We, humans, developed a unique ability to think. As physically not the strongest mammal, we had to. Seventeen billion cognitive neurons in our cerebral cortex, more than any other animal we know of, allowed us to figure out how best to survive individually and as a species.
Planet Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years and will continue to exist for an estimated 3.5 billion years, with or without us. Humans entered the fray as an offshoot of our great ape cousins, gradually trading physical strength for intellectual capacity. Our intellectual ability to lay traps prevented us from having to develop the muscle to chase down prey. We left all other great apes in the dust when our newfound cognitive intelligence, only some six thousand years old, matured from an ape-like state, made us build settlements, and, combined with the ability to reason, helped us better predict and counter impending threats to our collective survival and adapt.
Humanity is believed to have almost gone extinct were it not for escaping the brutal climate of Africa, from where we all descended, moving to cooler temperatures up North with more access to fresh water and nutritious vegetation. According to paleontologists, we remained one race—the human race, with the melatonin in our skin changing into paler shades in the migratory process. We proved to be highly adaptable when migrating worldwide, changing our food intake, habits, and physical composition to suit our new environments.
The ability to adjust our thinking is what saved the human race from early extinction and can save us again. As our circumstances have generally improved, so has the need to improve our thinking once again. New threats have surfaced that require new methods of thinking to adapt. The wrong thinking, and bulging levels of solipsism, no longer in sync with nature’s first-principles, will cause an accelerated anthropogenic cascade and self-induced human extinction.
Nature controls the existence, evolution, and survival rate of any species. To live as long as humanly possible, we must align human gameplay to nature’s gameplay. As our environment continues to change, we must improve the proximal development of our thinking. Especially in a democracy where every vote for the management of ourselves counts, we must all learn to think, the natural way.
I will describe how.
