by Jon Cleland Host

Though nearly everyone outside of the political right agrees that evolution has crafted our bodies (including our brains), it is still common for the huge effect of our evolutionary origins on our daily lives to be routinely ignored.  As David Sloan Wilson explains in his book Evolution for Everyone, evolution pervades nearly everything we do (especially those things we struggle with), yet is ignored like a taboo elephant in the living room.  Perhaps much of this blindness is simply that we haven’t been given the opportunity to learn these evolutionary details, but at least some of this blindness seems to be due to our reluctance to admit that we are evolved animals, not dualistic gods incarnated from some imagined spirit realm.

Regardless of the cause, this realization smacked me in the face yet again this morning when reading “Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here”, which exposed another Yoga instructor found to be having sex with his female students.  The article spends plenty of time going over the sexual impact of yoga, yet never mentions that fact that millions of years of evolution have given us males a brain core (our Lizard Legacy) that keeps us looking for sex nearly 24/7, regardless of whether we are doing yoga, riding a bike, or whatever.  That lizard legacy can easily overcome our rational brains, if proper safeguards are not responsibly put in place ahead of time.

When we understand how evolution has given us our brains, the idea of respected men looking for sex goes from being shocking to being expected.  It shows why hard safeguards should always be in place to protect everyone involved.  Understanding our lizard legacy shows why it’s not our fault to have those urges, and also why it is very much our responsibility to handle them responsibly, ahead of time.  It shows why we shouldn’t pretend to sharply divide instructors into groups of “gurus” and “misanthropes”, as the article does, but instead to realize that these lizards live within us all, ready to bite if not responsibly harnessed.

This is especially important in areas dominated by liberals, such as yoga.  Many liberals imagine human nature to be basically good, and thus can miss the harmful parts of human nature, which are very real.  The realization that our brains, and thus our natures, have been built by evolution makes it easy to understand that we’ve accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage.  This baggage, in men, includes the often harmful desire for frequent sex with many different women.  When we begin to see the world through evolutionary eyes, we realize that to suppose that men lose these urges when they become respected is as silly as to think that their hands fall off.  In fact, as we now know, fame and respect often makes these urges stronger, not weaker (see here and here).  This reminds us all of the importance of dealing with these natural urges responsibly, which is easier if done openly from the start.

This is one area where even Calvinism contains a shred of truth – that our human nature is far from perfect, and that these harmful urges are always ready to spring into action.  John Calvin interpreted these in an unnatural way, yet, by seeing the natural origin of this part of all of us, we can move past the 16th century Calvinism while still benefiting from knowing those urges are real.  In fact, by appreciating how these same urges were needed for the very existence of our Ancestors and indeed ourselves, we can work to control them from a position of gratitude, a stronger position than one of guilt or shame.