As you choose how you will interact at home this evening with the ones you love, or at the gym, restaurant, or singles bar with ones you would like to love, it’s good to know that your brain allows you to be so much more than the blockheaded tool of reproduction that evolution built. Since at least the Enlightenment or maybe the Industrial Revolution, we are unbound by the laws of evolution, free from the meddlings of Darwin in our brains. Instead of being beholden to our animal instincts, we are rational beings with an evolved purpose that goes beyond the need to procreate (even if we can’t exactly articulate what this purpose might be). But are you really? Are you really beyond evolution?
We could strip the northern forests of pulp for the paper that it would take to describe all the studies showing that men and women are still doomed to act according to our evolutionary impulses. For example, take a paper published in Nature in 2000. It starts by naming past studies that have shown that tall men have an advantage over short men in academics, health, income, and social status. Really, that should be enough on its own: why should height influence your career success? But the study goes even further, showing that tall men have more children. Even in this enlightened age in which we live, being tall gives men a basic evolutionary advantage.
As highly evolved as you undoubtedly are, there’s still room to grow.
What to Talk About on a First Date
The behavioral economist Dan Ariely showed that people on first dates go about their conversations all wrong. We tend to speak in generalities, talking about the weather or food—topics that guarantee a vanilla sort of agreement. But according to Ariely, sticking to safe topics like hobbies and jobs makes a middle-of-the-road date, quickly forgotten. When Ariely forced daters to choose from a list of pointed questions like “Have you ever broken someone’s heart?” and “How many romantic partners have you had?” both the askers and the answerers rated the conversations as more enjoyable. Settling into topics that guarantee equilibrium is safe. But shaking it up is the path to a good date.