Tag: Evolution

You’ve Come a Long Way Since the Primordial Soup

Was there to be any end to the gradual improvement in the techniques and artifices used by the replicators to ensure their own continuation in the world? There would be plenty of time for improvement. What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins

…”everything hides and stops trying to eat you when it rains.”

Our line were small monkeys in rainforests for a lot longer than we’ve been big hominids living on open plains. Big chunks of our brains don’t even know we ever left the trees, because evolution doesn’t discard instincts that were ever useful – it just buries them under new ones.
Sleep paralysis; plus the sudden feeling like you’re falling when you’re on the edge of sleep; and the sense of comfort when we hear raindrops on leaves...all of that is from the trees. And a lot more. Fear of spiders definitely is. Big spiders specifically lethal to primates are still a part of African rainforest fauna.

Comment from discussion There must have been some crazy-dangerous bugs back when humans were evolving, because our instinct to run away when we see a creepy-crawly is strong as hell..