The ConsumHERist - Evolution

Posted on | October 9, 2008 |

By, Delia Passi

I think a lot about our primitive instincts, how they came about and how they’ve manifested themselves in our modern behavior.  Of course, the modern behaviors I focus on are the ones that drive women in their shopping and purchasing, and how attention to those primitive instincts often applies when selling to women.

Two stories that I came across this week caught my attention.  One was about how a Welsh geneticist stated controversially that evolution has effectively come to a standstill.  I don’t really wish to get into a debate over whether evolution has ceased, although I think it has at least seriously slowed down.  Consider how science, technology, nutrition or medicine has allowed many children to routinely survive to the age of reproduction, which is central to this scientist’s conclusion.  

My inclination, however, is to consider how survival skills long ago locked many of our evolutionary traits in place and have kept them intact ever since.  Men’s and women’s behavior patterns had evolved for the good of the family and the tribe.  Once weapons and agriculture developed, assured survival at a very basic level altered the direction of our evolutionary changes toward more physical changes, and less toward psychological development.  

 I’m not an evolutionary scientist though, just a sales and marketing specialist, which is in itself a peculiar survival adaptation.  Knowing that evolution has slowed to a crawl or stopped for humans is comforting to me.  I can be assured that salespeople will continue to be born with those primitive instincts to act inappropriately when selling to women, and I will be assured of my survival.

The other article was about how prehistoric cave art took thousands of years to complete.  That too made me think about evolution.  The article tells of how the caves where the art was found do not appear to be where they lived, and that the art may have taken literally thousands of years to reach completion. 

My instant reaction was to believe that these caves were the probable hangouts of the males of the tribe, the equivalent of the prehistoric sports bar.  Where else would you find a place where a decorating project can take hundreds of generations to complete? 

Delia Passi, Founder of WomenCertified® and author of Winning the Toughest Customer: The Essential Guide to Selling to Women is a regular columnist on eBrandMarketing.

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