A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

Authority is not to be used as a bludgeon to shut down the exchange of ideas. Bob Trivers, evolutionary biologist par excellence, and our mentor in college, once advised us to seek positions in which we taught undergraduates. His reasoning was this: Undergrads do not yet know the field, and so are likely to ask questions that you aren’t expecting,

Make food less ubiquitous in your own world. For most of history, human societies have tempered against boom and bust with ritual feast and long periods of frugality. But recently, agriculture has led to an increase in the capacity to hold food in reserve, to save for a rainy day—or, more likely, to save for an extended drought, or a harvest failur

Do not helicopter or snowplow your children. Let them make their own mistakes. At the same time, make clear rules. One that we set was this: “You are allowed to break an arm, a leg, a wrist, an ankle. But you may not break your skull or your back, or impair your senses.” This allowed our children a sense of what kinds of risks were acceptable to ta

When times are good, people should be reluctant to challenge ancestral wisdom—their culture. In other words, they should be comparatively conservative. When things aren’t going well, people should be prone to endure the risks that come with change. They should be comparatively progressive—liberal, if you will.

Move your body every day.21 Take walks. Mix it up—don’t do the same thing all the time, and don’t move your body in the same way whenever you move it. And, at least sometimes, move intensely, and move outside, where the stakes are higher.

Technological frontiers are moments when innovation allows a human population to make more, or do more, or grow more, than they did before the innovation occurred.

Encourage active engagement with the physical world. Do this mostly by modeling it, but also by making opportunities and, to some extent, toys that make it easy and fun, available. Allow mistakes. Expect accidents, falls, minor injuries. Be prepared for the possibility of larger injuries. Remember that people do not learn exclusively from being tol

The sacred is the reification of received religious wisdom, the sine qua non of a particular religious tradition, that which has stood the test of time and proved valuable enough to the ancestors to be passed on as holy. That which is sacred has a low mutation rate—it changes infrequently—and is highly resistant to change; it is built for a static

There is an important parable to be invoked here, Chesterton’s fence, named for turn-of-the-20th-century philosopher and writer G. K. Chesterton, the man who first described it. Chesterton’s fence urges caution in making changes to systems that are not fully understood; it is thus a concept related to the Precautionary principle. Chesterton wrote t