Our mindbrains and bodies evolved to be keenly sensitive to life threatening situations involving, lions, snakes and crocodiles, thunder and lightning, warlike neighbors and jealous spouses. To cope with these threats we have the inbuilt fight or flight response which releases chemicals into the blood. These chemicals quickly change how the heart and lungs and other parts of the body and brain prepare us for strenuous action.
The fight or flight response causes us to react quickly without involving the conscious brain. The rustle in the grass might mean a lion. Better a live pessimist than a dead optimist. Avoid paralysis by analysis. Act swiftly. If there is no hard evidence then make something up based on past experience. Assume the worst; be a bit neurotic and paranoid; be anxious and open to panic. Escape. Then, afterwards, you can go back to normal and make babies.
In the stone age the dangerous situations were real but not common. The need to be on red-alert was relatively rare – there was plenty time to be relaxed, fun loving and possibly creative.
In the computer age the dangerous situations are mild by comparison but are common. Road rage getting to work; status anxiety amongst peers who are strangers; reactions to the workaholic boss; and fears for job security when the computer system crashes. You are on your toes all the time and you hardly ever relax. This leads to stress, existential crisis, chronic depression and no babies.
BUT it is not all doom and gloom.
Several branches of science are now uncovering the true structure and functions of the mindbrain and its body within its social group. There is a fast growing consilience about this.(ref E O Wilson). Evolutionary psychology and neuroscience are leading the way and are closely followed in the West by the social sciences and even by philosophy, theology, politics and economics. So what is the new world view?
The big bang happened 13.7 billion years ago. Planet earth began 4.6 billion years ago. Life began when simple cells appeared 3.6 billion years ago. This led the way for multicellular life one billion years ago, great apes about 20 million years ago, and for modern humans who first appeared about 200,000 years ago. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolutionary_history_of_life )
And there was no forward planning. There was only chemicals making copies of themselves and sometimes getting it wrong. This gave rise to variations and some of these survived better than others. I find it comforting that evolution has neither an all knowing creator nor a central planning committee. It is driven and shaped by the energetic churn operating on the various levels of the spatial zoom from quantum to cosmos.
I find it both amusing and awesome that cosmic stardust became conscious and is now conscious of being conscious. It happened so recently and quickly – only 6000 years since the beginnings of settled agriculture - only 200 years since the explosion of science and technology and – only ten years since the mass production of smart phones.
It appears that cultural evolution has outstripped the biological kind – thus we have the stone age brain in the modern world. This need not be a cause for concern. Evolution is a tinkerer rather than a perfectionist. It is not in the way of things to wipe the slate clean and to begin again. The whole jing bang is driven by serendipitious selection from a range of mutations. The cosmos and all it contains is made possible by natural selection from the never ending stream of ‘faults’ that make up our imperfect nature.
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