[thatoneuser]

I’ve been reading through Sapiens lately and it lends some insight into the whole “was work ever meaningful”. My take is that basically once we got to the agricultural revolution, the answer has basically always been no.

We evolved to be hunter gatherers. Millions of years of evolution brought us there. Then in the recent thousands of years we found ourselves being repurposed for efficiency. But at the end of it, were spear throwing carnivores still. We just don’t have the physiology and mental wiring to be happy going into the same place for decades doing bs abstracted work.

[DATACOMMANDER]

I have a strong hunch that human evolution has been accelerating for quite some time. I can’t back this up with citations, but intuitively, as fitness becomes more complex, adaptations should spread faster (and maladaptations should disappear faster). This is of course partly counteracted by the presumably much higher percentage of individuals that reproduce in a civilized environment compared to a pre-civilized environment, but the dawn of civilization by no means brought about full reproductive parity. It seems to be taken for granted that cultural evolution largely replaced genetic evolution circa 10,000 years ago, but I highly doubt it. It seems much more likely to me that cultural evolution has been taking place alongside accelerated genetic evolution.