Evolution’s Beta Test of Rationality
We humans tend to see ourselves as finished products—the pinnacle of evolution, defined by our capacity for rational thought. But what if rationality itself is an unfinished evolutionary experiment?
Like any first draft, humanity is both ambitious and incomplete. Our rational mind sits atop millions of years of primal instincts, and it’s still learning how to manage them. Understanding ourselves as evolution’s beta test of rational cognition places us in the proper context: animals, still developing the tools to think beyond instinct.
Rational thought grants us the ability to imagine future scenarios, abstract complex meanings, and reason outside immediate survival needs. Neuroscience shows that this capability arises from our neocortex, a relatively new evolutionary addition layered atop older brain structures controlling instinct and emotion. These primal systems—responsible for fear, aggression, hunger, and reproduction—still powerfully influence human decisions.
We tend to forget our animal heritage, believing our rational minds set us entirely apart from other species. Yet our behavior regularly proves otherwise. Despite impressive cognitive abilities, humans remain susceptible to irrational fears, tribalism, and impulsive reactions. Consider how quickly fear or stress derails logical thinking in favor of instinctual responses like aggression or avoidance. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes our mind as an emotional “elephant” with rationality as the rider, who frequently justifies, rather than directs, the elephant’s actions.
This tension between instinct and rationality defines not just individual behavior, but the systems we create. Entrepreneurs launch beta products; writers produce first drafts expecting extensive edits. Our social, political, and economic institutions are no different: provisional attempts to harness reason while managing the primal instincts within.
Nowhere is this clearer than in our relationship with wealth and power. From an evolutionary perspective, money is a modern equivalent of essential resources like food or territory. Studies show that acquiring excessive resources profoundly alters human behavior. A famous UC Berkeley experiment rigged Monopoly games to make one player arbitrarily wealthy; within minutes, this player exhibited dominant, entitled behaviors—taking more snacks, speaking louder, and claiming skill as the reason for their advantage. Wealth didn’t merely elevate their status; it chemically recoded their brains, amplifying dominance and diminishing empathy.
This effect becomes even more pronounced at the extreme ends of the wealth spectrum. Our tendency to see all humans as rational and uniform blinds us to deep psychological divergences. Studies show that wealth rewires cognition—diminishing empathy, increasing entitlement, and strengthening instinctual dominance behaviors. It’s why billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos often seem detached from the needs of ordinary people: their psychology diverges from the norm, shaped by abundance, status, and the unchecked pull of primal drives.
We see the same patterns among primates. Alpha chimpanzees hoard resources, enforce hierarchies, and assert dominance in ways that closely mirror our own behavior. Wealth and power, therefore, activate our evolutionary wiring. What we call greed is often just evolution asserting itself in a world of deepening inequality.
Recognizing humanity as evolution’s first rational draft is a call to embrace compassionate realism. It asks us to see human behavior as the growing pains of a species still under construction. Our irrationalities, biases, and mistakes are all predictable steps in a long, unfinished developmental process.
Understanding ourselves as a work in progress changes how we confront the world’s most urgent problems, from inequality to climate change. Instead of harsh judgment or naive optimism, we need thoughtful revision. We must continually edit our norms, laws, and institutions to better account for the instincts that still drive us. Yes, we must expect more from ourselves. But we should also remember that Homo sapiens is still young in evolutionary time. Imperfect as we are, it is remarkable that we have begun to think our way forward at all.
There is beauty in recognizing that we are unfinished. Like an artist refining a sketch, our task is not to perfect human nature, but to keep revising it. Accepting our role as evolution’s rough draft is an eternal responsibility. The goal is not the triumph of reason, but the wisdom and humility to keep refining it.
