By Bernard Crespi, Professor, Evolutionary Biology, Simon Fraser University; and Xingwei (Nancy) Yang, Assistant Professor, Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University Imagine a tribe of uncontacted hunter-gatherers in the deepest Amazon rainforest. Anthropologists airdrop dozens of smartphones loaded with social media apps, with solar chargers, simple instructions in their native language and Wi-Fi just within the tribe. What would happen to their culture and their mental health? Such an experiment appears fanciful, but a similar one has been unfolding in our world for about 20 years. For the first time in human evolution, everyday social interactions have changed from face-to-face to disembodied experiences, from in-person to digital and from social reality to whatever someone puts online. Social media is an evolutionary novelty, like M&M’s, e-cigarettes, fentanyl and H-bombs….
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