According to biologist Richard Dawkins, the rising incidence of mental illness in developed countries may be due to the “astonishing speed” of technological change.
The iconic 83-year-old British author and evolutionary scientist theorized that we are evolving too slowly to keep pace with our environment, creating an imbalance that disrupts our sense of well-being.
He floated the theory during a podcast on Sunday, drawing on years of research linking social media use to depression among young people, among other modern ailments.
“A lot of people worry that the changes are happening so fast that we’re not well adapted to deal with them,” Dawkins told podcast listeners. “That’s a concern.”
Despite these seemingly obvious concerns, there is still a debate about the relationship between technological progress and human well-being. A study led by the Internet Institute in Oxford found no clear link between the two.
According to biologist Richard Dawkins (above), the rising incidence of mental illness in developed countries may be due to their “astonishing speed” of technological change.
The 83-year-old British author and evolutionary scientist with an iconoclastic outlook proposed the theory on the TRIGGERnometry podcast last Sunday, reflecting on years of research linking Big Tech and social media use to depression among young people, among other modern ailments.
“It is certainly true that the rate at which we evolve genetically is minimal compared to the rate at which we evolve non-genetically, culturally,” Dawkins told the hosts of the TRIGGERnometry podcast.
“And a lot of the mental illness that people suffer from is probably because we live in a constantly changing, unpredictable environment,” the biologist added, “in a way that our ancestors didn’t.”
But Dawkins—who has developed a combative relationship with cultural trends on gender, religious beliefs, and other political issues that he sees as at odds with evidence-based scientific reasoning—was reluctant to fully endorse this theory.
“I actually find it amazing how resilient we are,” said the author of groundbreaking books such as The Selfish Gene (1976) and The God Delusion (2006).
“It seems that most of us are coping quite well with the astonishing speed of change in my lifetime,” Dawkins believed.
A large international study published last November in the journal Clinical Psychological Science magazine, which used data from two million people between the ages of 15 and 89, appears to support Dawkins’ optimism.
The researchers, using a cohort of two million subjects from 168 countries, found smaller associations than you might expect if the internet or online social media were causing widespread psychological harm.
Professor Andrew Przybylski of the Oxford Internet Institute, who led the research, also published similar research into Facebook usage last year.
In that study, published in the journal Royal Society for Open Sciencehe and his co-authors used data on levels of anxiety, depression and self-harm from 2000 to 2019 in about 200 countries.
Well-being was assessed using data from personal and telephone surveys by local interviewers. Mental health was assessed using statistical estimates of depressive disorders, anxiety disorders and self-harm.
“We looked really hard for a smoking gun that connects technology and well-being, but we didn’t find it,” Przybylski said.
A large study published last November, using data from two million people between the ages of 15 and 89, appears to support Dawkins’ optimistic argument. It found smaller associations than expected if the Internet were causing widespread psychological harm.
“I find it amazing, actually, how resilient we are,” said Dawkins, the author of such groundbreaking books as The Selfish Gene (1976). “We seem, most of us, to be coping reasonably well with the astonishing speed of change in my lifetime.”
According to Przybylski, the common idea that the Internet and mobile phones have a negative effect on our well-being and mental health is probably not correct.
“It is indeed possible that there are smaller and more important things going on, but any grand claims about the negative impact of the internet on the world should be viewed with the utmost scepticism,” the Oxford scientist concluded.
However, his research contradicts several studies that claim that social media and this confusing time of technological change have worsened the mental health of middle-aged people, millennials and young people.
Dawkins said that human genetic evolution was not as rapid as cultural evolution. Above is a model of a DNA strand
In his podcast appearance, Dawkins also raised more immediate concerns about other aspects of the impact of human technology on evolution: climate change and basic self-reliance in the face of a new Dark Age.
“The Internet is a huge change, it’s a gigantic change,” he noted. “We’ve gotten used to it with astonishing speed.”
“If the electricity goes out, if we suddenly lose the technology we’re used to,” Dawkins feared, humanity might not even be able to “begin” to adapt in time without massive social upheaval and death.
The biologist had a similar view about global warming due to climate change, but cautioned that this was not his area of expertise.
“It’s probably a dangerous problem,” Dawkins said in the podcast, “and a problem that needs to be solved.”
But since he studied the evolution of various animal species in his illustrious career, he focused in particular on the impact of humans on other life forms on Earth.
“Human-induced extinction,” he said, “is just as bad as the others. I think it’s tragic.”