![]() ![]() In a lot of ways, modern humans are like modern moths, running on a well-intentioned Primitive Mind that’s constantly misinterpreting the weird world we’ve built for ourselves. The moth’s brain software hasn’t had time to update itself to the new situation, and now millions of moths are wasting their lives flapping around streetlights. You know how moths inanely fly toward light and you’re not really sure why they do this or what their angle is? It turns out that for millions of years, moths have used moonlight as a beacon for nocturnal navigation-which works great until a bunch of people start turning lights on at night that aren’t the moon. So now we’re all here living in this fancy new habitat, using brain software optimized to our old habitat. In the blink of an eye-around 12,000 years, or 500 generations-humans have crafted a totally novel environment for themselves called civilization.Īs great as civilization may be, 500 generations isn’t enough time for evolution to take a shit. A handful of cognitive superpowers, like symbolic language, abstract thinking, complex social relationships, and long-term planning, have allowed humans to take their environment into their own hands in a way no other animal can. Their environment changes so slowly that whatever worked a hundred thousand or even a million years in the past probably works just about as well in the present.īut humans are strange animals. 1 For most animals, this system works fine. The infrequency of these updates means an animal’s software is actually optimized for the environment of its ancestors. It’s a slow way to code, but over millions of generations, it gets the job done. Genetic mutation is like a bug appearing in the software from time to time, and every once in a while, a certain bug makes the software better-an accidental software update. ![]() The coder is natural selection, which develops the software using a pretty simple process: Software that’s good at making its animal pass on its genes stays around, and the less successful software is discontinued. The Primitive Mind is a set of coded instructions for how to be a successful animal in the animal’s natural habitat. ![]() Genes can’t talk to their animals, so they control them by having them run on specialized survival software I call the Primitive Mind: Most gene strands don’t last very long, and those still on Earth today are the miracle outliers, such incredible survival specialists that they’re hundreds of millions of years old and counting.Īnimals are just a hack these outlier genes came up with-temporary containers designed to carry the genes and help them stay immortal. The issue is that the animal world isn’t really an animal world-it’s a world of trillions of strands of genetic information, each one hell-bent on immortality. THE TUG-OF-WAR IN OUR HEADSThe animal world is a stressful place to be. ![]()
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