Evolutionary Ergonomics – A Position Statement
Posted on: January 26, 2026
Author: Dr. Scott W. Donkin, DC, DACBOH
What Is Evolutionary Ergonomics?
Evolutionary Ergonomics is a developing framework that examines how modern environments, tools, and daily behaviors interact with bodies shaped by millions of years of human evolution – and how intentional design and learnable skills can restore alignment between the two.
While traditional ergonomics focuses on comfort, efficiency, and injury reduction, evolutionary ergonomics adds a deeper lens:
Does the way we live, sit, work, and rest support how the human body and nervous system evolved to organize readiness, stability, and action?
This perspective does not reject modern life. Instead, it asks how modern civilization can be inhabited skillfully, rather than endured.
Why Evolution Matters in Ergonomics
The human body did not evolve in offices, vehicles, classrooms, or digital environments – yet today we spend much of our lives in them. As a result, many common postural and movement challenges are not failures of the body, but mismatches between evolutionary design and modern conditions.
Evolutionary ergonomics recognizes that:
- Many modern “weaknesses” are actually untrained capacities
- Chronic strain often reflects skill absence, not structural failure
- Repeated daily behaviors quietly shape nervous system states, resilience, and agency
From this view, the solution is not avoidance of modern behaviors – but learning how to meet them well.
From Weakness to Strength
A core principle of evolutionary ergonomics is this:
Human transformation occurs when a perceived weakness is not avoided, but trained – until it becomes a strength.
Sitting offers a clear example. Over time, sitting has been framed as a human liability. Yet sitting itself is not inherently harmful. What is harmful is unskilled sitting – sitting that collapses structure, dampens readiness, and disconnects the body from its innate organizational intelligence.
When sitting is understood and practiced as a learnable human skill, it can shift from a source of fatigue and strain into a source of stability, clarity, and functional readiness. In that moment, a modern weakness becomes a modern strength – an example of conscious, practical human evolution.
Relationship to Existing Fields
Evolutionary ergonomics does not replace established disciplines. It builds upon them:
- Evolutionary biomechanics helps explain how the human body evolved to manage forces
- Ergonomics and human factors address how environments can be made safer and more efficient
- Neuroscience illuminates states of readiness, threat, and coherence
Evolutionary ergonomics integrates these perspectives and extends them into daily life, asking not only how things are built, but how humans are trained – consciously or unconsciously – by the environments they inhabit.
Power Sitting as a Case Study
The concept of Power SittingTM emerges from this evolutionary ergonomics perspective. It explores how sitting – one of the most repeated postures in modern life – can be transformed from a passive condition into an active, skillful state that supports human health, performance, and well-being.
Power Sitting is not presented as a posture to hold, but as a learnable organizational skill that aligns modern sitting with the body’s evolutionary design for readiness and action.
A Living Framework
Evolutionary ergonomics is offered here as a living, evolving framework—one intended to grow through research, education, design, and practical application. While sitting is a natural entry point, this perspective has relevance across many aspects of modern life, including movement, work, technology use, and recovery.
This page is published to establish authorship, clarify intent, and invite thoughtful exploration of how human evolution and modern living can be brought back into constructive relationship.
©2026 Scott W. Donkin. All rights reserved.
Evolutionary Ergonomics is presented here as an original integrative framework. This material is shared for educational and authorship-establishing purposes.