Science Daily tries to find the evolutionary roots of …oooh, shiny! I’ll finish this tomorrow:
From an evolutionary standpoint, impulsivity makes sense: Our ancestors should have been inclined to seek immediate rewards when the next day was uncertain.
Procrastination, on the other hand, may have emerged more recently in human history. In the modern world, we have many distinct goals far in the future that we need to prepare for — when we’re impulsive and easily distracted from those long-term goals, we often procrastinate.
Thinking about the two traits in that context, it seems logical that people who are perpetual procrastinators would also be highly impulsive.
…
[Daniel Gustavson of the University of Colorado Boulder] and colleagues had 181 identical-twin pairs and 166 fraternal-twin pairs complete several surveys intended to probe their tendencies toward impulsivity and procrastination, as well as their ability to set and maintain goals.
They found that procrastination is indeed heritable, just like impulsivity. Not only that, there seems to be a complete genetic overlap between procrastination and impulsivity — that is, there are no genetic influences that are unique to either trait alone.
That finding suggests that, genetically speaking, procrastination is an evolutionary byproduct of impulsivity — one that likely manifests itself more in the modern world than in the world of our ancestors.
So… it’s the same thing that makes us put stuff off that also helped us survive the saber-toothed tiger, yeah? Right?