Journey of the Universe weaves together the discoveries of the evolutionary sciences together with humanities such as history, philosophy, art, and religion. This course draws on the Journey of the Universe Conversations, a series of 20 interviews with scientists and environmentalists. The first 10 interviews are with scientists and historians who deepen our understanding of the evolutionary process of universe, Earth, and humans. The second 10 interviews are with environmentalists, teachers, and artists who explore the connections between the universe story and the practices for a flourishing Earth community.
Learning, Living, and Dying (Terry Deacon)
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Journey Conversations: Weaving Knowledge and Action
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Cours 2 sur 3 dans Specialization Journey of the Universe: A Story for Our Times
À partir de la leçon
Emergence of Life, Learning, and Humans
We discuss the oxygen crisis two billion years ago and the endosymbiosis that dealt with it creatively. We too will deal with the enveloping crises of our time, first of all by tending to them, by taking responsibility for them.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Mary Evelyn TuckerSenior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
John GrimSenior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
[MUSIC]
[SOUND] How are we going to tell the story of the Earth?
In particular, how are we going to tell the story of Earth to our children?
This is especially important because in the last couple of centuries,
we have learned more about the Earth than in perhaps, the previous 100,000 years.
So the question is, how are you going to convey that,
the essence of that to the next generation?
One thing is completely clear.
The Earth is very different than what we thought.
The Earth is not a platform, it's not a background.
[MUSIC]
In fact, the great discovery is this.
Life doesn't exist on top of the Earth.
Life is a partner to the oceans, to the atmosphere, to the land.
For instance, if you look at the atmosphere, it is 21% oxygen.
This makes us unique among all the known planets.
The only reason we have oxygen in our atmosphere
is that life is pouring it forth each day.
So the very composition of our air reflects the fact that life is here.
[MUSIC]
In that sense, life is woven into the atmosphere.
But an even more radical hypothesis is beginning to emerge in the minds of some
scientist.
[MUSIC]
Perhaps, Earth is not only an integrated system.
Perhaps, Earth somehow maintains itself so that life can flourish.
[MUSIC]
Consider temperature.
Life only exists in a very narrow band of temperature.
So something like this temperature has been true of Earth for 4 billion years.
[MUSIC]
Now, scientists originally thought this was because the Earth just happened to be
93 million miles away from the sun.
But during the 1950s, we learned about the fusion processes taking place in stars.
And so now, we know the sun's temperature has increased by over 25% over
the last 4 billion years.
[MUSIC]
Which means somehow, Earth has had to adapt itself to maintain
that stable narrow band of temperature.
How?
We know some of the details.
Earlier that a thousand times the carbon dioxide is present in the Earth.
So during that time,
the air system is drawn the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
For I mean, for instance, the shells of marine algae and
when the marine algae died, the shells go to the bottom of the ocean.
So more and more carbon dioxide is taken out of the atmosphere,
which enables the Earth to cool down while the sun heats up.
But the question returns, is all of this being organized by the Earth as a whole,
so that life could flourish?
If that's the case, then the atmosphere is not just stuff,
it's something like a membrane.
And we are not living on an Earth, we are actually participants in a vast,
intricate system that is something like a living cell.
[MUSIC]
A living cell has the power to learn through time.
This is what distinguishes the first cells
from all the other beings that existed prior to life's emergence.
A star for instance, has the power to organize itself for billions of years...
But throughout that time, it never needs to learn anything new.
[MUSIC]
Life learns, for life can adapt itself to new situations by
changing its form and by remembering these changes.
Life remembers the past by storing information in it's DNA molecules.
It is this power of memory encased in each living cell that enables life to learn,
and thus, evolve.
[MUSIC]
One of the ways in which to understand the nature of life's memory is by using
the ideas of the mathematician philosopher, Pythagoras.
You know a number of Pythagoras's ideas were revolutionary.
And like a lot of revolutionary ideas, they weren't that popular.
In fact, Pythagoras had to hide from the tyrant, Pecrotis,
who was in charge of Samos.
And tradition has it, this is where it's hidden, right here.
Half way up the mountain.
The cave there.
One of the Pythagoras's central convictions was that the essence of life
is not air or water, or fire, as the other Greek philosophers taught.
Rather, the essence of life is number.
Pattern, it seems such an odd idea, I mean, life is so
sensuous, it's so complex, so rich.
How can the essence of that be something abstract, like number or pattern?
It is precisely this deep connection between life and
pattern that enables life to remember its crucial achievements.
That's what DNA does.
In the precise sequence of the nucleotides,
DNA holds the essence of life.
[MUSIC]
Life did not hand down the actual molecules to my body.
Instead, life handed their essence in the form of genetic information.
Because of this, our bodies can come alive a thousand different ways each day.
Life has learned to learn.
[MUSIC]
One of the central ways of learning for our species involves seeing.
Life has invented so many different ways of seeing.
The amazing thing is, this process is not yet over.
Come with me into Pythagoras's cave.
[MUSIC]
Beginning billions of years ago,
the earliest cells began to develop a sensitivity to light.
They could sense it and move toward it.
And it was this capacity that lead eventually to the development of the eye.
Now, the first eye of which we have any fossil evidence, was that of a trilobite,
500 million years ago.
The trilobite, intent upon piercing through the darkness.
Invent an eye using calci, a mineral.
[MUSIC]
The trilobite was able to see only in the direction of these rods.
A primal form of seeing that prove so successful,
we find it even now in the compound eyes of flies and lobsters.
[MUSIC]
An entirely different form of seeing was invented by the worms.
And carried forward by the fish.
This type of eye is the one we know best, for it's the one we inherited.
The water based eye.
[MUSIC]
Even after 500 million years eyesight continues to evolve.
In humans, power of seeing deepens, with a new kind of sight, insight.
We see on the inner screen of our imaginations.
Life has learned yet another way of seeing,
one with a power to transform everything.
[MUSIC]
With this new way of seeing, we find ourselves blinking in a thrilling yet
unsettling light.
Root in the center of immensities, we open our eyes and see each thing a new.
Each thing ablaze with a cosmic creativity, billions of years old
[MUSIC]
With the insights made possible with conscious self awareness,
our vision now extends back through billions of years of evolution.
[MUSIC]
We see not only the scurrying spider, but
the entire cosmic journey layered into the spider's body.
Including even the distance stars, out of whose explosions,
its molecules were constructed.
And this capacity to see into the depths of time, gives new meaning to death.
[MUSIC]
The universe throughout space and time is filled with violence and chaos.
Millions of galaxies have been destroyed.
[MUSIC]
Trillions of animals have been killed.
Death and suffering, are woven into the very heart of the universe.
Usually, such destruction is massive and senseless.
A volcano erupts and kills every living being in its vicinity.
[MUSIC]
But it can also happen that dealing with death leads to more complex
co-evolutionary relationships.
For a rabbit, an eagle wears the face of destruction.
But in this relationship, the eagle develops more acute eyesight, and
the rabbit develops greater speed for escape.
[MUSIC]
Interdependent communities arise out of suffering and death.
[MUSIC]
The ultimate meaning of this escape's easy explanation.
We are confronted with the fundamental mystery in which the small self
of the individual dives into and nourishes the whole community.
But living beings are not just linked together by food.
[MUSIC]
>> So tell us about the emergence then of this extraordinary
creation of evolution, if you will.
The brain, how did the brain come about?
>> Again, this big explosion of multi-celled organisms is
the important first step.
There are lot os nervous systems that are not brains.
So for example, starfish, and jellyfish, have distributed nervous systems.
They control their bodies to move.
And moving is the crucial thing for the original origins of nervous systems.
If you're like a plant stuck in one place, when things change,
you can't change your environment to take advantage of it.
Plants stuck in one place can't even fertilize each other
by touching each other.
They rely on insects and animals to carry their eggs and
their sperm back and forth, in the form of pollen and seeds, of course.
But if you can move, you can do a lot of things.
First of all, you can choose your environment.
You can find food if it's not where you are.
And so, originally, what happens is,
of course, one class of organisms, multi-celled organisms, develop movement.
This capability of moving your bodies, mostly in the water.
Of course, all of this evolution begins in the oceans, not on land.
Moving in the water simply requires contracting things.
And you need the nervous system to basically decide what
muscles are going to contract and what are not.
So muscles and nerves develop about the same time.
Now, the interesting thing there is that you don't necessarily need a brain
to do this.
You can do it by just having the nerves around you sort of
respond to their immediate environment, contract things.
We have this kind of nervous system as well and
some of the automatic reflexes we have.
And the way we digest our food works this way.
But if you want to move in a controlled fashion.
If you want to go towards things to identify something
that you're interested in, eating perhaps, or staying away from.
You now need to organize that process.
You need to have a center that takes in the information, and
typically that's going to be at the front.
If you're going to move, you want to anticipate where you're moving to.
That means you need to get information not about what's immediately touching you, but
also about what's at a distance.
And so, at the front end of things is where we begin to find
neurons clustering together, why?
Because there's just more work to be done up there.
And that work has to anticipate what's going on.
So worms, insects, and even things like snails and
slugs, and octopi develop these things called brains,
which are just basically putting a bunch of stuff upfront.
So, your head is the anticipator, that's where you're going and so
you might as well look ahead, so to speak.
So, eyes developed, smell develops, even in the water,
you need to know where things are also by the chemicals that are there.
And so, if you can anticipate that the chemicals
that you're interested in are getting more concentrated by testing them.
That's a place to go towards or to avoid.
Similarly, light, radiation coming from things,
tells you about something that's at a distance.
In the water, also touch does.
It does so because when things move under water,
they create currents, of course, and pressures.
Fish have special sensors on
the sides of their bodies that sense the pressure that's coming along.
So they know what's distant from them by touch.
We only really touch things immediately.
There's a variance of this however, because hearing is touch.
Hearing is our version of what fish were doing.
We do it by having little hairs that get wiggled by pressure coming through
the ear that have been specialized for certain kind of pressure.
The tiny pressure that comes through the air, not through water.
So it's also sense of touch.
But it's touch at a distance.
So we also have touch at a distance.
This is just fabulous to think of this incipient nervous system,
then the concentration in the head, and all the senses developing as well.
And how does this, then, become reflexive consciousness, thinking consciousness?
>> Obviously, it takes a while.
There's not a lot of thinking consciousness in the sense that we
take it into account.
There's really two things to keep in mind here.
We oftentimes confuse them.
One is intelligence.
Which is the ability to have information that you can utilize
to respond to the environment in various ways.
To anticipate and respond.
But there's also sentience.
That is, our ability to be sensitive to the world.
>> What would be an example?
>> Well so, for example,
when the temperature changes our bodies change as well.
If you have hair on them, the hair stands on end.
If it's really cold, for example, you'll shiver.
These are automatic responses, your body knows how to do this.
It knows how to balance itself in gravity as well.
Our sense of balance.
We don't have to think about it.
We don't have to worry about whether we're upright or
not unless we lost that sense in some way.
>> They're automatic intelligences.
>> They're automatic intelligence and they're intelligent.
They have lots of different alternative ways of responding and
reacting to different circumstances in the world.
Probably most of what goes on in the nervous system is this sort of thing.
>> Terry, tell us about sentience as opposed to intelligence.
>> In one sense, there's a kind of sentience in all organisms.
>> You're right.
>> Organisms respond to the world.
And they're mostly, mostly automatic.
But once you start moving around and
have to predict the future, you can't be fully automatic.
So with animals, you get this kind of sentience.
Now, when you want to talk about reflexive,
what you're talking about is what did my actions do?
How did it change the situation?
How did my making this decision change the future options?
If you're doing anticipation,
if you're doing prediction you're now part of the story.
>> Okay, now we know sentience is in the mammalian world.
And types of sentience, as you've just said, are in the fish world.
How far back do we go for sentience then?
The reptilian world, the plant world?
>> Plants probably not.
Now, the way I would put it is that really, and
you captured with a notion of reflexive sentience.
I think sentience in the sense of being responsive to the world is general, but
being responsive to the world as you have changed that world by your actions
is something that animals do.
And there are lots animals that themselves are automatic entirely.
By the time however we get to animals,I think even as simple as insects
are already getting a little bit, just an inkling of that next piece.
>> Let's talk about different sizes of brains.
Can you give us a sense of how small a insect's brain might be?
>> Brains can be quite small because neurons are single cells.
Some of the smallest brains are only thousands of cells.
Hundreds of cells in some small worms in fact.
And when we presume that when the smaller the brain the less sentient, and
the less intelligence you have less to work with.
So clearly, intelligence and sentience are going to grow together to some extent.
Insects of course, we know mosquitos, these tiny little things,
they must have tiny little brains, but of course, cells are quite small.
How many cells do they have?
Thousands.
Bees, for example, and
flies have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands in some cases.
You and I, of course, have tens of billions,
maybe hundreds of billions of cells.
>> Can you show us some of these small ones, like the frog and the snake.
>> So these are all vertebrate brains.
Even the smallest vertebrate brains from fish for
example, are some of the largest brains on the planet.
And so these are brains all captured in plastic and they're tiny little things.
Snakes, this is a pigeon, the biggest one's a pigeon for example.
But down here we see fish and snakes and frogs.
Tiny little things, and
yet I would argue that they also have some degree of intelligence.
That is, they have to predict their world,
they have to predict the effects of their own behaviors on the world.
And in so doing they have to in a sense take in themselves.
You become part of your worldif you can change what's going on around you.
>> Does sentience involve awareness of pain too then?
>> Clearly it has to,
because one of the things you have to do is avoid those sorts of things.
If you're rooted to the ground and you can't avoid things, pain is not so
important except that you've gotta fix the damage.
So plants do respond to damage by creating wounds and so on and repairing themselves.
But they don't pull away as easily because they don't have that kind of mobility.
Even so some plants do back away from noxious uncomfortable stimuli.
But when you're an animal and
you can move your position in space now you can completely avoid pain.
You can anticipate pain.
>> Could we even say something about sentience like there's different
types of sentience that are developed in these various animals and
what would that look like?
>> First of all, sentience has to do with senses, right.
It has to do with what you can take in.
We have a sentience that will be reflective of the fact that
we're very visual, that we're very tactile.
That a lot of information that comes into our brain is from the surface of our
bodies, touch, pain, heat, cold, and so on.
Sound, all of these are part of our sentience.
We're responsive to the world this way.
We have something in addition and that is we are also sentient in a symbolic way.
We think in abstract terms.
That in effect is a different whole level of this process.
But now we are also insentient in some ways.
There many fish for example that are very sensitive to electricity.
They feel the space around them in terms of the electric charge that's around them.
They generate it by tensing muscles.
Muscles that are specialized to generate electric current.
And then they sense how the electric current bounces back, so to speak, or
gets absorbed in the world around them.
So they have a sentience that we lack.
>> So the extraordinary thing, really, is that this earth process has brought forth,
we could say, a multi-sentience, plethora of life.
>> That's right.
>> Which has different types of qualities that are navigating through the world.
>> Right, and what it also says is that as one gets more complex,
as you have more of these to compare.
Where you have to integrate signs of danger,
you have to integrate sights at a distance.
Odors are something that might have sometime ago.
And make a decision on that basis.
Now you can't just be responsive to them individually, you have to
be responsive to the complicated relationships that they setup for you.
>> That's a fascinating thing that I was thinking about, the sentience of
migrations that require collective thinking and
patternings and connection to wind, star,
perhaps magnetic planetary sensibilities too.
Can you say something about the sensibilities of migrations of birds or
fish, turtles, mammals?
>> One of the things we've learned a lot about because in some sense the sentience
is distributed, it's not in an individual alone.
>> In terms of migrations?
>> In terms of migrations, in terms of the schooling of fish.
>> Yes.
The vast hoards of locusts for example that migrate to eat from place to place.
We're learning that their responses are not to the world at large.
They're not thinking ahead so to speak.
By taking very close bits of information of their neighbors but
the collective, again like the collection of neurons in your brain.
The collective itself has a kind of intelligence incentives, responsiveness
because of the individual responsiveness not just the individuals to the world but
to their neighbors, to their nearest neighbors.
One of the things that has been discovered for example about locust migration
is it looks as though they don't migrate to find food so
much, as to avoid being eaten by other locusts.
Their neighbors are after them so to speak, because the food has run out.
And so they fly away, and their neighbors follow to eat them.
But in effect, they land on other food and they get distracted.
And eventually the bites start to happen and you got to run.
But as a result, everybody's trying to stay away from everybody but
trying to catch up with everybody, holds this group together, finding food.
Because that's when they can settle and stop.
>> Does this kind of collective sentience apply as well to the mammalian world?
Obviously migrations, but what is collective sentience?
>> Brains are also made up of little micro sentient creatures,
we call them neurons, single cells.
A single cell could in some places in the world live on their own, neurons can't.
They're basically parasitic on the rest of the body.
But their little sentient creatures and
they're interacting with their nearest neighbors.
Sending signals back that are really simple.
Back and forth, back and forth.
But it's that collective interaction that produces the sentience
that we have as a whole brain.
So in one sense there's not a fundamental difference
between that kind of sentience that holds the school of fish together or
the swarming starlings together and the way brains work.
>> I love that.
Let's go backwards to discuss this evolution of the brain.
And then bring it forward to discuss kind of collective sentience.
And what it's implications are for the evolutionary story today.
But give us a picture Terry, of how did brains develop.
>> I'll go all the way back to other vertebrates.
>> Please. >> Because it turns out that brains
are not all that different from each other.
We think of our brains as so different from other brains, but the more we've
learned about how they're structured and how the genes have structured brains.
And so on, we realize that the way brains are segmented that sort of theme and
variation structure of brains is an old one.
That all vertebrates in fact, from fish to eels to
snakes to rabbits to birds to us are all segmented the same way.
The brains are all laid out with the same basic principles.
Not just the same basic neurons but even the same basic chunks.
>> A couple of chunks like what?
>> Well, the big part of the brain that we think about in the front of our brains
is the cerebrum or the cerebral cortex.
We have a structure like that that stands out as that folded thing
that we all recognize but there is a cerebrum in every single vertebrate brain.
There is a cerebellum this little brain in the back
in every single vertebrate to some extent they're smaller or
larger they're at different proportions, but they're all there.
>> So the structures are the same?
>> The structures are the same so
one myth about brains is that things have been added,
new stuff has been added like a new kind of structure has been popped on to it.
Not very likely, for the most part,
Darwin's theme and variation story is right.
That is, descent with modification.
>> Mm-hm.
>> The same basic structure gets modified,
each of these components gets modified in subtle ways.
But it's in the same place doing the same kind of thing.
Those parts that are towards the front are doing more of the prediction,
the long distance prediction.
As you move back in the brain down towards the tail so
to speak, down in us those are things that are doing more automatic stuff.
Again the head end of moving organisms has to do all the prediction.
Interestingly enough the two things that are most predictive are eyes and nose.
They come in at the very front.
Now we think about eyes as being long distance predictors.
We can predict things sometimes miles away from moving forward.
Noses are even better at this because a scent can be left yesterday.
And you can pick it up.
So it's not just long distance in space, it can also be long distance in time.
You can predict things.
So what's going to happen, what did happen, what might happen,
on the basis of what odors are there.
So the front of the brain is doing more of those things of predicting in the future.
And prediction requires more sentience.
>> Terry, as humans we're only about 150,000 years on the planet,
as homo sapiens.
Clearly we have ancestors that go further back, and let's talk about our brain
in relation to our relatives, like the chimps, the primates.
What's the size of the chimp and the human brain?
>> Good question, yeah.
Well, brains and bodies in mammals have actually been fairly stable for
a long period of time.
You can predict the size of the brain, knowing the size of the body.
Pretty easily.
And that tells you that in effect,
that there's this tight relationship between them.
Primates shifted away from that a little bit.
Primates have slightly bigger brains for
their bodies than you would expect from another mammal.
Interestingly enough we've recently found out that's because they grow their
bodies slower.
Even though they grow their brains at the same rate.
But that produces this disproportion.
Now, chimpanzees turn out to be some of the largest brained primates.
With exception of us and our ancestors.
And this is the cast of the inside of the primates skull.
This is a chimpanzee brain cast.
And the inside of the skull actually gives you a sense of the shape of the brain and
the size of it.
And you get a pretty good sense of it here.
In comparison, I'm going to show you a model of a human brain.
This is a hemisphere of a human brain.
And what you can see is that the human brain is quite a bit bigger.
Now, we're not that much bigger than chimpanzees.
What's happened since chimpanzees.
And we held a, had a common ancestor not with chimpanzees.
But with their ancestor.
We both came from the same ancestor.
That ancestor probably had a brain size not much different than a chimpanzee.
But during a period of roughly six to seven million years, human brains
got quite a bit bigger, and our bodies did not get bigger at the same pace.
>> And our common ancestor would be?
>> First, we don't know who the common ancestor was.
Interestingly enough, we don't know what the species that
gave rise to us and the chimpanzee looked like.
Most people assumed it was a little bit like chimpanzees.
But the more we've dug back into the fossil record,
it's beginning to seem like that's probably not the case.
That they're probably different than both chimpanzees and us.
And that we're cousins.
Both of us have been evolving independently but
what's happened is the chimpanzee brains have not enlarged, ours have.
And that's something about our own evolution.
>> Tell us a little bit more.
I mean, where did we come from?
What's the Neanderthal, and what are the earlier forms of human?
>> Well, one of these, we've learned about Neanderthals.
Is that they're probably just another race of humans.
The genetics of Neanderthals have now been, at least in draft form,
worked out and we share a lot of genes in common with the Neanderthals.
Clearly there's been a lot of gene exchange which means inter Relationships,
reproduction between Neanderthals and the populations of Europe and Asia.
So, they're probably not the ones we want to look at for our ancestors.
They're a race of humans that didn't make it.
>> Okay, and which ones did then?
>> Well, the story goes back quite aways.
And what's interesting is that for a very long time in our evolution,
after we split off from the common ancestor we had with chimpanzees,
that we still had a brain size of about chimpanzee size.
And let me give you an example of this, this is a skull,
a fossil skull of a species called an Australopithecine.
Australopithecine means southern ape.
It's an ape-like creature, it has a brain case, it's about chimpanzee size.
Little bit bigger but not much.
Has a body size about chimpanzee body size.
But these guys were walking on two legs, just like you and I.
>> And we're talking about Africa here.
>> In Africa all of these creatures are in Africa.
And in fact our ancestors stayed in Africa until about 1.8 million years ago.
So we spit off we think somewhere around six and
a half to seven million years from the chimpanzee lineage.
But for
about four to five of those million years,we were looking like this guy.
Small brain,small body.
One of things that happened is that some of those evolve into
very heavily bones and giant tooths creatures.
These are also Australopithecus.
These guys were specialized for eating things like grasses, seeds, and tubers.
Which is why they had these huge, grinding teeth,
something that no other primates actually have, and don't have today.
These guys were on a special direction in evolution, in which
they specialize for eating the grasses and the tubers that grew on the Savannah.
A very different kind of adaptation than chimpanzees or gorillas or us.
They were our ancestors.
What happened about 2 to 1.8 million years ago is the brains began to change,
teeth began to change, body size begins to change and
the difference between males and females begin to change all at once.
And it followed after a really interesting change.
And about two and a half million years ago
are ancestors the Australopithecus began to use stone tools.
They began to chip sharp edges on stone and use them to cut into meat.
One of things that happened, see it cause the teeth to get small,
you didn't have to grind this complicated stuff.
Didn't have to grind grasses and grains and tubers, and
so teeth could get smaller.
You and I had teeth that are this kind of teeth.
They were lost but another thing that happened is for the size of the body,
the brain started to get bigger.
And in fact, at one point 8 million years we find the brain this big.
>> Sizeable.
>> Sizeable.
Much bigger.
Not as big as yours or mine.
But significantly bigger than any other primate on the planet.
And in fact almost than any other mammal on the planet.
Not quite as big as dolphin brains?
>> So what caused this?
>> Well that's the big question, of course.
What I want to do is just to describe the things that changed
during this transition.
I've mentioned that about two and a half million years ago,
stone tools began to show up and our Australopithecus ancestors are using them.
Half million years later we find a number of things have changed in at least
one lineage.
Now, this lineage, interestingly enough, continues, but
is now living beside a very different lineage, this being one example.
This fellow is Homo habilis, given homo because we found stone tools with it.
And because his brain is a little bit bigger
because his face is a little smaller, his teeth have reduced.
One of the things that happens at this point, it's at 1.8 million years,
about a half million years later, is also we find some creatures with brains
this big, radically large compared to other primates.
There are no other primates with brains anywhere knew this big.
>> So that sense of story in what you've narrated to us,
from single cells to multicellular organisms to the emergence of human.
That sense of our story, maybe a way of thinking in new directions for the future.
>> I think one of the things that's really hopeful,
I mentioned this when I talked about driving, is we're so flexible.
I actually think that we're somewhat degenerated ape.
And by that I don't mean that we're nasty brutish.
I mean that we don't have so many well developed instincts.
We don't respond well.
We've been in a sense domesticated by our own social activity.
We're a self domesticated species, but that means that we're not so locked in.
Not so modular.
Not so robotic.
We are flexible.
And I think the fact that we've been so successful in this context, we've been so
flexible.
We've changed social structure so radically in just a very
short period of time is a promise for the future that we really
might be capable of it that our evolution might not be a trap.
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