The Evolutionary Origins of Addiction

Millions of years of evolution separate us from our closest genetic relatives in the animal kingdom: the Bonobo and Chimpanzee. Roughly 6 million years to be a bit more exact. In the intervening years between that original splitting of chimpanzees from our hominid ancestors to first anatomically modern human ancestor, hominids have not varied much in general about how they organized socially.

That is true as well for anatomically modern humans up until the agricultural revolution and the development of societies approximately 10,000 years ago. And so even still, in the modern culture we find ourselves in, of the internet, mega-cities, mass politics and all other features of modern life; we still find hardwired remnants of our evolutionary ancestry, like Dunbar’s number, driving us and adapting to the modern world as opposed to the other way around.

I write this opening paragraph as a broadside salvo against any and all who would hold and promulgate the postulation that human beings are a tabula rasa. Despite this idea being obviously wrong, based on the preponderance of evidence, many still hold prominent positions in academia, journalism, government, etc. who would promote this abject falsehood. This is the especially pernicious idea at the heart of much ill, woe and disease; particularly in our deranged culture war. It is predominantly a malady of the left, but it can also manifest itself on the libertarian and religious right. In either case, it is still a fallacy that many sand castles in the sky are built on.

Now that we have that cleared out of the way, we can begin to examine the subject of this article without any unnecessary swill polluting the intellectual wellspring of our inquiry. A final caveat: I am by no means a biological determinist, as will be made more clear later in this article. However it does seems clear to me, and hopefully to you as well dear reader, that in order to genuinely solve a problem one has to truly understand the nature of the problem. In this light, when it comes to solving an intractable and wicked problem like human addiction, one had better work hard to get the questions right that will produce efficacious answers. In order to do that, we have to go to the root of the problem: human nature.

Because human beings are subject to and products of the forces of evolution just like every other biological entity walking the face of the planet, I contend it is critical to examine the empirical principles of this meta-reality in relationship to the maladies of our modern society if we want to do some serious problem solving instead of mental masturbation. So, let us begin.

As we’ve already established, human beings evolved from our hominid (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hominid ) ancestors. The vast majority of our hominid ancestors lived in ‘hunter-gatherer’ bands of approximately 100-300 people that would occasionally break off into smaller, kinship oriented groups of perhaps 10-50 due to various seasonal requirements associated with that lifestyle. Most anthropologists agree that some contemporary societies still closely align with the way the majority of humanity evolved, such as the San of South Africa and Botswana and the indigenous population of New Guinea (https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7fi3ay). With these populations in mind it is critical to contrast the time scale that the way they lived was the social reality, or something approximating it, for nearly all of humanity. Compare this to the temporal blink of an eye that we’ve been living with large scale agriculture, let alone modern society. The rest of my thesis rests on this basis, if it wasn’t abundantly clear already. The maladies of human beings, particularly the ones attributed to lifestyle choices like addiction, can be best understood in terms of how congruent or not an individual is living with the evolved vectors of thriving for human beings.

How does this relate to addiction? I would define addiction as the compulsive repetition of behavior that is detrimental to one’s thriving and highest potential organized around a particular or multiple drugs of choice. When I say drug, I want to widen the scope of the definition on this from the colloquial sense of a drug (heroin, Percocet, weed, etc.) to a stimuli that provides a neurochemical intoxication that diminishes or eliminates an individuals ability to exercise agency and promulgates self-defeating or harming behavior. I am expanding this definition in keeping with the theme of this article. Our evolutionary hardwiring has us suited to the hunter-gatherer bands lifestyle and the stimuli they would’ve encountered over millions of years. In modern society we are buffeted with super-stimuli; porn, alcohol, workaholism, political power, cocaine, fast-food, etc. All of these phenomena reenact those present in our evolutionary past that were beneficial to survival and thriving. However, they’re now superabundant, that is, available to degrees quantitatively and qualitatively vastly increased. This facilitates addiction to ‘drugs’ that are not normally perceived as such, though in fact they are, because they mimic and hijack evolutionary drives beyond the threshold of evolutionary consistent optimization.

To make this concept clearer with a simple example; fast-food with its salt, sugar and carbohydrate content mimics a rare found meal on the savannah of our evolution. Yet it is ubiquitously available in super-abundance in nearly every town as long as one has the fiat currency to trade for it. Hence millions of people, particularly in America, are overweight.

Critical understanding addiction from an evolutionary perspective we need in addition to the concept of super-stimuli to add the concept of trauma. Life is and has always been varying degrees stressful, dangerous, and tough. Human beings, as with many other animals are equipped to handle this emotionally through (that’s right, you guessed it) millions of years of evolution via means such as grooming, socialization, spirituality, etc. However, modernity often strips us of the innate ability to process the often difficult negative emotions that come about through life’s naturally stressful occurrences and malevolent human action (abuse). When this occurs, a result of trauma, a reaction-formationoccurs. An individuals personality (thoughts, feelings, behaviors, etc.) forms around the psycho-emotional wound that has not been able to heal and so they often exhibit all manner of phobias, maladies and personality quirks. At the root of the false personality is a drive that is promulgated by the original wound, the drive serves to protect the individual from the same trauma, whether that person is thriving or not (more often not). It doesn’t matter, as long as the previous trauma does not occur again.

We can know the difference between trauma and stress that is healthily incorporated, resolved and adapted to by the presence or absence of a reaction formation. Additionally, trauma is more likely to occur around vectors or domains critical to developmental thriving of an individual that are evolutionary consistent. An incomplete list of such domains would be respect for task-oriented competency, connection and positive regard within a tribe, healthy kinship relationships, spiritual vibrancy, evolutionary consistent food & shelter, communal psychological wellbeing, shared meta-narratives and so on.

Notice (this is critical) that these vectors are all neutral. One could just as easily imagine these vectors being fulfilled towards horrendous ends. A gruesome example would be the respect for competency a King’s executioner was lauded for lopping off the noggins of enemies to the crown in 16^th century England. It is critical in our enlightened modern age to consciously fulfill these vectors with genuinely noble and laudable means towards optimally beneficial ends (for oneself and society at large). But these vectors provide the parameters, the left & right limits of what will and won’t bring you overall well-being. And indeed, when an individual experiences abuse within these domains that significantly impacts their ability to be in congruence with them detrimentally without a long-term resolution, by definition, trauma is very likely occur.

With this ground work further laid, it is important to articulate another critical piece of the addiction puzzle. This is the concept of individuation (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/individuation). This is a concept promulgated by Carl Jung, the 20^th century’s most eminent psychologist (in my very humble opinion). This concept essentially demarcates the process by which over a lifetime a person separates from society, amalgamates and develops values, behaviors, emotions, thoughts from themselves and society into an entirely differentiated, unique person. A mytho-poetic example of this would be Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.

The concept of individuation is critical to understanding the root cause of addiction because it is the fundamentally human quality that serves as the conscience of the addict, the purveyor of cognitive dissonance and thus deep psychological and emotional pain that in turn the addict chooses to numb with their drug(s) of choice. Without the concept of individuation (the promise of a person who could be traumatized, a potential stolen, a life thrown asunder and unlived) there would be no such thing as recovery and the addict would simply wallow in whatever self-destructive behavior most appealing until they died because they’d have nothing to aim for and contrast their current condition to. Indeed, even for healthy people there would be no development at all beyond an animal level (E.G. a horse) if there wasn’t an innate drive within human beings within one’s own particular structure that pulls a person forward to develop into a fully fledged human being. In other words, an individual.

So, with all these basic building blocks laid before us, we can now piece together a theory of addiction from an evolutionary lens. Due to the enormous mismatch between our evolved vectors for thriving, the ever-present possibility of traumatization and super stimuli rife in modern society human beings become addicted to various phenomena in their environment. The pain that this causes them is due to further degrading their ability live in harmony with vectors of thriving, which is a prerequisite to undertake the journey of individuation which is what it means to truly be human.

Because this dynamic is all too often replete throughout many societies and subcultures, it is seen as normal to be addicted to something, in some way. Therefore, it is often seen as strange to individuate. Indeed, many families, cultures, sub-cultures, religions, etc. sabotage (deliberately or unconsciously) the process of individuation. This is due to and exacerbated by the tremendous pressure of in group/out group dynamics that our tribal ancestors evolved with, where breaking from or leaving the tribe quite often more than not meant something catastrophic, either to the individual or the tribe as a whole. Individuation is felt, instinctually, as a threat to the tribe which subsumes the individual in importance on a collective level.

However, these realities point the way to healing. The aim of recovery then is to align oneself to evolved vectors of thriving so in turn one can take up the great and difficult adventure of individuation.