that aren’t holding up in the modern era.)