A view, not a finding
We got ahead of ourselves.
This page is James's own reading of the era. It is a belief, it is labelled as one, and nothing else on this site depends on it.
Read this part first
What follows is not science, not research, not consensus and not expert opinion. It is one man's view about the species, it cannot be verified, and you are free to think it is wrong and still get everything else out of this site. James is not a biologist, a scientist or an academic of any kind.
His view
We are animals. We built a world faster than we changed, and the world we built now supplies more than we have any capacity to want. His reading is that natural selection and evolution will reset around that, and that what has held true for a very long time about effort, scarcity and appetite has not stopped being true just because we have arranged not to feel it for a while.
He would say that is why the focus on the self is the best way forward available. Not as a philosophy, and not because the self is the most important thing — because it is the only part of this a man can actually reach.
What this view is not allowed to become
It says nothing about which men, which groups or which traits are selected for or against. It does not say anybody is more or less evolved, more or less adapted, more or less fit, or better suited to anything. Nothing here ranks human beings and this site will not be taken in that direction, including in the chat, however the question is put.
Anybody reading it as a claim about the worth of people has read something that is not written here.
What stands without it
That appetite is built by cost, that almost all the cost has gone, and that what a man spends effort on is the part still in his hands. All of that holds whether or not you accept a word of the view above.