Abstract

Evolutionary biology shows that organisms have many traits that developed by natural selection as adaptations to their environment. The so-called 'mismatch theory' holds that if the environment changes faster than the ability of the organism to adapt and evolve, it finds itself mismatched to its environment. Studies in evolutionary psychology suggest that this is the case with many human emotional responses. In this essay I explore the implications of these studies for ethics of technological risk, paying particular attention to risks related to the World Wide Web. Connecting insights from evolutionary psychology with emotion theory and psychology of risk perception, I discuss the tension between the task of improving learning processes concerning present technological risks and the task of changing our social-technological environments guided by ethical considerations. I conclude that both tasks should be informed by the growing body of knowledge about the relation between our evolved emotional make-up and the way we live our lives. However, it is up to us to decide to what extent and how we take our evolutionary past into account in our attempts to reshape our environment and ourselves.