Two subtle fears lurk beneath the surface of many modern people’s lives. One is the feeling that humanity no longer needs to evolve. Problems that evolution once solved- finding food, escaping predators, surviving disease – are now being tackled by technical devices, drugs, and soon algorithms. The other is that despite the supposedly most comfortable age in history, each day feels strangely superficial and passes far too quickly. It’s as if the summer of childhood has extended over the entire season, while the summer of adulthood is barely remembered. 

These two phenomena are often discussed separately – one as an issue of evolutionary biology, the other as an issue of cognitive psychology. They may have a common mechanism, however: technology increasingly takes friction out of human life, Effort and variety and evolutionary change, as well as rich subjective experience – such as time – do indeed depend on these elements. The situation is undoubtedly so closely intertwined that we have forgotten both pure optimism and pure caution.

While these questions are universal, they could become even more important for developing Asian and aging European societies as AI increasingly finds its way into education, healthcare, politics, and everyday decision-making.

Darwin’s insight was never that the strongest organism survives. Rather, it was that the individual best adapted to the given environment survives better, reproduces, and passes that adaptability on to the next generation. A finch with a beak slightly better suited to cracking a particular type of fruit lives longer than its neighbor, not because it is superior, but because the environment rewards that particular trait by removing that environmental pressure by altering food, eradicating predators, and curing disease. If this trait loses its importance, natural selection is left with no other choice. In fact, a significant part of modern civilization has done just that with the human gene pool. Vaccines, antibiotics, surgery, agriculture, and social security systems have systematically reduced the differences in mortality rates that once determined who can reproduce successfully. Biologists call this weakening of selective pressure “relaxed selection”. 

This is not an unusual idea. Geneticists who study the human genome have been arguing that improvements in the environment and culture have eased natural selection on humankind. As a result, mutations that would have previously been eliminated could survive or even spread. Humanity has so cleverly protected itself from environmental stresses that it now needs targeted medical and technological interventions to combat the “harmful” side effects of this “relaxed selection”. In other words, we find ourselves in a kind of vicious circle in which the tools that once freed us from........

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