In the Beginning
Today we live in a world that our australopithecine cousins would not have recognized. For our early ancestors the struggle for survival was the main priority and goal in life.
Air, water, and food are requirements for survival in all animals, including our species. Clothing and shelter provide necessary protection from the elements.
The intensity of the human sexual instinct is biologically shaped more by the sexual drive than maintaining a birth rate adequate to survival of the species.
Our New World
As we have evolved in our cognition, we traveled through time from a world without names and numbers to one largely based on names and numbers… from one in which obtaining food was of foremost concern to one in which too much food is a common cause of fatal health problems… from a time where we worked together to protect our children from the lions and hyenas to a time in which we try to protect them from each other… from a time in which supernatural beliefs were the only way to explain the unknown to one in which the world can largely be explained through science.
Although we currently inhabit a time and place we were not programmed to live in, the set of instructions hard wired into our DNA on how to build a brain are the same as they were 100,000 years ago, which raise the questions… to what extent is the neural operating system established by evolution well tuned for computerized, predator-free, sugar-abundant, sedentary lifestyle, world travelers, media-saturated, densely populated world we have managed to build for ourselves?
Should we congratulate ourselves?
William Thackeray once said…“I never know whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses”
So now we are faced with the great irony of success. We can move forward; understanding the desires established from the evolutionary pressures of harsh times in a baron world…or…we can continue to ignore the past and blame our current situation on the inability to control our basic needs.
Are you going to control your future…or are you going to be a victim of your ancestral success?
“Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it”
3 comments:
How true! Love the quotes!
Nice post! Very true that the ancestors rarely drove through and picked up a bucket of fried chicken...
Your right melissa...and when they did eat chicken...it cost more calories to catch the chicken than the actual value of the food.
Do you know what the closet relative of the T-Rex is today????? The chicken! Wow...back then I would have eaten alot of t-rex and rice :)
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