Ask A Genius 1458: Human Strengths and Weaknesses: Evolutionary Mismatches and Cognitive Limits
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/07/15
Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore the structural strengths and deep flaws of human beings. They highlight our endurance, cognitive flexibility, and evolutionary advantages, while exposing vulnerabilities like death, cognitive biases, adrenal overload, and small-data thinking. These mismatches between ancient biology and modern life explain many of humanity’s systemic struggles.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Structurally, what do you think are the most prominent features—and the most significant bugs—in human beings?
Rick Rosner: So, in our current situation, one of the most significant limitations is that we are small-data oriented. We evolved to focus on small, local patterns.
At the same time, we are the planet’s first true generalists. We dominate because our thinking is highly flexible. What we can think about is less tied to what we physically are as animals. We can imagine, reason about, and manipulate ideas far beyond our biological needs.
That cognitive flexibility has led to technological dominance. And it has made life much easier for humans, to the extent that there are now around 8.2 billion of us. As I said, almost everyone today reaches reproductive age. We no longer live in a brutal environment that kills off most people before they can reproduce.
Many people now live well into their so-called “decline years”—the post-reproductive phase—before dying. But there is a limit to what our brains can do. And we are now in the process of building our successors—machines and systems that will be far better at big data analysis than we are.
That’s one of the most significant weaknesses of being human. The biggest strength is also what I just mentioned: our capacity for abstract thinking. We can think about almost anything—unlike, say, dogs.
Dogs can think about dog-related things, but they are entirely overwhelmed by most of what happens in the human world around them. What do you think are the most significant human strengths and drawbacks?
Jacobsen: In terms of strengths, the physical adaptations that support upright walking are the flat, broad heel for standing and balancing upright.
Additionally, forward-facing binocular vision aids in depth perception. Our large frontal lobes play a crucial role in advanced decision-making and planning.
And then there is our endurance-oriented physique. If you break it down biomechanically, we are built for long-distance movement.
Predators like cheetahs or horses can go faster than we can, but only over short distances. In an ancestral environment, a human on foot could eventually outlast many animals through sheer endurance.
So if a human were being chased by something like a hyena, over time it would exhaust itself and either collapse or become much more vulnerable to retaliation or evasion. Then there is the size and function of our brains. Beyond neuroplasticity, we also retain the ability to generate new neurons in the hippocampus, a key area for memory formation and learning.
Rosner: I would add another major weakness: death. We spend our entire lives accumulating experience, building models of the world, and making sense of reality. And some of us become very skilled at understanding it.
But then, all of that experience and understanding is just… gone. Yes, we have ways of recording information—such as books and digital media—but it is not the same as preserving the lived cognitive model.
Jacobsen: That may be nature’s way of keeping the essential structure of a person, but compressing it, like a ZIP file.
You could think of DNA and epigenetics—more specifically, the genome and epigenome interacting with the environment—as a kind of compressed file of potential. It contains what the organism could become, given certain conditions over time.
And since the universe is in a general state of thermodynamic decay, though we are still in an energetically favourable state right now—
Rosner: How do you mean “decay”?
Jacobsen: In the entropic sense. The mainstream cosmological models project a gradual increase in entropy, leading eventually to what is often referred to as the “heat death” of the universe.
Rosner: Yeah, but that is not going to happen anytime soon.
Jacobsen: Right. Not likely in our foreseeable future.
Rosner: Even under the standard Big Bang model, the heat death scenario would not happen for billions of years.
Jacobsen: Exactly.
Rosner: But entropy is still increasing. Locally, entropy is not growing in the way we might expect; it’s almost as if the universe is a massive organism, replicated many times over, simply existing.
Jacobsen: In terms of local order in the universe, it almost seems wastefully structured—there is far more order than what is strictly needed. Packaging that kind of order into the genome and epigenome makes for an incredibly efficient way of distributing complex potential. It allows for incremental improvements on systems that are nearly—but never entirely—perfect. I mean structurally, like DNA.
Rosner: Also, yes—evolution is inefficient. It lacks a program or a goal. It only adapts things to be just good enough to survive and reproduce. If evolution has an agenda at all, it’s to be as impartial and mechanistic as possible. Its only “goal,” if you can call it that, is to exploit every exploitable niche in the environment.
Jacobsen: Another major weakness is cognitive vulnerability. There are whole categories of weaknesses tied to how the brain works. As we discussed earlier, the brain can be easily fooled.
Rosner: In some areas—especially sexual behaviour—the brain seems to have evolved to fool itself. It drives desire, not necessarily rational evaluation. That can be both a strength and a weakness. One of the strengths, oddly enough, is that we reproduce easily. We generate many offspring. That counts for something evolutionarily.
Jacobsen: That’s true. Here’s another weakness: our adrenal glands are way too large. So we burn out.
Rosner: That makes sense. We evolved with that kind of acute stress response because we lived on the savannah with lifespans averaging under 40 years. We needed to be able to react quickly to threats—get away from predators, avoid danger.
But today, we are poorly adapted to modern life. For example, when I bid on something on eBay, I always bid in the last five seconds, because it’s dumb not to; you don’t want to give people a chance to outbid you. In the final thirty seconds, my heart starts pounding. It is absurd. I am not running from a lion. I am not chasing a hyena. I am just clicking a button.
So, I agree—there are numerous mismatches between the environments in which we evolved and the modern world we now inhabit. And those mismatches—those misalignments-can debilitate us.
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