Conclusion

The goal of this book is to move the discussion of evolution forward from facts and speculation about apes, men, and ancestors into using it as a tool of prediction that can answer a lot of whys about humans. If the human organism is viewed as a high-performance adaptation to living in the Neolithic Village environment, a fairly adequate fit for the Agricultural Age environment, and a just beginning, needs-improvement fit for the Industrial Age environment—which has already largely changed into an Information Age—then a lot of things about the human condition and human thinking make more sense.

Let’s review some of the points I’ve made about the human species, as neat bullet points both for those of you who’ve stuck with me all the way through and for those of you who’ve started with this last page to see if you want to read the previous ones.

Human thinking is well adapted to Stone Age living because humans lived that way for thousands of generations. Humans have lived as agriculturalists for only 250 generations or so, and as Industrial Man for 10 at most. When we make silly choices, it’s often because we’re using Stone Age thinking to solve a civilized problem.
The big three characteristics that make humans special are advanced tool use, self-aware thinking, and strong language skill.
Advanced tool use lets humans greatly modify their local environment. So Mother Nature, Design Engineer, finds that giving humans better tool-using skills is more beneficial than giving humans stronger legs, more cold resis¬tance, or other traits that would help a lot if humans were running down food and living up trees instead of in caves behind fire pits or, better yet, in houses.
A key element in human intelligence is self-aware thinking, because it enables teaching other humans, and especially younger people. This makes one-in-a-thousand discoveries relevant to survival of the species.
Another key for teaching is strong language skill, which makes being smart pay off, substituting for Instinct. Teaching makes learning new ways to do things a whole lot more efficient than waiting until Mother Nature hardwires a thinking pattern into a brain.
We’ve prospered mightily as a boom species.. This is good, but there is a dark side. If we have a civilization-destroying catastrophe, it will be hard for humans to recover, and the longer we live in the civilized environment, the harder the bust will be when the catastrophe hits. We can mitigate this bust by maintaining humans with a gene pool and knowledge base that is well adapted to Stone Age living. The best way to do this is by maintaining the Neolithic Park described above.

In this book, I’ve barely scratched the surface of looking at human foibles as a result of being a fossil species, too often behaving as if we still lived in a Stone Age village. I’m hoping that you, the reader, will at some point be able to say, “Ah hah! Now I understand what’s happening better!” and as a result make better choices in your day-to-day living.

If that happens, this book is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

And I get to say …

“Yay!”