9. My Story

Evolutionary psychology opened the door to a new kingdom for me. It was the information I needed to make meaningful and positive change at a time when I was particularly lost. Like a perfect storm, a convergence of factors amplified the outcome. 

Most good stories have a human element, and Doug Lisle is not your typical doctor or academic. I discovered him on his podcast, Beat Your Genes, and his no-nonsense approach instantly attracted me. He’s wonderfully calm and rational, but with fiery convictions and a strong sense of justice beneath the surface. Ever confident, with little concern for what others think of him, he’ll nail down the truth with a hammer that shatters political correctness and any delicate sensibilities you may hold. At the same time, he manages to be immensely kind and compassionate with those he cares about. Once I discovered he was a libertarian who appreciates Ayn Rand, my unconventional childhood hero, my reverence was complete. 

I quickly listened to all three hundred episodes and bulldozed my way through his recommended reading list. Since then we have spoken on the phone twice, and we periodically exchange emails. Last year I braved a total of twelve hours of highway driving—terrifying for me—to hear him lecture. Getting to meet him in person was an extraordinary experience. According to evolutionary psychology, we value people commensurate with the resources they are able to provide, and quality information is certainly meaningful in the context of survival and reproduction. 

As a practicing evolutionary psychologist, Dr. Lisle describes his job as “finding the bug in the software.” The goal is not to create a therapeutic relationship but to locate and address the problem within a session or two. Dr. Lisle does not tolerate a “victim mentality.” It’s often a manipulative resource acquisition tactic, as is self-injury, crying, or any such other displays. You can—and should—ask for help, but realize that the majority of work is going to be on you. As someone who is always willing to put in the effort, I immediately recoiled at the thought of manipulating others into providing resources. The relief that came from putting down the victim mentality surprised me. 

In his sessions there is no delving into the past; emotions are primarily reflective of current conditions. He’ll take you through life’s major domains—romantic partners, friends and family, and trading partners (work), and look for mismatch problems, where your evolved design and the environment are at odds. He stresses that life is by nature competitive, and failing to live up to your competitive abilities can be disturbing. 

Your personality reflects psychological differences, specifically how you measure on each continuum for the traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The further out you fall, the more prone you are to distortion, which will affect your assessment of reality. Understanding that I’m extremely low in emotional stability (or high neuroticism) while simultaneously high in conscientiousness and low in extraversion has phenomenal explanatory power. The point is that I, like the majority of people, do not have any type of disorder. The presentation is simply normal personality variance, however extreme. Any distress or depression does not indicate mechanism failure; rather, it is a signal that something needs to change. In this case, taking psychotropic medication would be a surefire way to disrupt and disturb the brain’s homeostatic systems.

Understanding that personality is genetic and that I cannot change it in any fundamental way was immensely relieving. For my entire life I’ve tried to force myself into becoming more stable. Apparently, my failure was due to the static nature of the design, not a lack of willpower. Accepting my downfalls has freed up time and energy. Learning that each extreme of a personality trait has both costs and benefits was also valuable. Instability is about amplification, positive and negative. It generates passion, which has often served me well. 

You cannot change your genes, but you can change your environment to best suit them. For example, instability responds favorably to structure. The brain has happiness circuits that certain input activates; it’s your job to figure out what that input is. This doesn’t change you, but it changes the nature of your experience.

Similarly, you cannot change other people; they have their own genetic predispositions, their own personality traits and distortions, and their own cost-benefit analysis that cause them to act the way they do. Accepting people for who they are—not who you want them to be—is also profoundly liberating. It makes for much smoother interactions, often changing the relationship dynamic as a whole. 

Because even more important than our environment is the esteem we receive from people of value. This is how we are designed, because it’s advantageous to have high-quality individuals on our side. Therefore, this is—should be—one of the greatest predictors of happiness. There’s the esteem from others, and then there is self-esteem. As Dr. Lisle says, self-esteem is your internal assessment of the efforts you put forth. There has never been anything wrong with my self-esteem. 

I was able to restructure my life, practically and psychologically, by keeping in mind the system’s design. It functions optimally when consuming primarily plant-based food, engaging in decent amounts of physical activity, and staying away from deleterious supernormal stimuli. We are highly social creatures, and even as an introvert, I need to seek out meaningful connections to be happy. I no longer berate myself for how I feel; I can always trace it back to its evolutionary origins, from where I can see the design’s advantages. I work with my personality by creating an environment in which it’s comfortable. If I need help, I ask for it, but keep in mind that others have a right to their own agendas. 

Having accurate information about how and why we act and feel leads to the reduction of error in decision-making, which greatly reduces vulnerability. Evolutionary psychology provides the context to understand both the larger picture and the details. It’s the ultimate why for life, or, as Dr. Lisle says, it’s the skeleton key to every lock. 

The amount of suffering in the world was always a big question and concern to me. It’s no longer such a question once you understand that the design’s only purpose is gene reproduction. Individual bodies are merely temporary hosts, with feelings that indicate the current level of our survival and reproductive success. Nature supports suffering because it’s advantageous (where it can motivate an improvement to fitness) or irrelevant (where it has no direct effect on fitness). In this sense, there’s nothing limiting it. 

Hearing Dr. Lisle call life “inherently tragic” or leading expert Richard Dawkins say that natural selection is a “horrific process” felt vindicating. I have never understood why people claim that life is intrinsically good—indeed, nature is completely value-neutral. As Dr. Lisle explained, the value judgment we superimpose is a built-in, necessary motivational feature of the organism. It’s conducive to survival and reproduction that we have a baseline feeling of mild positivity. It’s a tool, or a strategy, not necessarily a reflection of reality. As with other traits, there is individual variation in this sensation, and this will dictate the type of beliefs you hold or story you tell. 

The stories begin at the basic level. For example, you tell yourself why you chose apples over cookies or decided to go for a walk. However, the decisions you make are the result of mostly unconscious, highly complex cost-benefit analyses. For reasons of mental space, you simply don’t get enough information in consciousness to really know why, and so you often make it up. Sometimes it’s in your best interest to understand reality as accurately as possible, and sometimes it’s more advantageous to protect your status within the village, maintain a self-concept, or adhere to the psychological distortions that have evolved because they are adaptive. 

On the other end of the spectrum are the stories you tell yourself about the larger picture of life. What’s your purpose? What holds meaning? What do you value? Cognitive psychology, which overlaps with evolutionary psychology, speaks of reframing your perspective. The facts don’t change, but the way you reframe or interpret the information can change the experience to some degree. There’s immense room for creativity here, despite reality’s constraints. Every day I appreciate how much our ability to use language has given us the capacity to tell and reframe our stories. 

However, not everyone sees the appeal in evolutionary psychology. Some dislike the idea that we are simply animals governed by our genes. Others dislike that when it comes to survival and reproduction, there is objective superiority—it’s often a matter of better and worse, not simply different. The language uses terms such as “mate value” and “genetic quality”; the intelligent and attractive have fewer mutations, and this is tied to sexual attraction. Furthermore, the young have greater reproductive potential, leading to an age bias. Innate psychological differences between men and women are also repelling to some. The fact that it would be more advantageous for men than women to stray from their pair bond dips into muddy moral waters. Behavioral genetics shows that we are not blank slates. It can be hard to accept that not all change is possible and our potential is not equal. It’s also become associated with eugenics, and the topic of genetic racial differences is equally explosive. At the end of the day, we reject a lot of the information because it threatens status.

I personally find comfort and structure in sticking as close to the facts as possible and fear mistakes resulting from straying too far. In an experience generally consisting of too many emotions, I appreciate the cold simplicity that life is at the core about the gene’s reach across time. Evolution has made us all the same, but genetic variation has made us all different. In this sense, the story is all yours. 

I’ll end with a quote by renowned evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, which nicely sums up how I feel about this field of study: 

“I got hooked on the idea that human behavior could be best understood by considering the challenges of survival and reproduction that our pre-historic ancestors faced. The paradigm shift seemed uniquely satisfying and complete—as if I had found my intellectual home once and for all, and nothing could ever blow my mind in the same way again.”