Articles

At some point we have to come face to face with the fact there is an uneven rate of change between the kind of change that occurs biologically in organisms, and the change that we manufacture such as technology, or even scientific discovery.

To give you some idea at how slow evolutionary change occurs, the last time we had a major evolutionary change was when we got up on our hind legs and discovered two legged locomotion, and that occurred somewhere around 4 million years ago. When that happened, we suddenly stood up, and got an avalanche of new sensory input. We could smell and see our enemies from miles away, which when we were on all fours in the grasses we couldn't do. But that information was relatively useless to us, unless our brains knew what to do with it. You can gather a lot of data, but unless your brain can process it to some evolutionary advantage, it's going to be of no use to you.

In that 4 million year period, our brains went through what paleontologists and archaeologists now call a special event in human evolution. That special event was that our prefrontal cortex of our brains grew 30% – 35% in the course of 4 million years. The reason we call this a special event is that was really fast in terms of evolution.

The way I see it, we don't have 4 million years to wait for the brain to catch up to the kind of complex problems we face today, such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, or the spread of pandemic virus. What do we do when evolution can't keep up to the rate of change that humanity is now manufacturing and discovering?

Find out the answer to this and more in Rebecca's book, The Watchman's Rattle available here