From Stone Age to Phone Age.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Evolutionary psychology and cellular telephones - Humor

Consider when you last heard someone say into a cell phone: `Yes, I am a worthless turd, and if I screw up again, please hasten to fire me.'

I was struck by the primal force of my craving for a cell phone. Obviously, others must have felt this, too, since there are now an estimated 100 million people worldwide running around and talking into the air, with only a small black object nestling against one ear to distinguish them from the deinstitutionalized psychotics. It had become impossible to go anywhere--out on the street, to a shopping mall, or to an airport--without noticing that every other person in earshot was engaged in a vast and urgent ongoing conversation which excluded only myself.

For a stylish explanation of primal urges and even ordinary whims, we turn to evolutionary psychology, which claims that we do what we do because our apelike ancestors once did the same thing. It doesn't matter that our ape-like ancestors did not possess cell phones; they no doubt had cell-phone-related urges. Like most of our primate cousins, humans are social animals. Paleo-anthropologists think we got this way when we left the safety of the forests for the wide open savanna, where we had to band together for defense against a slew of nasty predators. Hence, we are hardwired for wireless telecommunications, or at least for the need to be verbally connected to others of our kind--in case a leopard is lurking nearby. The explosion of cell phone use is simply a reflection of the genetically scripted human inclination to huddle in groups.

There is another interpretation of the evolutionary psychology of cell phones, according to which the cell phone users are seeking not fellowship but isolation from the hordes of fellow humans around them. To a non-cell-phone user, the cell phoners marching through supermarkets and malls project an aura of total inaccessibility. Maybe they are really having meaningful and satisfying conversations. And maybe they are simply trying to repel the advances of any phone-less fellow humans who happen to be physically present.

In their 1992 book, The Social Cage: Human Nature and the Evolution of Society (Stanford University Press), Alexandra Maryanski and Jonathan H. Turner argue that for eons before our ancestors were forced to band together in the savanna, they lived contented solitary lives in the trees, much like orangutans today. Our arboreal ancestors were probably pleased to run into others of their own kind only at...