We've been thinking about happiness and the recent stats bandied about by people who have read Sonja Lyubomirsky's research and began wondering about the evolution of happiness.
Sonja's findings reveal that happiness is determined by the following factors:
50% - Your genes
40% - What you think about the world and your attitude to what happens to you
10% - Your physical environment and social and personal circumstances
Apparently you can tip the balance on the happiness scale favourably against the genetic dimension by focussing your attention on positively re-framing your thinking around what you believe and value and then acting (where and when possible) to change your situation.
The biologist Bruce Lipton suggests that thinking energised positive thoughts and maintaining a positive attitude actually impacts on our genes by turning off 'bad' genes and turning on 'good' genes. Dr Ernest Rossi tells us that his research is revealing that novelty, life-enriching experiences and physical exercise can turn on positive gene expression within minutes throughout the body and brain so we can actually reconstruct ourselves from a genetic level. And Dr Jeffrey Schwarz has a body of research on brain plasticity that shows thinking really does alters the structures in our brains to help us overcome phobias.
If these eminent individuals are to be believed then we can evolve into 'happy' beings with a bit of concentrated thought. However, as the brain is the most energy hungry organ in the human body using up to 20% of our energy reserves we might want to consider some genetic engineering type surgery to help us along. This might seem like the equivalent of genetic liposuction but this snippet from an article by Olly Bootle in the 'Independent' highlights more on this:
"When it comes to changes in our future, it's hard to think of anything that will have as much of an impact on our evolution as our ability to tamper directly with our genes.
Dr Jeff Steinberg runs The Fertility Institutes in Los Angeles, a fertility clinic that helps couples to conceive using IVF. Using a technique called Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), embryos are screened to try to ensure they're free of genetic diseases.
During the screening process, it's obvious whether an embryo is male or female, and couples can choose the sex of the embryo to be implanted in the womb. This is illegal in the UK, but in the US, "anyone can choose. They can choose a boy, or a girl, and we've done this close to 9,000 times now," Dr Steinberg says.
But genetic diseases and the sex of the embryo aren't the only traits that Dr Steinberg's technicians can see. The clinic attracted controversy recently when it announced that it would allow parents to choose the eye and hair colour of their offspring. "We heard from a lot of people, including the Catholic Church, that had some big problems with it," says Dr Steinberg. "So we retracted it, even though we can do it, we're not doing it."
Dr Steinberg is in little doubt that PGD, and genetic engineering more broadly, will play a major role in humanity's future. "I think it will play a huge part in our evolution and I think rightfully so. We need to be cautious about it because it can go right and it can go wrong, but I think trying to remove it as part of our future evolution is just a task that's not going to be accomplished."
It turns out that our culture and technology, like genetic engineering, can change our world so much that rather than sheltering us from natural selection, it can actually drive our evolution.
As Stearns says: "We see rapid evolution when there's rapid environmental change, and the biggest part of our environment is culture, and culture is exploding. We are continuing to evolve, our biology is going to change with culture and it's just a matter of not being able to see it because we're stuck in the middle of the process right now."
It seems that the direction of our future evolution may be driven not by nature, but by us."
Hmmmmmm.....Happy co-creating!
Tom
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