[jamii]

> Except the latter has been proved out to be species-useful for tens of millions of years, and even more if cross-species evolutionary conservation is considered.

One of the things that makes humans dominate the planet so thoroughly is that we are programmable, so we can evolve culturally on a scale of decades, instead of genetically on a scale of centuries.

The side effect of this is that that parts of us that aren't programmable are not keeping up with rapidly changing environment eg being both cognitive misers and obese (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547044/).

It does lead to a neat heuristic though - if some easy change improves intelligent/memory/whatever, it should be expected to have side effects that would have been a poor tradeoff in our ancestral environment, otherwise it would have been selected for already - https://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics