I just read an article about a domestic cats' ancestor, African Wildcat. Cats obviously changed very little, they still patrol their territories, mark their property (including us) and turn into slinky killing machines when a greedy pigeon lands on the other end of the balcony. However they fine tuned these instincts so that they serve them equally well in the wilderness of street life and the comfort of their own home.
In comparison, our human instincts and reflexes and even body plan are so crude.
There's the instinct that was developed as a way of detecting threats and reacting to them quickly with an adrenaline burst, which means we all live with a background anxiety, constantly monitoring our environment for threats. As our environment is now safer than ever before, we make up things to worry about, wind ourselves up to the point where we overreact to minor things and develop anxiety disorders. Yey...
There's the one that makes us seek and consume vast amounts of fatty foods, as we don't know how long it's going to be till the next kill. Also, sugary foods being unnatural confuse our hunters-gatherers bodies that are not sure as to how much we need them. So here's an excuse for you for being fat. Your bloody ancestors are to blame for not being more efficient hunters and letting other predators take their prey away. Like big cats. Hm.
Oh what about the one that makes us afraid of the dark, because it might be teeming with predators, which paralyses people venturing to their own cellars with fear when a light bulb blows unexpectedly?
Or the fact that most eye conditions occur because our eyes are designed to look long distance into the wilderness to spot danger/prey/big cats and not short distance into collections of dots and dashes and swirling colours of tv/pc/mobile screens? Same with back problems, because we are supposed to be mobile and flexible and not stuck in a sitting position for most of the day.
For a so called superior species we are rather depressingly stuck in our African savannah past, burden with safety mechanisms we no longer need, that are actively used to control us by at least one species of predators. Did you know that cats are using our instinct to take care of and protect crying babies by emitting a purr on the same frequency as the babies' screams? Now that's what I call fine tuning.
