Misused and misunderstood on Instagram, the language we use around evolution continues to shape modern myths about what humans are supposedly “designed” to do. Photo credit: Vitaly Gariev via Unsplash
“To” and “for” are perhaps the prepositions most commonly used after the term “evolution”. When describing how our species came to be, one frequently encounters a very purpose-driven account of evolution. Humans evolved our physiology to walk bipedally, or opposable thumbs for the use of tools. In these terms, our body parts, and the features of every living species, have a very express purpose.
When describing how our species came to be, one frequently encounters a very purpose-driven account of evolution.
Framing evolution in terms of evolving “for” or “to” is extremely ironic, given that the development of the theory of evolution by natural selection was one of the most instrumental nails in the coffin of creationism. Creationism, which posits that all life was created with a God-given form and purpose, seems to be little at odds with such a deterministic account of evolution.
The prepositions “to” and “for” present evolution as a process of pigeonholing. These terms imply that our genes carry more than just the basis of protein synthesis, but instead a sort of knowledge or set of instructions that drive behaviour irrespective of the material world in which we live.
However, as anthropologist Tim Ingold raises, our genes may be capable of directing protein synthesis, but they cannot know what will exist in one’s environment before they are brought up in it. Evolution is therefore better understood as occurring “alongside”, “through”, or “within” certain environmental conditions and behaviours, than evolving to a given end.
Evolution is therefore better understood as occurring “alongside”, “through”, or “within” certain environmental conditions and behaviours, than evolving to a given end.
Shirtless men, vegans, and Instagram pseudoscience
Evolutionary theory is regularly, and poorly, appropriated by ill-qualified online nutritionists and dieticians. Modern media, from television to short-form content on Instagram, frequently calls upon “evolution” and “nature” as a means of establishing how exactly we should be eating. Many have likely seen topless men on Instagram reels eating steak, eggs, avocado and occasionally some other fruit off a wooden chopping board and claiming this is how humans are supposed to eat, that this diet is evolutionarily consistent. What this typically looks like is the isolation a few portions of human anatomy, then arguing that this must show a human design for the digestion of something, at the expense of all else.
Many have likely seen topless men on Instagram reels eating steak, eggs, avocado and occasionally some other fruit off a wooden chopping board and claiming this is how humans are supposed to eat…
An Instagram reel posted by a carnivore health influencer with a quarter of a million followers asserts ‘we are not designed to eat multiple times a day’. Another reel posted by an account with two-million followers uses an audio stating that, ‘We have the perfect gut for digesting meat’. Fruitarians and vegans seem equally capable of misusing biology. One influencer with just under half-a-million followers argues our senses must preclude us from eating meat, ‘Raw rice, wheat, raw potato doesn’t excite the human senses does it? No sweet smell, no vibrant colour, no juicy texture. These foods were never meant to appeal to us as frugivores’, and a smaller account uses a caption to write ‘Did you know humans are biologically designed to be frugivores?…Our teeth, digestion, and instincts all point toward fruit’.
A major flaw in this thinking is that an adaptation toward an improved digestion of one food must dictate an adaptation away from all else. However, this conclusion is simply not an inevitable one. A low pH stomach acid may well confer an ability to digest meat, but since it does not render humans unable to digest fruits, tubers, or nuts, one cannot claim that we have a carnivorous stomach, but precisely an omnivorous stomach.
In addition, individual body parts cannot be isolated to make species wide comments. Frequently, dietary influencers base their entire dietary approach on a select few body parts, acting as if the form of our teeth, stomach, and intestines alone can “reveal” what it is that humans are supposed to be eating. However, as Stephen Jay Gould shows through the notion of “mosaic evolution”, the bodies of all species are mosaics, or records, of countless evolutionary pathways, some expanded upon, others not. Species are not newly designed at points of speciation but the continuation of evolutionary pathways that are millions of years old. Few would claim that our appendixes reveal that humans are meant to subsist heavily off leafy greens, but many have no problem with making the same claim about our intestines or jaws.
Moreover, humans have never eaten a consistent array of products, and even if they had at the very origin of our species, it would be impossible to recreate today. Those who think they are consuming a “natural” diet commonly fall back on meat, fruit, and perhaps some nuts and seeds. What these health influencers may not wish to reckon with, however, is that everything in supermarkets today is the product of tens of thousands of years of selective breeding, global translocation, and in the modern day, direct gene editing.
…everything in supermarkets today is the product of tens of thousands of years of selective breeding, global translocation, and in the modern day, direct gene editing.
The steak-egg-avocado chopping board, a common sight on alternative health Instagram, is a fitting example of the myth of nature in current diet culture. No one had eaten an avocado outside of the Americas until the latter half of the second millennium, the cow was only domesticated and came to resemble its current form less than fifteen thousand years ago, and the chickens that lay these eggs were only domesticated within the last four thousand years. There is little of the “ancestral” or “primal” to be found here. To consume this combination, of out of season fruit and domesticated animal products extracted from other corners of the globe, is the very essence of modernity.
Conclusions: A better terminology
What, then, is the solution to our flawed understanding of the evolutionary process? I believe it is fundamentally a semantic one. We must cease to explain in evolution in terms of “to” or “for”, but instead “alongside”, “with” or “through”. Recognising the role of any activity or ecology in our evolutionary history cannot be used to declare that humans evolved to do anything in the present day. Our evolutionary accounts must be historical, not used to create commandments for modern living.
This remedy can be applied to any evolutionary discussion. We can speak of human cognitive or dexterous capacity evolving alongside tool use, we can speak of human linguistic capacity evolving within large social groups, and we could even claim human intelligence evolved through both of these processes. That does not equate, however, to us evolving to use tools or verbal communication, or evolving for a particular way of life. At best, we can say that evolution through these processes has given many contemporary humans the capacity to do both.
In short, we did not evolve to do anything, but evolved bodies are capable of an awful lot.
In short, we did not evolve to do anything, but evolved bodies are capable of an awful lot. Decisions on diet and lifestyle should be made according to genuine assessments of academic research, not based on anecdote, fetishised portrayals of “nature”, and isolating body parts, as if that can serve as proof for the design of more complex systems. Genes do not “know” how our ancestors lived, and they are certainly not compelling us to hunt a mammoth or pick berries off a bush like we are truly “supposed to”. As ever, our genes contribute to the construction of bodies and minds that will attempt to thrive and optimise in the situation they find themselves in.
