The human animal

Are we reaching the limits of our capacity?

Humans don’t want complexity. We are wired to solve problems and move forward into the future yet the way we do it is leaning seems simple and straightforward yet there are so many underlying mechanisms in between that the average person will never bother attempting to seek the very bottom layer of causality. Have you ever encountered asking yourself why you hate complex problems like the debugging a computer glitch or diagnosing your car that broke down? The only thing that you will want in these sorts of situations is for pain to go away. But the more you try to google an answer or rotate a wrench makes you more frustrated. The more frustrated you are, the time horizon stretches and makes you feel more fustration. This is the process until you somehow see some solution emanating from your method of choice - like calling a computer technician or a car mechanic for their service, again all we do want in life is for pain to go away as fast as possible.

I bet you get my point. An easy life is staying away from too much complexity like solving a thousands of problems like I have presented above. But the truth is everyone in this world cannot disconnect themselves from the grip of reality where life itself is too complex, ever changing to forces that we can and cannot even control. Being human is by default hard for all of us.

Evolutionary perspective helps us understand how we are vastly unique as animals, we are remarkably upgraded in a lot of different areas…

• Nutrition - Diversity in source of vitamins and nutrients to support the tremendous requirement of maintaining cognitive and motor requirements. It is believed to be that our earlier dependence to a fat rich diet from bone marrow or mamoth meat enabled the formation of the cortex - which allows us to basically do everything that is uniquely human.
• Language - The ability to utter subtle variations of sounds that can describe stories, warn against danger and enable basic execution of hunting and survival strategies, especially in larger groups of people.
• Eyesight - The human eye is one of the best in the animal kingdom - powerful enough to recognize patterns subconciously, recognize color variations like determining which one is ripe or fit for consumption.
• Agility - The ability to handle mobility (while on ground) and handle weapons in both hands and execute a kill or defensive stance is something worth savoring.
• Dexterity - Our nimble hands and fingers enabled the formation unique neural pathways and undertanding of the physical world. Our ability to perceive and configure shapes, weight and sizes of things vastly improved feeling through our hands.

Survival of the fittest is a the primal game that all living organisms play. Our uniqueness shot us to the top of the food chain in recent modern history and we continue to do gain foothold on how we interact with the natural world. (TBC..)

The natural world is harder to understand nowadays as modern society tries to cluster into cities or much worse is spending too much time with our smarthones. Yet evolution is still at play and we cannot deny the fact that we are biological creatures, trying to move forward into the future. We learned how to defend ourselves using spears and stones, cook our wood through fire, built farms that feed so villages and castle walls that protect the citizens. Through this rolling process of improving technology and scientific research we are now in a position in the 20th century where you can potentially wire your brain directly to the internet and harness the data google have and become a walking library or university. Our strive to solve fundamental problems, however small they are across millenia became the driving force to the thriving of the genus homo. We are the biggest badass predator ever to walk the face of the planet.

This have proven to be the hallmark of our human existence as we have thrived to dilluting any situation to a minimum, we configured so much profound discoveries in the past 10,000 years that enabled the modern living so easy as a result of maximizing some basic evolutionary pathways. We exploded to 7.7 billion in the last century and became the most dominant force ever to walk the face of this world. The explosive growth of our influence for the natural world is best shown in our ability to build cities and technologies and yes the negative footprints of all kinds of pollution and over extraction of natural resources.

Variations across the same species over thousands (or even millions) of years enabled the creation of new species. That is how the story of life on earth has came about. It took one billion years from the big bang to create single celled organisms that later become multi-cellular and later become fish, then rats, then apes, then homo sapiens - Us. This might seem so absurd to you how life on earth is created as this abstraction seems so unbelievable but darwinian theory is the best we’ve got in explaining this slow moving proces of species trying to move forward their kind into the future.

But it would be so dumb to think that we are the center of the universe, thinking that yeah we made it to the 20th century and let us close the history books. The mere fact that a pandemic can still happen despite the advanced medical science we have, we can’t just dispense how fragile our center of the universe is. An evolutionary view of everything we do - walking, running, talking, eating, sex, thinking, sleeping, working becomes more profound if you factor that in each activity is built by tiny changes (good or bad) over long stretches of time.

(Heavy writing, a great rough draft of ideas about evolutionary thinking…)