Evolutionary
biologists have estimated that 99.99% of the species that have ever lived on
earth are extinct today. From devastating meteors and asteroids to
natural environmental hazards, their survival was under constant threats and many of which spelled immediate doom. Human beings, on the other hand, became quite adept at
avoiding danger partially by creating their own environment, rather than just adapting to it. They crafted ways to solve problems, and became the only animal
on the planet (1) that looks for problems, (2) that even predicts future problems, and
(3) that invents “practice problems” to solve. (The imaginary and practice problems were/are presented in a safe and controlled environment that we called “schools”).
With the
capacity to think flexibly, and after amassing an incredibly robust repertoire
of problem-solving strategies, human beings evolved as the only species that
could run away from a problem, swim away from a problem, climb away from a
problem, talk our way out of a problem, create vehicles (sometimes with cooperating domesticated animals) to take us away from a problem, and use technology to design remedies
to our problems. Mastering a wide range of possible problem-solving strategies
and passing them down from one generation to the next permitted the survival of
our species. However, it was not as much governed by the “survival of the
fittest” rules as it was the survival of the most innovative and fastest
adapting brains.
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