A self-described “evolutionary fitness trainer”, David R. Samson decodes our evolutionary wiring to help us live and perform our best, both at home and work.
One of the greatest challenges we face we as a species, is that our brain has evolved for how things were — not how they are. In his captivating presentations, David skillfully demonstrates how to tap into human nature and bridge the gap between past and present to optimize wellness and performance, enhance team unity, and strengthen your leadership.
David recently joined us “Inside Our Boardroom” where we dove deep into our paleo past, exploring the role our evolutionary biology plays in modern workplace dynamics. From tribal instincts that shape team cohesion to the power of intergenerational wisdom, David reveals how understanding our ancestral adaptations can transform organizational success in today’s rapidly changing environment.
Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Grading Our Scientific Progress
Speakers Spotlight: If you were to give humanity a grade on how well we’re harnessing science in pursuit of success, what would it be and why?
David R. Samson: On an individual level, in the global north and developed economies, we are currently at a B-/C+, depending on the circumstances. As a group, I think we might be at a D or D+.
On the individual level, I’ll give a great example — circadian physiology. This is the lowest hanging fruit, the most bang for your buck, if we can get it right.
Today, we have an incredibly dynamic environment. Our ancestors and their ancestors before them going back 3.5 billion years have been constantly exposed to light and temperature oscillation in their environment. That’s no longer the case, we’re wonderfully in temperature regulated and light regulated environments. But this masks and bludgeons our inherent biological cues to align our behaviour, cognition, and physiology to its environment and there are massive consequences to this. Our lack of understanding of this is why I give a low B in terms of a grade.
With groups, one of the biggest challenges we have, especially in the 21st century is how to properly frame our identities. Identity is one of the most powerful drivers that shape our perception of reality and truth. So, the way we identify with groups is going to bleed into things like workplace satisfaction and sense of belonging, both of which are massive predictors for a positive workspace. In addition, we evolved in very specific group sizes, and if you don’t adhere to what we call scaling laws of human group sizes, you can do a massive disservice to the human-to-human potential, if you’re not paying attention.
David dives deeper into how ignoring our paleo instincts both harms and hinders our individual and collective performance in the video below:
The Misunderstood Power of Tribalism in Modern Organizations
SpSp: Can you unpack “tribalism” and how it relates to the workplace?
DS: I’m really glad you asked that question. There is a negative connotation to the word tribalism and for good reason. It’s associated with sectarian violence and in-versus-out group psychology, and lot of other levels of interpersonal, intergroup conflict.
But, if you look at it from an evolutionary standpoint, its original use case, the evolution of tribalism was actually a cheat sheet for cooperation amongst strangers. So, 1.8 million years ago, our genus evolves. We start dwelling in these camps and bands. This way of living persists for about a million years. Then, something really cool happens 300,000 years ago. We can see it relatively clearly in the paleoanthropological record. There are groups of us moving beyond the “us” zone and starting to interact and trade with others.
So around 300,000 years ago, humans had to adapt to this changing world. And one of the cheat sheets was enhanced cooperation with those who are signaling your identity effectively and authentically. That’s what tribalism effectively is.
If we bury our heads in the sand and ignore tribalism or try and distance ourselves from the idea, we’re doomed to fail. This is an evolved instinct that has 300,000 years of evolutionary history bootstrapping it to our cognition.
Drawing from his award-winning book, Our Tribal Future, David provides an astounding and inspiring look at the science behind tribalism, and how we can learn to harness it to improve the world around us in his keynote “Our Tribal Future”. He explores the concept of tribalism in more depth in the video below:
How Organizations Conflict with Human Nature
SpSp: Have we built workplaces in ways that run counter to human evolutionary biology? How do we fix this?
DS: Absolutely. This is a group scaling issue, what we call power laws. When you scale the size of a city, you scale the growth of an organism, there are specific mathematical properties that derive from this. They can be economies of scale, they can be sublinear, they can be superlinear.
For example, when a city grows in size, crime grows not just linearly, but exponentially, so you have to have counter measures for that. The same applies to any organization. As it grows, it has to be incredibly mindful of the impact of that scaling.
Like I said before, the camp is the fundamental human unit. Within that, you had what were called fire teams. These are groups of three to five individuals with the sweet spot being four. Why? Because you can develop trust with this number of people and that’s one of the most powerful ingredients to enhancing team level cohesion.
When you scale beyond four, perhaps a board of 12-15 people, you can have a very strong local identity, but beyond that you start getting into trouble. Your capacity to have meaningful relationships reduces. There’s a law called Dunbar’s law, which states that 150 individuals is mathematically the computational limit that the human brain, the homo sapien brain, can process meaningful relationships. Beyond that, it’s just mud — it’s a cognitive processing limitation.
What this means for organizations is that you want to be very mindful of organizational group structure. Anything beyond 150 is going to be in the tribal zone, where you have to question and measure whether or not you have a collective identity that these 10,000 employees are proud to belong to.
And you can measure it, you can ask them on a survey, and that number will tell you the health of your identity, which directly predicts work satisfaction. So, you have to be very mindful of that 150 zone and be very strategic on how you leverage face-to-face relationships in order to build trust and psychological safety.
When David says “psychological safety”, it’s different than the typical HR definition. He explains the number one factor to building workplace satisfaction in the video below:
The Evolutionary Advantage of Multigenerational Teams
SpSp: How does anthropology inform intergenerational workplace issues?
DS: The age issue is actually fascinating. Starting from the time we stopped living in the canopies of East Africa, which was approximately 2.5 million years ago, and our ancestors came to live on the ground full time, we can see from the bones left over that there was demographic variability. This means those groups had a nice balance between the young and the old, and this allowed them to survive in that environment.
Very few animals have what we call alloparenting, famously known as the grandmother hypothesis, where you’re not just concerned about the survival and reproduction of your offspring, you’re concerned about the survival and reproduction of their offspring. So, you live long enough, and you have enough life experience, that can actually help the survivorship.
So, I think this speaks to the modern workplace because there is so much you can tap into when it comes to demographic variability. If strategically leveraged, it could yield multiple dimensions of success at the organizational level.
The Sleep Paradox: Lessons From Our Evolutionary Past
SpSp: What are we losing by sacrificing primitive insights in pursuit of progress? Can we thrive by tapping into primal knowledge on sleep?
DS: There is so much we can learn from the old. Much of it is just embedded in our physiology, our biology, and our psychology. If you ignore that, it’s equivalent to swimming upstream all the time.
Humans have a lot of freedom in their behaviour, but ones that go against our nature are intrinsically just more expensive and costly to do. What I urge people to think about is how they can ride those drives and surf them in a way that they’re not fighting the current, but leveraging it to achieve health, wellness, and performance.
An example is sleep. I’ve been studying sleep in primates and humans for the past half decade, and my research program discovered something really cool. When you look at sleep cross culturally, small scale societies have significantly shorter sleep durations and much poorer sleep quality. We assumed that they had more of a paleo sleep — sleeping a fresh 10 hours every night, and it was perfect. Turns out it’s the exact opposite.
This runs directly counter to this “sleep epidemic” narrative we hear on the news. The global north, including North America, are sleeping longer and better than they ever have likely in our evolutionary history. That’s surprising, especially since we have such anxiety about sleep. The reason why I think this is happening is because we’ve made major technological gains in terms of security and comfort in our sleep space. Those are gains that you don’t want to throw away.
But the remarkable discovery from these small-scale foragers and other societies was that their circadian rhythms are significantly greater than us in the West. So, if we can find a way to leverage the science and technology with our paleo instincts, we can get a synthesis that allows us to escape this evolutionary mismatch we’re in, and finally be in a state of sync with our bodies and our minds.
David dives deeper into this “evolutionary mismatch” and his research into sleep in the video below:
Harness the Power of Evolutionary Insights
Want to stay ahead in an increasingly complex business landscape? David R. Samson‘s research-backed strategies help organizations align with human evolutionary design rather than fighting against it. Discover how to optimize team dynamics, enhance leadership, and create environments where people naturally thrive. Contact us today to bring David and his transformative insights to your next event.
