Evolution has conferred upon us a brain that is capable of truly amazing things.\u00a0 We have, for thousands of years, been capable of creating incredibly beautiful art, telling compelling tales, and building magnificent structures.\u00a0 We have risen from small and dispersed tribal bands to perhaps the dominate life force on the planet.\u00a0 Our feats have been wondrous.\u00a0 We have put men on the moon, our space probes have reached the outer limits of our solar system, and we have people living and working in space.\u00a0 We have literally doubled the life expectancy of human beings, figured out how to feed billions of people, and eradicated some of the most dreadful diseases known to human kind.\u00a0 We can join together in virtual social communities from remote corners of the world, and even change nations using Facebook and Twitter.\u00a0 This list could go on and on.\u00a0 We are very capable and very smart beings.<\/p>\n
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Our mark on this planet, for the moment, is indelible.\u00a0 Yet, despite our great powers of intellect and creativity, we are incredibly vulnerable.\u00a0 I am not referring to our susceptibility to the great powers of nature as evidenced in Japan this last week.\u00a0 I am referring to an inherent mode of thinking that is core to our human nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It is pretty certain that nature-nature<\/em> will destroy our species at some point in the future, be it via asteroid impact, super-volcanoes, climate change, microbiome evolution, or the encroachment of the sun’s surface as it goes red giant in five billion years.\u00a0 Of all the species that have ever lived on this planet over 99% have gone extinct.\u00a0 What’s living today will someday be gone – there really is no question about it.\u00a0 But the question that remains is: “Will nature-nature do us in – or will human-nature do it first?”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We have evolved over billions of years to our current homo sapien (wise man) form, and for the vast majority of that evolutionary period, we have had very limited technology.\u00a0 The development of primitive stone and wooden tools dates back only tens of thousands of years; and reading and writing dates back only several thousand years.\u00a0 What we do and take for granted every day has only been around for a minuscule amount of time relative to the vastness of incomprehensible evolutionary and geological time. These facts are relevant because our brains, for the most part, developed under selective pressures that were vastly different than those we live under today.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Much as our appendix and coccyx hair follicle are remnants of our evolutionary past, so too are some of our core thought processes.\u00a0 These vestigial cognitions play out both as adaptive intuitions and potentially quite destructive errors of judgment.\u00a0 We would like to think that as an advanced thinking species, our ability to use reason, is our dominate mental force.\u00a0 Unfortunately, this most recent evolutionary development, takes a back seat to lower and more powerful brain functions that have sustained us for millions of years.\u00a0 I have previously written<\/a> about this reason versus intuition\/emotion paradigm<\/a> so I won’t go into this issue in detail here; but, suffice it to say, much of what we do is guided by unconscious thought processes outside of our awareness and outside our direct control<\/a>.\u00a0 And again, these life guiding processes are mere remnants of what it took to survive as roaming bands of hunters and gatherers.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ours brains came to their current form when we were not in possession of the tools and technologies that help us truly understand the world around us today.\u00a0 Early survival depended on our ability to see patterns in randomness (pareidolia<\/a> or patternicity) and to make snap judgments.\u00a0 Rational thought, which is slow and arduous<\/a>, has not played out in a dominate way because it failed to provide our ancestors with the survival advantages that emotional and rapid cognitions did.\u00a0 As such, our brains have been programmed by evolution to make all kinds of rapid cognitions, that in this modern time, are simply prone to error.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We are uncomfortable with randomness and chaos and are driven to pull together causal stories that help us make sense of the world.\u00a0 Our brains are correlation calculators, belief engines, and hyperactive agency detection devices<\/a> – all inclinations of which lead us to develop polytheism to help explain the whims of “mother nature.”\u00a0 All cultures, for example have also developed creation myths to help explain how we came to be.\u00a0 We are a superstitious<\/a> lot driven by these vestigial remnants.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It is easy to see how powerful this inclination is.\u00a0 Look at the prevalence of beliefs about things like full moons<\/a> and bad behavior.\u00a0 And how about bad behavior and acts of nature?\u00a0 Pat Robertson blamed Katrina on homosexuality and hedonism.\u00a0 One wonders what the Japanese did to deserve their most current tragedy.\u00a0 I’ve already heard talk of the attack on Pearl Harbor as an antecedent.\u00a0 Like mother nature would align with the United States to punish long past deeds against us!\u00a0 If mother nature cares at all about herself, I wonder what we have coming for Nagasaki and Hiroshima?\u00a0 Likewise, people blame vaccines for autism<\/a> and credit homeopathy for their wellness.\u00a0 I could go and on about our silly inclinations.\u00a0 We are prone to Confirmation Bias<\/a>, Spinoza’s Conjecture<\/a>, Attribution Error<\/a>, Illusions of Attention<\/a>, and the Illusions of Knowledge and Confidence<\/a>.\u00a0 In the same vein, we are manipulated by the Illusion of Narrative also known as the Narrative Fallacy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n