The evolution of emotions is something that Charles Darwin
himself explored”. Darwin is seen as the founder of the evolutionary approach
to emotions. He said that emotions were evolutionarily evolved and that they
were here to serve an important survival purpose. He actually argued that
emotions have evolved via natural selection and serve this purpose for humans’
survival and helping aid in communications and bonds with others. For Darwin,
emotion had an evolutionary history that could be traced across cultures and
species.
Unfortunately, the mechanism of the “psychological natural
selection” has sort of a glitch. Unlike biological natural selection, some of
the psychological traits that served an important survival purpose thousands or
even hundreds of years are not required anymore and could be very harmful.
While having an extra ear muscle or a legacy of a tail does not really hurt or
does not usually cause harm, having an ugly psychological legacy like a
mentality of creating enemies does cause a lot of harm.
While removing a wisdom tooth can cause you some pain for a few
days, getting rid of an evolved psychological trait is not that easy, and lots
of harm could be caused in the process. The need for creating enemies had been
required to serve a survival purpose while our ancestors were in the savannas.
This trait is, by default, violence generating and, respectively, war
generating. And if you are lucky enough, this trait would be tuned down to
creating sort of social enemies, enemies at your work or business, for example,
or even within your family, which is pretty sad, to say the least. The
relatively good news, though, is that we do have some sort of control over
changing this trait and evolving beyond it. It is not a walk in the park, and
we do need a more systematic approach to change the negative and harmful psychological
legacies of our evolution.
More about the topic and evolution of emotions in my book: Quantizing Emotions (The basic mathematics of psychology)
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