Chapter 2. Animals Becoming Humans

Consider human history as our struggle to feed ourselves and stay alive. What now is a trip to the refrigerator or the local shop for breakfast began in our prehistoric days with foraging and hunting, sometimes going hungry for days on end until finding success. And this while trying to keep from being something else’s breakfast in the process. Over a million or so years (could be many millions more depending on how caveman you are willing to go) we progressed. Our ability to make tools and invent new strategies helped us capture, grow, process, and eventually cook our food, becoming more and more efficient along the way. During this same time we went from living in trees to caves to primitive mud huts, continually improving the security and durability of our shelter.

These are the early examples of human enterprise and achievement. Our early efforts were focused on survival, and success was the result of being productive. Being well fed and sheltered defined the good that resulted from taking initiative, doing the work, becoming more efficient at staying alive and improving our condition. By these early measures we were finding and experiencing our capacity for good.

Back to our history of struggling to feed ourselves and stay alive. We started as animals and have been seeking the best version of our uniquely human selves ever since. We started with little choice, relying on our primal instincts to guide our reactions, searching for relief from the constant fear, hunger, and confusion that has haunted our primal selves for literally millions of years.

A few illustrations help put this into perspective. In his book “Who Ate the First Oyster?: The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History”, Cody Cassidy provides the following timeline of our three-million-year history and the major achievements along the way. Notice how they accelerate.

Another look at how much of our evolution has occurred in the relatively recent part of our history is provided by Tim Urban in his book “What’s Our Problem”. Here he diagrams the last 250,000 or so years, or essentially the time since we became the homo sapiens we are today. Note that the last 250 year page is essentially the time since the Declaration was written. In this context, it seems like only yesterday.

Over those millions of years we’ve learned a lot. We have discovered ways to be safe, find reliable sources of nourishment, and develop amazing levels of intelligence. But it took us a while, and our ability to innovate has obviously been accelerating.

In Urban’s book, he works to help explain how and why society is struggling. To make his case he proposes that we as humans struggle with the internal motivation of our primitive minds and our ability to imagine a better world for ourselves, or our enlightened mind. He uses the 250,000 year chart to illustrate that we’ve relied on our primitive minds for the vast majority of our existence since becoming homo sapiens, our most current physical evolution. This is 240,000 years of relying on our primitive minds compared to the last 10,000 years when the innovations from enlightened thinking start to accelerate. If you use Cassidy’s timeline and consider the additional time we relied on our primitive minds back into our prehuman ancestry, the comparison jumps from 240,000 years to 3 million years of primitive thinking, compared to the last 10,000 years of more enlightened progress. In either case, that is a long history of primitive habits and hard-wiring to overcome.

Rather than using Urban’s “primitive mind” and “enlightened mind” model, you could consider that we’ve spent nearly all of our existence as a species relying on our animal instincts. Benefitting from the innovations and the abilities of our intellect has been relatively recent. In this context, we have a long history of behaving like animals and have only recently begun to rely on our uniquely human ability to imagine and innovate.

You can relate our “animals becoming human” trajectory to Abraham Maslow’s “pyramid”, the theory that human development builds on basic needs up to higher levels of enlightenment.

Source: Wikipedia

Each of us are on our own journey up this pyramid (hopefully). It’s an interesting thought exercise to consider where you would score society on this scale.

Why is this important?

Our early ancestors were preoccupied with survival, the struggle to feed ourselves and stay alive. For hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions, we relied primarily on our animal instincts. Ideas like fairness and being civil to one another are relatively new from that perspective. And though the concepts of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” can be connected back to our survival instinct, they are completely intellectual constructs that rely on our intelligence to exist. And they rely on our intelligence to persist and thrive.

And it’s here that we find our primary struggle.

Which do you trust more: your emotions or your intelligence? Remember that our ancestors relied primarily on their instincts. Relying on the power of an idea is relatively new to us.

That requires a quick sidebar. I just grouped instincts and emotions. Emotions are akin to our primitive instincts rather than being something we learn. A baby instinctively experiences and expresses surprise, happiness, anger, and sadness. Other animals have emotions. Dogs wag their tails when they're happy. They snarl when they're angry. They whimper when they're afraid. And they mope when they are sad.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is an idea. It is something we’ve learned, a realization that each of us is best equipped to know what’s best for ourselves. The premise of the American Experiment is based on this idea, this enlightened realization that the proper form of human governance is one that values the human life and protects each citizen’s right to live their life and pursue their happiness as best they can.

The idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is caught up in our struggle to overcome our primitive animal instincts and become a more ideal version of our uniquely human potential. We can imagine a world better than we have, and we can then pursue that world, but it requires belief in an idea, an idea based on the fact that our most precious possession is our time in this world and the opportunity to make the most of that time.

Remember that we’re more accustomed and comfortable trusting our instincts and emotions over our ideas and reasoning. With that in mind (apologies), consider our current situation:

• How much time do we spend as a society working to understand why protecting each citizen’s life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the proper basis for human governance?

• How much effort do our politicians invest in nurturing this intellectual pursuit compared with the time spent focusing on emotional choices of “pro-life” or “gun rights”?

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is an intellectual and uniquely human aspiration. Pursuit of that aspiration requires us to evolve beyond our primitive, animal selves.

Further reading:

Tim Urban’s eBook “What’s Our Problem” is highly recommended. Urban’s stick figure illustrations help you navigate through his assessment of our current societal ills. And his chapter on the importance of Freedom of Speech should be required reading.

For an enjoyable and quick trip over the last 3 million years of innovations that have changed the trajectory of human development, check out Cody Cassidy’s “Who Ate the First Oyster?: The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History”.