International security

Our Hands Hold Weapons That Our Minds Can’t Comprehend

The recent U.S. assassination of an Iranian general in Iraq has attracted much media attention. Arguments about it abound, and the attack will surely have international political and security implications. But reflecting on it also offers a glimpse into an important psychological phenomenon: How the capacity of our technology is outpacing, and subverting, the ancient designs of our biological brain.

In other words, a gap now exists between the tasks our brain has evolved to manage and the tasks it is currently asked to manage. This general idea was developed and articulated in the 1990s by the emerging sub-discipline of evolutionary psychology. The general argument, as described by evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, goes like this:

“Natural selection, the process that designed our brain, takes a long time… The environment that humans—and, therefore, human minds—evolved in was very different from our modern environment. Our ancestors spent well over 99 perent of our species' evolutionary history living in hunter-gatherer societies… for 10 million years, natural selection slowly sculpted the human brain, favoring circuitry that was good at solving the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors…