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[ruhisarchive]

An evolutionary mistake ??? 🤔

Have you ever wondered why tigers are BRIGHT orange in colour... even though they hunt in dense green forests?

Aren't they considered to be camouflaging so that their preys don't spot them ?? How is this colour of traffic cones and safety vests - things that you are supposed to spot from far away - helping them "camouflage" in their habitat ??

WELL, Mammals actually cannot produce green fur, it is pretty much biologically impossible. This is because our mammal ancestors spent about a 100 million years, hiding underground at night. And during that time, they lost practically every pigment system. (a classic "use it or lose it" evolutionary process lol) Leaving us behind with only 2 chemicals : One that makes brown and black & one that makes orange and yellow. That is the entire mammalian colour palette. Every dog, horse, lion, deer, even US... All of it is just those 2 pigments mixed in different ratios !

AAAND, the trade off here is... deers cannot tell the difference lol ! They are actually red and green colour blind. Deers have two types of colour receptors , and neither one can separate orange from green. To a deer's visual system, an orange tiger sitting in a green bush , registers as a green bush!

And then there are the stripes...The black markings aren't just aesthetic haha, they break up the tiger's outline in dappled light and tall grass, a phenomenon known as disruptive colouration. So, the orange disappears into green for the deer, and the stripes dissolve the tiger's silhouette in the process.

There's actually a term in evolutionary biology for what tigers are doing. It's called sensory exploitation. Not universal camouflage. Not invisibility to everyone. Just precise, targeted optimisation for the perceptual limitations of one specific audience ;)

And us? Well, primates actually re-evolved a third colour receptor later in evolutionary history, long after the mammalian palette was stripped back. Which is why you can see the tiger's orange perfectly clearly.

[ruhisarchive]

Why is living in the moment so difficult ?

As someone whose mind is constantly jumping between memories, worries, ideas and observations... My brain seems permanently committed to keeping at least ten tabs open at once😭, I'm always thinking and thinking - either nostalgic about my past, anxious about my future , or so caught up in my thoughts that I feel like I barely experience the present moment while its happening. And, not living in the present can of course contribute to higher anxiety levels, emotional burnout and fatigue.

So I guess the first step to living more mindfully would be to understand why it is biologically so difficult for us to do so...

Basically, your brain has a system called the default mode network. When you are not focused on a specific task, your brain doesn't go quiet... it activates this network and immediately starts doing what it does best : replaying past events, simulating future scenarios, running social comparisons, imagining things that haven't happened yet. It is your brain's literal default state.

AANDD... It was a huge evolutionary advantage.

The ancestors whose brains constantly rehearsed past mistakes, anticipated future threats and mentally prepared for what came next... they survived. In a world without medicine, without infrastructure, without any safety net whatsoever- replaying the moment you trusted the wrong person, mentally preparing for a predator that might return, or pre-running a difficult social interaction before it happened wasn't rumination. It was critical. Get the social dynamics of your group wrong and you risked exclusion. Miss an environmental threat you'd already encountered once and you might not survive it twice. Fail to anticipate what came next and you were always reacting too late. The ones who simply existed in the present, unbothered and unplanning, often didn't make it. Your brain was never built to rest in the now. It was built to stay one step ahead of what the now might become.

So when you try to just be... no planning, no replaying, no spiralling ; you are fighting hundreds of thousands of years of survival programming. The present moment, evolutionarily, was never really the point ! You are not overthinking because something is wrong with you. You are overthinking because your brain is doing exactly what it evolved to do.

Box breathing, sensory grounding, single tasking, meditation are all methods you could practice to be more mindful. The goal is just to notice when you've drifted and choose to come back. Every time you do that, you are quite literally rewiring your brain

[ruhisarchive]

the science of awkward silence

You are mid conversation and suddenly there's a pause...Nobody speaks. And within seconds it starts to feel genuinely uncomfortable- like something has gone wrong, like you need to fix it immediately...

But why? It's just the absence of sound ?

EXCEPT, your brain doesn't process it that way at all !

For most of human history, silence wasn't neutral. In small social groups, a sudden drop in conversation was a signal : tension, disapproval, exclusion, or an external threat nearby. The individuals who picked up on that signal quickly and responded to it survived social conflicts and dangers at higher rates than those who didn't. So the brain developed a finely tuned sensitivity to conversational silence, treating it not as emptiness but as information.

That sensitivity is still running.

There's a biological mechanism behind this called the anterior cingulate cortex- the part of your brain responsible for detecting social errors and conflicts. Studies have shown it activates during awkward silences the same way it does during explicit social rejection. Your brain isn't just registering that things have gone quiet. It's registering that something is wrong and flagging it as a threat that needs resolving.

This is why the discomfort is so physical. That urge to fill silence, to say literally ANYTHING lol , that's your nervous system trying to defuse a perceived social conflict before it escalates.

And, the awkwardness of silence is remarkably universal across cultures. The threshold varies, but the discomfort doesn't. Research by Dutch psychologist Namkje Koudenburg found that silences as short as four seconds are enough to trigger measurable spikes in feelings of rejection and exclusion in most people.

Four seconds.

BUUUTT, then why does silence feel completely comfortable with people you're close to?

Because the brain isn't just detecting silence, it's reading context. With someone you trust deeply, silence carries no ambiguity. There's no question of disapproval or exclusion because the relationship has already established safety. The anterior cingulate cortex, which fires when silence feels threatening, stays quiet when the social context feels secure.

Psychologists call this "companionable silence".

So next time a conversation goes quiet and you feel that familiar panic just know that that's an ancient threat detection system doing exactly what it was built to do, in a time where silence meant something very different

[ruhisarchive]

why can't we stop picking at scabs?

You know it will scar. You know it will bleed. You know it'll take longer to heal. And yet....

Well, for most of human history, an open wound or parasite on your skin wasn't just annoying, it was potentially fatal. No medicine, no antiseptic, nothing but your own hands. So the individuals who felt a compulsive need to groom, to remove anything foreign or incomplete from their body, survived at higher rates than those who didn't.

and that compulsion never left

There's also something your brain does that makes this worse - a scab feels unfinished. And your brain treats "unfinished" the same way it treats any incomplete task, it nags you until it's resolved. Remove the scab and you'll have a genuine dopamine hit; A small reward for "finishing something"

So you're not being irrational or gross. You're just running grooming software that's been in your biology for millions of years.

evolution really did not think this one through lol

[ruhisarchive]

blaming social media for modern chronic anxiety is only half the story.

Anxiety rates have skyrocketed over the past few decades. The easy answer to that is "all because of social media!" or "just modern pressures" - and yes, those things do play a part BUT... there is a biological story underneath all of that which nobody talks about enough.

So, deep in your brain sits a small almond shaped structure called the amygdala. It's ancient, it's fast, and its entire job is to detect threats and trigger a response before your conscious mind has even registered what is happening. Cortisol and adrenaline flood your system, your heart rate spikes, your muscles tense - you are ready to fight or run within milliseconds. This system is exceptionally good at what it was built for : immediate, physical, short lived danger. A predator. A rival. A fire. You respond , the threat resolves , cortisol drops, and your body returns to baseline.

Notice the emphasis on 'resolves' ?

Well, the problem is that nothing resolves anymore. Modern stressors don't work like predators. Financial stress, social comparison , career uncertainty, climate dread - these threats have no resolution point. There is no moment where your body gets to register "threat gone, stand down." The alarm stays on.

Biologically, chronic stress is deeply novel. Our systems were never designed to run cortisol continuously at low levels for months or years. so when they do, something starts to break down.

Prolonged cortisol exposure is said to physically reshape the brain. The amygdala, your threat detector, becomes more reactive over time- scanning for danger even when none exists. Meanwhile the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for rational thought, context, and calming the alarm down, actually shrinks. The brain gets structurally better at being anxious and structurally worse at talking itself out of it.

So you are not imagining that anxiety feels harder to control over time. Your brain has quite literally been physically rewired by it.

Now comes the social media aspect of it... Humans are hardwired for social comparison. In small tribal groups, knowing where you stood relative to others determined your access to food, protection, and mates. Your brain developed a constant, automatic system for benchmarking yourself against the people around you.

That system was built for 150 people you actually knew.

However, social media exposes you to millions! all presenting the most curated, filtered version of their lives. And your brain, running an ancient ranking algorithm it never evolved to switch off, processes every single one as a genuine social comparison. In a real community, hierarchies eventually settle and the anxiety quiets. But the feed is infinite, the comparisons never resolve, and your brain never gets to conclude "I know where I stand." The result is an anxiety with no finish line.

Anxiety is just an ancient, sophisticated biological system encountering a world it was never built for ; and struggling in very specific, measurable, physical ways. We built a world that never lets the alarm turn off... And then we're surprised that the alarm keeps going

[ruhisarchive]

how 10 lizards completely shifted our understanding of evolution

This is one of the most intriguing examples of natural selection!

So basically, in 1971, ten Italian wall lizards were taken from the island of Pod Kopiste and relocated to a nearby island called Pod Mraru. Despite being close by, these islands are completely different ecologically - one abundant with insects while the other vegetation heavy.

Now , one would think that the lizard population ought to have died out entirely considering the fact that it was a tiny, vulnerable population exposed to a completely new environment and food supplies, right?

Well, surprisingly not! In 2004, another team of scientists went back to Pod Mraru island - only to find that the lizard population had exploded and was thriving in their new conditions. But more importantly, they had physically changed : Longer heads, stronger jaws, stronger bite force. They had also shifted from being primarily insectivores to primarily herbivores.

The most shocking change was the development of cecal valves though. Cecal valves are folded structures that create compartments in the intestine to slow down food and allow bacterial fermentation of plant matter. 

what surprised them wasn't just that the lizards had  changed... What genuinely shocked them was the scale and complexity of the change. Minor shifts in colouring or slight size differences would have been unremarkable. But structural changes to the jaw AND an entirely new digestive organ was way beyond what anyone anticipated for such a short timeframe. After all, cecal valves are not a simple tweak... they represent a meaningful reorganisation of gut anatomy. This kind of change is usually expected to take hundreds of thousands of years, not just 36...

So how did such massive changes happen within just about 3 decades? Two reasons. The founding population was only a mere 10 lizards - this is called a bottleneck. In a diminutive population, useful traits spread through the gene pool far faster than they would in a large, diverse one. Counterintuitive, but true. The environmental pressure was also immediate and extreme. There were practically no insects on the new island, so the dietary shift wasn't gradual, it was sink or swim from day one. The stronger the selective pressure, the faster natural selection acts.

10 lizards. one new island. 36 years. and an entirely new organ. pretty cool right?

[ruhisarchive]

"How?"

Have you ever noticed that the first thing anyone ever says when they find out about someone's death is usually "how did they die?" ?And, I wondered if there was a deeper explanation for that... Turns out, there is!

For most of human history, the mechanism of death was the most critical piece of information you could have. Was it contagious? Is the predator still nearby? Is this location dangerous?

Knowing the cause of death helped our ancestors avoid possible threats to their lives. It told them whether they need to flee, isolate or fight. The individuals who asked "how?" and acted on that information survived whereas the ones who didn't, often didn't.

That instinct still remains within us.

what feels like simple curiosity today was one of the most important questions you could ask back then.

[ruhisarchive]

why humans evolved to fear exclusion

Humans are strangely sensitive to social rejection. It seems irrational at first - why does being ignored, excluded or judged by other people affect us so deeply?

But if you really think about it, for most of human history, social belonging was directly tied to survival.

Humans evolved in small interdependent groups where isolation could mean less protection, fewer resources , and lower chances of survival.

Maybe that's why the brain still treats social rejection like a threat... even when the "tribe" is now just a group chat x

[ruhisarchive]

evolution isn't what you think it is

Evolution is one of the most misunderstood ideas in biology. In school, evolution is often explained using terms like "survival of the fittest" or the idea that it always makes organisms better adapted; however, nobody really stops to explain what any of those terms actually mean and that's where misconceptions start to fill the gap. Firstly, "fitness" in evolutionary biology has got nothing to do with strength or intelligence or being the best. It simply refers to how well suited you are to your current environment. A bacterium that is resistant to antibiotics is fit. An arctic fox that turns white in the winter is fit. A person who is genetically less susceptible to certain diseases is fit. "Fit" just means- you survived long enough to reproduce. That's it. "Evolution is animals adapting to survive" ... but is that always the case? Peacocks are the best example for this paradox. Peacock tails are bright, heavy, energy consuming and make the bird easier to spot by predators. By any logical measure - a terrible feature to have. Why does evolution still favour it then...? The answer is , peahens are attracted to it , for mating... and so the trait stuck around ! So, evolution isn't some perfect process engineering the most ideal creatures. It can be messy, blind, and sometimes produces things that are maladaptive - because , "works well enough to reproduce" is the only bar it needs to clear. Importantly, it isn't just ancient history - it's in the food you crave, the anxiety you feel, the features you find attractive ; and once you understand that, evolution stops being a background fact of life and starts being something you notice everywhere.