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Generally I think we've evolved a lot more than orthodox thinking gives us credit for since the agricultural revolution. We still have some vestiges of our hunter-gatherer roots, but most of us have had ancestors cultivating crops for millennia.

As for life in the metropolis, we're a little less well adapted to us.

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You may be right. Most anthropologists see technological/memetic evolution as largely supplanting genetic evolution after the sedentary shift (so that we, say, invent glasses rather than getting better eyes), but I often wonder myself how much we've changed in the last 10,000 years or so.

And I agree that the city is (speaking emotively and not scientifically here) especially brutal. And yet strangely inescapable. I've adopted Emerson's strategy of living in the countryside in the orbit of a great city, and descending on it from time to time.

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