Everything is better than it used to be — or is it? | Agustín Fuentes
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Oct 22, 2025
Biological anthropologist Agustín Fuentes challenges the idea that human population growth equates to evolutionary success. He presents a thought-provoking argument that such success should consider broader measures, including health, security, and well-being, rather than just numbers. Fuentes emphasizes the importance of cultural perspectives, questioning the Euro-American bias in defining progress. His insights reveal a more nuanced view of human flourishing and its distribution across different societies.
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insights INSIGHT
Numbers Don't Equal Success
Traditional evolutionary success measures focus on persistence, adaptation, and growth of populations.
Agustín Fuentes points out 8 billion humans show traditional success but raises ethical and ecological concerns.
insights INSIGHT
Question Who 'We' Means
Claims that humans are doing better often assume a singular, undefined 'we.'
Fuentes warns that such claims reflect mainly Euro-American cultural perspectives, excluding many lived experiences.
insights INSIGHT
One Culture's View Isn't Universal
A single cultural framework drives many assertions of global improvement.
Fuentes emphasizes diverse societies experience different outcomes and many suffered under that framework.
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The traditional measure of evolutionary success is a population's ability to continue, adapt and grow. By that measure, humanity has been a huge success: our population is only getting bigger, and for a lot of countries, so is our average life-span.
Biological anthropologist Agustín Fuentes takes issue with this measurement. In his view, the sheer number of humans living on the planet doesn't necessarily equate to success. In fact, the argument that humans are doing better than ever before is problematic, because it only considers a narrow perspective of Euro-American societies, ignoring other vast cultures and populations.
Instead, Fuentes argues, evolutionary success for humans should be measured by our capacity for flourishing, which includes health, security, interaction, and well-being — and importantly, how this flourishing is distributed across our species.
0:00 What is evolutionary success?
1:07 Is everything getting better?
1:32 Response #1. Who is “we”?
1:51 Response #2. One broad culture
2:24 Response #3. What is the measure of success?
3:21 Distributing human flourishing
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About Agustín Fuentes:
Agustín Fuentes, a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. Earning his BA/BS in Anthropology and Zoology and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley, he has conducted research across four continents, multiple species, and two-million years of human history. His current projects include exploring cooperation, creativity, and belief in human evolution, multispecies anthropologies, evolutionary theory and processes, and engaging race and racism. Fuentes’ books include Race, Monogamy, and other lies they told you: busting myths about human nature (U of California), The Creative Spark: how imagination made humans exceptional (Dutton), and Why We Believe: evolution and the human way of being (Yale).
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