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The Battle Against Biology and Evolution

The Battle Against Biology and Evolution

Thoughts as of 6/6/24

Something that has come up again and again in my quest for physical fitness and happiness is the unavoidable fact that we are products of evolution and at the mercy of our biology.

The problem is, we have escaped the food chain and these systems no longer serve us.

The more you learn about the processes of the body whether it be chemical balances, circadian rhythms, impacts of light, exercise, and food, etc. etc. there are evolutionary reasons why things are the way that they are.

We are beings that are optimized to survive and reproduce and things that serve that purpose give us good feelings and things that do not, do not.

This does not lead to optimum behavior in today’s world.

One example of circadian rhythms and our biological clocks is in the impact of light on biological processes. If it were up to us, we would probably want to divorce these clock signals from light exposure so as to be able to stay up late using artificial lights and wake up at our leisure without needing to view the sun. 

Unfortunately, a lot of systems in our bodies are closely tied to this circadian cycle that has light as a primary driver.

For pretty much all of human existence, this worked pretty well. We had the sun as a reliable queue to wake up, and then when it went down, we would go to sleep or at worst, gather around the firelight. Thus, it made a lot of sense to synchronize bodily processes with this sleep-wake cycle that would operate with regularity.

In today’s world, these systems are not working in our favor by default. With artificial light, lack of sunlight viewing, and variances in sleep-wake times, most of the world today can be classified as shift workers.

Our software has not been updated for this new technology, so when we see certain wavelengths of light after dark, it interrupts biological processes like melatonin production that help us go to sleep.

Normally, the biological clocks within our cells are synchronized with daily rhythms, but now that is totally out of whack.

This is proven to lead to a cascade of biological consequences ranging from our mood to our immune system, to our recovery. It is difficult to find an aspect of our well-being that is NOT impacted by these circadian components.

An example keeping theme with the above light example is seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Simply looking at circadian interruptions, there are a number of negative consequences ranging from insulin sensitivity (diabetes), to depression and anxiety, to increased risk for myriad metabolic diseases.

These all stem from the fact that our outside world has changed (relatively) rapidly, while our inside world is stuck in the past.

The impacts do not stop at circadian interruption. Another important one I have thought about is our food preferences.

We are made to survive, so we have preferences for certain types of foods that can give us a lot of calories. When we were in the savannah and found sugary foods or foods with high fat content, it made sense to light up our brains with feel-good chemicals to make us eat as much as possible.

There is not a biological advantage in our programming to eat in a caloric deficit.

This served us well in the past, but in the modern world with an abundance of food, it does not anymore. It does not help that food companies today process foods to make them hyper-palatable with high sugar and fat content that does not mimic anything found in nature.

The chemical makeup, texture, combinations of macronutrients, smells, and even packaging of food is specifically engineered to make our brains' reward centers light up and want to consume more and more. There is nothing evolutionarily stopping us from behaving in that way, in fact, our impulses actually make us want to indulge and binge eat as much as we can.

Muscle burns more calories than fat at rest, and we can live longer off of our fat stores than we can from muscle stores. Thus it is inefficient to have a low body fat percentage, and all things equal, our body would prefer to store calories as fat and get rid of muscle.

I personally am trying to keep a low body fat percentage, and thus have to work directly against my biological impulses.

This is a tricky balance to find because there are some things that you simply cannot escape due to the negative downstream effects. 

Light viewing and having regular sleep-wake cycles as an example is an inescapable fact of biology that we need to comply with in order to operate. There are biological downsides to trying to have a low body fat percentage as well.

I realize this post is bordering on rambling so I will bring it home here.

The essential crux of this thought is that we are evolved creatures and what got us here does not necessarily serve us in today’s world. There are some aspects that are vital to mimic from the lives of our ancestors and other impulses that we would be better off avoiding in our modern world. Figuring out exactly which things belong in which bucket is the hard part.
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