Part of a series exploring how economic thought leads to cognition and cognitive behaviour
Looking at our brain through the evolutionary rear-view mirror we can marvel at its abilities.
A kilogram and a half of organic matter furnishes us with a rendering of our world, gives us a toolkit for understanding it and automatically takes care of a plethora of other functions we need to survive.
We haven’t just arrived at this point and, being constrained by our three score years and ten of existence, it can be quite hard for us to fathom our frame of reference. As a rough guide if your lifespan is 70 years you will experience about 4.4 billion half seconds. Oceans formed on the earth about 4.4 billion years ago.
So, every half second you experience on this scale is equivalent to one year in earth’s history with an appropriate medium to incubate life in some form.
The speed at which humans have been able to colonise earth is unbelievable. Along with our own constrained perspective it is easy to see why some believe in a deity as a guiding hand in our progress.
But we didn’t arrive at this point by a happy accident.
We have evolved the brains that our ancestors needed.
Ensconced in our cosy first world lives within a generation we have forgotten how callous and unsentimental survival is – and it was probably our ancestors who were responsible for dishing out more than they took for us to be here.
Our ancestors were only successful if they could outperform their environment and the other entities within it.
It may seem strange to us when we come with our senses pre-installed but we only have them because our forebears needed them to exploit their world and they managed to do so better than their peers, competitors or predators.
Those traits that we didn’t need weren’t selected for and those that were in demand were. For instance, we have a sense of smell, but it is not a sensitive as a dog’s is. For our ancestors to survive it didn’t need to be. For a canine’s ancestor it did. Our ancestors found success in being able to infer intent from another’s disposition. This has been programmed into our DNA in numerous ways. The whites of human eye or the sclera are obviously visible in our species, allowing us to see the focus of another’s attention and aid cooperation on tasks without other forms of communication.
With the lens of pragmatism the mystery of our brain falls away.
We may not always like the answer that it gives us, but that can depend on whether you want to find knowledge or invent it.
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