What Makes Us Human and How Has That Changed?
How our mind-bending evolutionary trajectory made life a game of incomplete information.
What is the meaning of life? How should one live?
Humans have been wrestling with these questions for thousands of years.
It is really more like mixed martial arts.
We have developed and deployed numerous techniques to aid us in our quest for answers. In our collective encounter with the unknown, kickboxing and jiu-jitsu are replaced by religion, philosophy, and science — each a distinct domain of inquiry.
But while the mixed martial artist must integrate numerous combat techniques into a unified system of fighting, our species’ deepest religious, philosophic, and scientific pursuits usually happen separately, in isolation from each other.
Too often, we lack a system of living.
Life is short.
We only have so much Time to pursue and acquire new information, so we often specialize in a narrow field.
And in our increasingly complex and confusing world, this trend has only been accelerating.
Ideas can long outlive their creators, so the intellectual contributions of each passing generation will slowly pile up, but not always with cohesion. The knowledge available to our species has dramatically expanded, but our lifespans and mental capacities have not kept pace.
As we acquaint ourselves with an ever-shrinking proportion of existing knowledge, modern human life has increasingly become a game of incomplete information.
It is also a game of decision making.
But having too many choices to make, in too many different areas, impairs our ability to choose wisely. We have traversed the “information age” and entered an era of information overload. It’s rarely talked about, but we can all feel it.
How should we use our Time?
What Food should we eat?
How should we spend our Money?
The modern possibilities are endless.
Our individual options will differ and are not equally distributed amongst our species. But as a group, we have never had so many choices.
This is usually a good thing, but it can also become overwhelming.
Consider animals.
They don’t use Money, so their Time must be used to directly acquire Food. Unable to purchase what cannot be acquired directly, animals are materially constrained in ways that humans are not.
And lacking our species’ special combination of “software” and “hardware” (big brains and opposable thumbs), there are only so many ways that each animal species can use their Time to acquire Food.
Animals have no choice but to accept the nourishment that nature offers directly, and which they are physically capable of obtaining.
This bug or that bug.
This grass or that grass.
But things are very different for humans.
Hunter-gatherers lived nomadically in small groups and worked together to convert their Time directly into Food, with little to no use of Money. They hunted or gathered the Foods they required, but with orders of magnitude more choice than animals.
Our physical and cognitive advantages allowed us to both alter and learn from our environment, leading to the discovery of ever-more ingenious ways to hunt and gather.
By adapting inherited ancestral knowledge to their current challenges and environments, early humans gradually broadened the range of possible courses of action that could facilitate survival.
By learning to identify, hunt, gather, and prepare many different types of Foods from nature, humans became more biologically resilient, further differentiating ourselves from animals.
Once we discovered how to farm and raise livestock (First Agricultural Revolution, around 10,000BC), our species’ resiliency relative to animals was extended even further.
But while growing or raising Food can now be considered a practical use of Time — though perhaps a boring one for modern city-dwellers — the situation was very different for our “founding farmers”.
Imagine being in this position.
Your hunter-gatherer life was centered around two, basic ways to acquire Food.
Time could be spent either hunting animal Food or gathering plant Food. There were some options within each category, but you ultimately had to accept what nature offered. This was how life worked, dictating the “way of being” for your whole social circle — until a series of strange encounters with members of neighboring tribes.
One day, your tribe is approached by a small, visibly shaken group who has fled their own tribe because their leaders had become possessed by magic and superstition.
They explained how their leaders, after ingesting some unknown substance, started to believe that Food could be willed out of the ground — so long as the proper rituals involving sun and water were observed.
There were even rumors of controlling animal behavior. It was all too much.
Dismayed by their leaders’ rash abandonment of tradition and blatant descent into witchcraft, this small group of dedicated hunter-gatherers went their own way.
Your tribe initially ignores this unusual encounter.
But after a series of similar meetings with the same warnings being shared, a profound realization begins to dawn on your own leaders:
New methods of Food acquisition have been discovered that were unknown to our ancestors.
They involve harnessing nature to our advantage.
This called into question the completeness of our inherited ancestral knowledge.
Human minds began to open, and we’ve never looked back.