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dbspintoday at 8:30 AM0 repliesview on HN

Agree with most of this, it's well articulated and captures how we react to change.

However - 'Humans species perhaps 300,000 years, we are essentially the same' is an enormous misconception. That fact that we lack gross anatomical changes during this period, ignores everything we now know about punctuated equilibrium and rapid evolution. It's highly probably we've had an enormous number of evolved psychological changes during the last few hundred, and even tens of thousands of years. Changes that relate to our capacity to live in large groups, adapt to urban environments, resist disease and so on. We know that's the case simply because acute pandemics become epidemics through herd immunity, and through the acquisition of lactose tolerance etc.

It seems highly unlikely that adaptations stop there. Altering the environment (in the last 10K years that means the built environment) alters the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. It seems likely that we've essentially domesticated out much of our propensity for violence and increased our capacity for mood regulation.

Obviously it's incredibly tricky to pair these specific behavioural changes to genetic changes -> protein synthesis -> behaviour. Bearing in mind though we're only 20 years out from the first study to link allele variant to behaviour (the COMT Val/Met polymorphism), and the potential controversy around such research, this shouldn't be surprising.