Darwin's Subterranean World

Evolution, Mind, and Mating Intelligence

10 Ways Our Lives Are out of Whack

Is modern life like living in a zoo? One expert believes it might be.

In 2012, after being home to various classes of primates for more than 100 years, the renowned Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo closed down. The zoo's current primate inhabitants reside in spaces designed to match their natural habitats. The shift is part of a broader movement in zoos around the world, based on the highly reasonable idea that all species have evolved to fit particular environmental conditions. Such features that typify an organism's ancestral conditions characterize its Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness or EEA (Bowlby, 1969). Housing a monkey, whose ancestors go millions of years deep into specific African jungle environments, in a small cage in the zoo of a large city was simply evolutionarily misguidedand arguably cruel.

Animals essentially need to have many key features of their ancestral environments in their current conditionsbecause their bodies and minds are the result of evolutionary processes that took place under these specific conditions. In an evolutionarily novel and unnatural environment, solid research shows that various primates will demonstrate signs of physiological and psychological stress (see Harlow & Suomi, 1971).

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This idea critically relates to the nature of being human in modern times. If you live in a modern, Westernized part of the world—as you almost certainly do if you’re reading this—then you are, in many ways, metaphorically living in a cage in a zoo.

A key principle of evolutionary psychology (see Geher, 2014) is the notion that modern humans in Westernized societies experience important instances of evolutionary mismatch. Understanding this is essential in understanding much of what it means to be human today.

Here is a list of 10 ways that modern, Westernized humans like you and me are, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, living “in the Monkey House”:













This list is certainly incomplete and, at best, preliminarythere are undoubtedly many other worthy contenders. That said, I’m hopeful that the list can help open the eyes of those interested in human psychology to the importance of evolutionary mismatch in understanding all aspects of who we are.

Welcome to the Monkey House.


References: Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss. Vol. 1. Attachment. New York: Basic Books.


Harlow, H.F., & Suomi, S. J. (1971). Social Recovery by Isolation-Reared Monkeys, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America,  68,1534-1538.

Vonnegut, K. (1968). Welcome to the Monkey House. New York: Delacorte Press.

This blog is cross-posted at evostudies.org.



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