What can psychological science, and evolutionary psychology in particular, offer to help to address these problems?
Can humans be “smarter than yeast?” Can we be the only species that can successfully avoid ecological overshoot and collapse? These are psychological problems — are we psychologically sophisticated enough to manage our own collective behavior? Evolved adaptations (including psychological ones) are all solutions to problems of inclusive fitness in ancestral environments. Our ancestors’ “inclusive fitness” refers to the number of genes they projected into the next generation via reproduction, and by helping those who shared their genes (close kin). Inclusive fitness has been the “designer” of human psychological adaptations. Evolution cannot look forward; it cannot anticipate what it has never encountered. We have no psychological adaptations to avoid ecological overshoot. In fact, we have just the opposite. Here’s the sobering rub: Inclusive fitness is always relative to others; it is not absolute. That is, nature doesn’t “say,” “Have 2 kids (or help 4 full sibs), and then you can stop
