Mismatch: How Our Stone Age Brain Deceives Us Every Day and What We Can Do about It ( London: Robinson, 2018 ), 346 pages. ISBN: 9781472139702. Paperback $12.18.

Correspondence: Gregg R. Murray, Augusta University, Department of Social Sciences, Augusta, Georgia, 30912-0004. Email: [email protected]

Giphart Ronald. and Vugt Mark van., Mismatch: How Our Stone Age Brain Deceives Us Every Day and What We Can Do about It (London: Robinson, 2018), 346 pages. ISBN: 9781472139702. Paperback $12.18.

What happens when humans live in an anonymous but densely populated, digitally dependent world, while they are equipped with a brain adapted to living in small hunter-gatherer groups of family and friends roaming sparsely populated open grasslands? Answering this question is the challenge accepted by Ronald Giphart and Mark van Vugt in their book Mismatch: How Our Stone Age Brain Deceives Us Every Day and What We Can Do About It. The concept of mismatch plays an integral role in evolutionary psychology. As these authors define it, mismatch occurs when “as the result of a change in the environment, the survival and reproductive chances of [a] particular species’ individuals diminish” (p. 4) or “when species are faced with a rapidly changing environment to which their hardware and software—their body and mind—are not well adapted” (p. 18).

Giphart and van Vugt argue that humans’ bodies and minds are finely tuned to physical and social environments that existed about 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago. During this period, which evolutionary psychologists refer to as the environment of evolutionary adaptation, ancestral humans faced a multitude of selection pressures that contributed to this fine-tuning process, including “famine, spiders and insect bites, large predators, much internal violence, and high baby and infant mortality” (p. 59). But around 10,000 years ago, humans began to cultivate and permanently settle land and to domesticate animals. This instigated a “Big Bang for humanity” in the form of an agricultural revolution that led to fundamental changes to the physical and social environment of human ancestors. For example, families and communal groups grew in size as access to food became more certain and excess food production enabled large-scale trade. In some cases, the mismatches between ancestral humans’ bodies and minds and their new environment promoted the evolutionary goals of survival and reproduction, and in some cases, they did not.

As their Stone Age brains responded to exaggerated, fake, obsolete, or missing cues from their new environment, humans used their...