explain this at length, don’t skip points or inferences, do not focus on brevity
There is an idea in the field of natural selection, where animals that were most well adapted to an exisiting environment may become most maladaptive to a large environmental shift.
Today’s environmental shift is the transition from land-native to a digital-native species, as monumental as our ancestors’ transition from water-native to land-native species.
You raise an intriguing point about how adaptations that serve a species well in one environment can become maladaptive if the environment suddenly changes significantly. This phenomenon in evolutionary biology highlights the need for plasticity and progressive adaptation. Let me elaborate on the context you outline:
The human species evolved powerful cognitive, social, and technological capabilities optimized for interacting with the physical world and land-based environments. Our perceptual, reasoning, and social structures were honed over millennia to help us survive and thrive on land.
However, the rapid emergence of digital-virtual environments represents an unprecedented ecological transition, just as monumental as when our distant aquatic ancestors adapted to terrestrial living long ago. Virtual worlds with different constraints call for very different adaptive strategies.
Many of the psychological and cultural patterns that served us so effectively in slow-changing physical environments now prove highly maladaptive in digitally-mediated contexts. Our brains still operate on old assumptions while our environment has massively changed.
For instance, our ingrained social structures, tribal habits, cognitive biases, and decision heuristics suited small, localized groups with limited information flows. But applying those same behaviors and thinking styles in the context of global digital networks leads to tension, conflict, and suboptimal outcomes.
To avoid growing mismatch between internalized behaviors and external realities, our species faces an urgent need to develop digital-native skills, ethics, and structures. This includes cultivating plasticity, embracing diversity, thinking globally, synthesizing knowledge, and adaptively exploring new social organzations enabled by technology.
Just as water-to-land transition required radical biological innovation, adapting to a digitally immersed existence requires similar psychological, cultural, and institutional creativity. We must break old molds before they break us. This moment highlights that no strategy remains optimal forever - we must progressively adapt, even letting go of once-useful models, to meet the future.