A Little Book to Save Humanity makes the case that we don’t have to be the victims of evolution. A new study supports that claim. Let me explain.
The core message of A Little Book is that while the amygdala evolved to alert us to (and thus protect us from) danger in the primitive world in which humans
lived for 99+% of our time on earth, it now creates a threat to the survival of the human race. Conflict entrepreneurs have learned how to manipulate humans by sending messages that alarm the amygdala. When the amygdala controls our behavior, humans are given to hatred, racism, misogyny, and war. Conflict entrepreneurs make money while the rest of us suffer.
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) skills are what humans can use to overcome the destructive elements of the amygdala, and thus wrest 
control of society away from conflict entrepreneurs. EQ makes us more human. In A Little Book, I suggested that if enough of us build and use EQ skills we can change the way humanity behaves, and thereby save humanity.
Skeptics might say, “Dana, are you telling me that we can overcome 50,000 generations of evolution? Silly boy!” Such skepticism is reasonable. Let’s take it seriously.
Evolution: For the most part, evolution operates at the genetic level. It is a problem-solving process. As conditions change, species evolve by adapting to whatever circumstances they find themselves in. But only some members of the species actually survive – (“survival of the fittest”). Through genetic mutations, these particular members have accidentally been born with capacities that most members of that species lack. Those without the needed capacities fail to contribute to the gene pool, which becomes dominated by “the fittest.” This process takes a loooooong time. There is no question that this is how genetic evolution works. But wait! There’s more!
A Little Book argues that we can accelerate the human evolutionary process. A recent study agrees – Waring, T. M., & Wood, Z. T. (2025). Cultural inheritance is driving a transition in human evolution. BioScience. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf094
The authors argue that cultural evolution is overtaking genetic evolution as the dominant force shaping human development. A summary report describing the study says, “Their theory suggests that humanity is undergoing a “major evolutionary transition,” where technologies, institutions, and shared knowledge are becoming the primary mechanisms that determine our survival and success.
“When we learn useful skills, institutions, or technologies from each other, we are inheriting adaptive cultural practices”, said Waring. Culture, he adds, solves problems much more rapidly than genetic evolution.
“Cultural evolution eats genetic evolution for breakfast, it’s not even close,” Wood said, adding that this shift has been underway for millennia, and may be accelerating in the modern era.
“Ask yourself this: what matters more for your personal life outcomes, the genes you are born with, or the country where you live?” Waring said, suggesting that in today’s society, our well-being is determined less and less by personal biology and more and more by cultural systems. This means that humans are becoming more group-oriented and dependent on collective systems, signaling a change in what it means to be human.
Where does EQ fit in? Science has demonstrated that EQ skills separate winners from also-rans. Sounds like evolution, doesn’t it? Survival of the fittest. Truth be told, humans have always had the capacity for EQ skills. People like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and others have shown tremendous levels of EQ skills. We just didn’t call them by that name in those days.
Thus, EQ skills have been part of our evolution too, along with the pesky amygdala. Because we did not have systematic ways to teach EQ, the evolution of its skills has been spotty. But for the past 35 years, science has been studying EQ – what it is, what it can do, and how to build it. As a result, science has made it more accessible to all of us. We just need to embed it into our institutions and technologies.
A Call to Action: It is up to each of us who recognize the potential positive/human power of EQ to do the embedding. We can do so as individuals within the organizations and institutions to which we belong to promote shared knowledge, and to help us support humanity’s growth to its best self. As a start, we could ask ourselves:
- How do we treat our family members? Families are institutions.
- To what extent can we help our children learn EQ skills? Both schools and parents play a critical role, as do other organizations that children belong to, such as scouts, sports teams, clubs, etc. How can we encourage our schools to teach EQ skills in a systematic way? How can we help parents know how to build their children’s EQ skills? It is one thing to tell parents what they “should” do. It is far more essential to help them know how to do it.
- If you are a leader at work, how you learn and model EQ skills will have an untold positive impact on countless people. Are you doing all that you can?
- Do you belong to a club? A church? Where do you interact with others in a systematic way?
Wherever we are, we, each of us, can use and promote EQ.
Beyond institutions, the study authors also mention technology, which would include the internet and social media. They have a deserved bad reputation. But that’s not their fault. It is humans’ fault. Each of us can model ways to use these technologies to advance human wellbeing through shared knowledge, rather than pitting people against each other as conflict entrepreneurs want us to do for their benefit, not ours.
The End Game: Let’s each of us, in our own ways, work to create a “critical EQ mass.” Critical mass is defined as the minimum amount of something—be it nuclear material, users of a network, or participants in a movement—that is required for a self-sustaining chain reaction or process to occur. Once this threshold is reached, a positive feedback loop often begins, making the process more self-reinforcing, and accelerating its growth or continuation. We can do this.
Will humans survive? The amygdala has taught us to be afraid, and left us susceptible to seeing our fellow humans as enemies to be destroyed. If that’s the end
of evolution, we are doomed. But if we can engineer an EQ evolution, we can give our fellow humans a second look, see the good in them, and turn them into our allies in building a world in which we, the fit, can all survive.
When should we start? I’m reminded of a story I used to tell people in the workshops I gave:
An eighty-year-old retired French general told his gardener that he wanted a row of trees planted on the sides of the lane leading to his château. The gardener looked at the old man skeptically and said, “General, those trees take fifty years to mature.” The general replied, “Well then, we better start this morning.”
