Skip to main content

The Upside of Disaster

In the previous post, I talked about the tactics rational optimists use to deal with uncertainty: explore and exploit.

There are situations where an utter disaster and the resulting uncertainty can change the history for the better.

An amazing example is the story of human evolution from chimp-like apes. Here's a brief review of the story told by William von Hippel in “The Social Leap.”

These apes lived in the rainforests of eastern Africa, around 6 million years ago. They ruled the canopy.

But then disaster struck. Eastern Africa was tearing away from the rest of the continent, due to plate tectonics. The climate changed. The rainforests disappeared. These apes had to adjust to living in the savannah, at the mercy of great predators.

Humans reacted to this disaster by innovating and inventing. Human distinctions — from bipedalism, persistence hunting, to the use of language and tools and our social structure — ultimately are the results of that disaster. They learned to be great at throwing rocks at animals. They developed physiques to run long distances on foot. Then they changed the rules of the game by taming fire.

In von Hippel's telling, the rise of the humans up the food chain looks like this: upright walking --> superior throwing --> cooperative society --> division of labor --> tool making --> fire, etc.

But this all started due to a disaster. It could have turned out poorly for our species. But it cannot be denied that the disappearance of the rainforest from eastern Africa set the scene for human greatness to develop.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Quotes from "The Social Leap"

These are the lines from William von Hippel in his book “The Social Leap” that I found to be incisive and insightful. “The ability to kill at a distance is the single most important invention in the history of warfare, because weaker individuals can attack stronger individuals from a position of superior numbers and relative safety.” “As if division of labor were not enough, Homo erectus then sealed the deal with the single most important innovation in human history: the control of fire.” “Long before the invention of writing (which is only about five thousand years old), human culture had become cumulative by virtue of our oral storytelling traditions .” “When we weigh up the costs and benefits, we see that farming afforded our ancestors some assurances against starvation, but at the cost of various new illnesses, reduced stature and longevity, excruciating halitosis, and often a far longer working day. The end result was that early farmers worked harder to achieve a worse life than ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pessimists and Optimists

I discussed before a role of dopamine for motivation and reward-seeking. I want to highlight a paper by  Colin G. DeYoung that tries to establish "a  unifying theory of the role of dopamine in personality."  One of the interesting point that Dr. DeYoung highlights is that " what is uncertain or unpredicted is unique as a class of stimuli in being simultaneously threatening and promising ." The promising nature of uncertainty explains why people like gambling so much. So what do people do when faced with uncertainty, what do people do? They do what every organism is hardwired to do: “… the organism should have two competing innate responses to an unpredicted event— caution and exploration …” I think this is where pessimists (caution) distinguish themselves from optimists (exploration). Pessimists routinely lack the skill to be lucky . Here's DeYoung's overarching theory: “the general function of dopamine is to promote exploration , by facilitating engage...
Post a Comment
Read more