Neurobiological/Fitness Gap

The neurobiological/fitness gap is the energy-enabled temporal and/or spatial separation between the Consequences that actually determine whether a behaviour recurs (neurobiological) and that behaviour's longer-term fitness-relevant consequences, which have the potential to select the behaviour out. It is the paper's central theoretical contribution — distinct from standard evolutionary mismatch theory, which explains why an adapted-to-ancestral-conditions behaviour misfires in a modern environment, but not why the mismatch is allowed to persist and compound rather than self-correct.

How the gap forms

Under low-energy, pre-agricultural conditions, fitness-relevant consequences arrived close enough in time and space to shape neurobiological consequences directly — hunger, ostracism or death followed quickly enough on a maladaptive behaviour to flip its neurobiological payoff from reinforcing to punishing. Exosomatic Energy broke this proximity: trade, medical advances, synthetic fertiliser and similar technologies let humans keep the reinforcing neurobiological payoff of a behaviour while pushing its fitness cost over the horizon via temporal, spatial or social Discounting. The paper illustrates this with a fictional low-energy fishing community, where a fish-stock collapse quickly and locally converts fishing from reinforcing to punishing and the community adaptively contracts — contrasted with a high-energy society, where a drought's fitness-relevant consequences are absorbed by fertiliser, trade and drought-resistant seed before they can bite, so the underlying behaviour never gets corrected.

Why it matters

Because the gap lets maladaptive behaviours persist, it also lets the surrounding Information Environment keep contextualising Evolved Impulses in maladaptive directions, entrenching them as Social Norms. The gap, not the impulses or behaviours themselves, is what is genuinely novel to MTI civilisation.

Bridging the gap

Actually closing the gap would require cutting exosomatic energy use, which the paper treats as unlikely in the near term. It proposes instead that the gap can be bridged within the information environment, via two complementary routes:

1. Recontextualise evolved impulses — redirect existing impulses (status, belonging, resource acquisition) toward adaptive, ecologically restorative expressions, rather than attempting to suppress the impulses themselves.
2. Proxy consequences — deliberately engineer immediate, salient neurobiological consequences (reinforcing or punishing) that stand in for the real, distant fitness-relevant consequences, correcting behaviour on a human rather than a geological timescale. To extinguish a maladaptive behaviour, such proxies need to be heavily punishing, proximal and salient; to promote an adaptive one, heavily reinforcing and immediate.

Localisation follows directly from this logic: small-scale, local social structures are precisely where proximal consequences — and thus self-correction — remain possible without any engineered proxy at all, which is why the paper treats localisation/"recommunitisation" as a structural argument, not merely a value position.

The paper is explicit that the goal throughout is redirection, not suppression, of evolved drives — and flags, as a risk its authors take seriously, that the same toolkit could instead be captured by existing power structures for more effective, authoritarian control of the status quo.

See also

Consequences · Exosomatic Energy · Discounting · Information Environment