Just How Malleable Are We?
There's a question that keeps bouncing around my head related to common ancestry versus creationist ideas. A few questions, actually, but let me set up the frame for the main question. Most of academia currently believes in common ancestry, so that's the position I'm going with, though I'm not convinced it's true. But operating under the assumption that we evolved—survival of the fittest—leads me to view everything through a lens of the question: "did we evolve to do this?" For example, we clearly did not evolve to sit in desks under fluorescent lighting for 7 hours a day as children. Our most recent ancestors, from my understanding, evolved to be adapted to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
We didn't evolve for this.
Here is the question I can't stop thinking about: if we end up discovering that common ancestry isn't real in the future, where does that leave humans? If we didn't evolve adapted to a particular way of life, are we infinitely malleable? That poses two ends of a spectrum in my mind. On one end, we are infinitely malleable and can adapt to an infinite number of lifestyles, no matter how foreign. I don't think anyone leans quite that far in that direction. On the other end, we are adapted to only a very specific way of life, either by natural selection or design. Both of those boil down to design, whether by nature or by a god. So what are we designed for?
What were we designed for?
Where in this spectrum do we actually fall, and why is no one talking about it? In this age of exponential technological development, I think it's a crucial question to be asking. We're rapidly altering our environment, and I'm not just talking about climate change. Meanwhile, we're the same humans we've been for thousands of years (at least). We have no significant adaptations to reflect our ever-changing environment. At what point are we going to become completely incompatible with it? Have we already in some ways?