Human evolution is just getting started

1. In the late 1940s, the Canadian neuropsychologist, Donald Hebb, discovered that “neurons that fire together wire together” (The Organization of Behavior. John Wiley & Sons, 1949). As a result, he is generally considered the father of the new field of neuroplasticity. Prior to that seminal discovery, science simply assumed that the neurological architecture of the human central nervous system (the CNS) was biologically determined by its DNA in the womb. In recognition of this achievement, Hebb was made the President of the American Psychological Association.

2. The next milestone in this new understanding of how the human brain develops was achieved by the Nobel Laureate, Gerald Edelman (The Remembered Present — A Biological Theory of Consciousness. Basic Books, 1989). He was the first to propose the existence of continuous reentrant signaling between separate neuronal modules within the human CNS. He defined “reentry” as the ongoing, recursive, dynamic interchange of neurological signals (synaptic patterns) that occurs in parallel between brain centers (Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. Basic Books, 1987). One of the most important implications of this discovery is that such reentry circuits could be the biological basis for the emergence of human self-consciousness.

3. In a later book, Edelman and Tononi (A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. Basic Books, 2000) proposed that consciousness is simply the product of the biological functioning of the brain’s unique dynamic structure. Self-consciousness is a direct result of information processing within the brain. This theory also explains that conscious perception is much more than a simple sensory representation of reality by means of our primate peripheral nervous system. We may be capable of preconsciously creating meanings that integrate all of our body’s current needs, instinctual and learned, with relevant past experiences. Their theory proposes that all adult experiences are essentially an amalgam of previous perceptions, along with all associated needs within the brain at that instant of perception. Thus, Edelman summarizes that every experience is a remembered present, which he explained in a previous book (The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness. Basic Books, 1989). [For recent research on the evolution of our human brain, see Christopher Zollikofer, et al. Endocranial ontogeny and evolution in early Homo sapiens: The evidence from Herto, Ethiopia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 8/1/22.]

4. An important example of how powerful the the role of the natural environment is can be seen in how natural selection created bonobos out of chimpanzees. As Frans De Waal (1997) has indicated, bonobos first emerged about 2 million years ago and still only exist in an area south of the Zaire river. Their habitat has always been confined to a 200,000 km² (77,220 mi²) area within central Africa, which is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This area, roughly the size of Great Britain, contains two river systems that converge to define the extent of bonobo distribution. This new species, the bonobos, was not even recognized as a separate species until 1929. Indeed, their genome was not sequenced until 2012 (Prüfer et al., 2012). We now know that the bonobo genome is less than 1% different from that of the chimpanzee, and our own genome is 98% identical to both of those species, making them our closest evolutionary relatives (De Waal, 1997). The biggest behavioral difference between these two species is in how they structure their social communities.

5. Richard Wrangham (professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard, often called the successor to S. J. Gould), has studied the behavioral/cultural differences between chimps and bonobos extensively (“The evolution of sexuality in chimpanzees and bonobos”. Human Nature. 4 (1): 47–79). Wrangham’s explanation for the radically different cultural values between such genetically similar species, chimps and bonobos, is most easily explained by the history of the habitats they each occupy. Today both species of primates live in tropical forests along the Zaire River, but on opposite sides. The chimps live on the north side of the river and the bonobos on the south side. Their environments seem to be quite similar now. However, about 2.5 million years ago, there is evidence that a lengthy drought in southern Zaire wiped out the preferred food plants of the gorilla species that also inhabited the area and forced those primates to migrate north. After the drought ended, the forests returned, but the gorillas did not.

6. As a result of the drought that probably lasted for centuries, the chimpanzees who remained on the south side of the river all along had the forest to themselves and were able to extend their diet to include the fibrous foods that had previously been eaten by gorillas. With this abundant food supply, the chimps could live in larger, more stable reproductive groups, and form cooperative, matriarchal cultural values. Eventually natural selection made them into a new species simply because a culture based on cooperation is inherently more fit for survival than a culture of competition and conflict. Because of this new environment of food abundance and the behavioral changes that were made possible, the bonobo population grew faster (only a 1% increase is sufficient) than that of the remaining, and preceding, chimp population. On the north side of the river, the chimps still had to compete with the indigenous gorillas. This change in the environment, and thus the change in social behaviors, between the chimps to the north and the chimps to the south of the Zaire is the simplest explanation for what led the southern chimps down a different evolutionary path. Specifically, due to their affluent environment, the chimpanzees living south of the river evolved into a society more prone to eusocial values and behaviors, that is, toward values and behaviors that are rooted in cooperation instead of competition, acceptance instead of conflict, and equality instead of hierarchy.

7. I am suggesting that the unique architecture of the present human brain can also explain how we all create meaning out of all our experiences. We normally assume that the meanings we perceive in our everyday experiences are inherent and self-evident. I believe that this model of how all other species of primates create meaning is correct. However, I propose that our species has evolved, through natural selection, a vastly more complex preconscious process for the creation of meaning than just immediate sensory perception (Thomas E. McNamara, Evolution, Culture, and Consciousness: The Discovery of the Preconscious Mind. University Press of America, 2004). Our species has evolved the ability to generate grammatical language and that necessarily requires a much more complex brain architecture, which emerged concurrently with the emergence of those reentry brain circuits.

8. I am suggesting that our unique neurological architecture was selected for simply because of the increased survival value of grammatical language (Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct. Harper Perennial, 1994; and Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. Harper Perennial, 1999). This gradual emergence of reentry architecture resulted in the preconscious integration of our past experiences, our present needs, and our expectation for the future. It was this very complex process of neurological reentry between our major brain centers that drove the emergence not only of grammatical language, but also self-consciousness, awareness of our past, present and future, and our ability to imagine and create new ways of satisfying our instinctual needs. Because this new wiring in our CNS has been continually reinforced over at least the last 50,000 years, it can now be used to enable our species to take control of our own environment and, therefore, of our own evolution. In this essay I am proposing that just as binocular vision gave many species the ability to see their environment in three spatial dimensions, our language-driven reentry circuits have given us the ability to transcend the prison of present experience in which all other animals live (Gould & Lewontin’s article, The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm. Royal Society, 1979).

9. Human language requires a brain that can form mental concepts and verbal symbols and that has the ability to manipulate these synaptic patterns according to learned rules, such as grammar and syntax. But once these neurological modules and pathways emerged for learning purely cognitive functions, we slowly learned, over tens of thousands of years, that we could extend our primate consciousness to create, and then manipulate, any kind of symbol (synaptic patterns) according to any kind of rules (new neurological pathways). Continually expanding memories produce overlapping “synpats” (my abbreviated word for synaptic patterns), which include sensory and emotive content. That catalogue of similar patterns leads to composite patterns that we call concepts, which can be recalled from memory and can be manipulated by using cognitive rules that are derived from grammatical relationships. These synpats produce logic and then can be combined with empirical memories, which are the foundation of the scientific method.

10. Of course, this new cognitive capability in no way ensures that the symbols we create and manipulate automatically produce a correct, accurate, or even healthy representation of the real world. Our imagined alternatives to the meaning of our direct experiences are still driven by our instinctual, primate needs. The human mind still perceives reality in terms of its immediate instinctual and conditioned priorities. We are still subject to creating thoughts and beliefs that are demonstrably incorrect. However, our reentry pathways also give us the cognitive potential to explore radically new meanings and possibilities within every dimension of our lives, both as individuals and as communities. Combining this creative process with our ever-increasing cognitive technology for empirical verification has proven to be the essence of human progress, i.e., the scientific method, in stark contrast to the counterproductive, instinctually driven cosmologies of an earlier stage in our cognitive evolution, i.e., religious world views and values.

11. It is this vastly expanded mental ability, as well as our enormous memory capacity, that has allowed us to create civilization and that now can enable us to use the scientific method to take control of our own evolution. It is this ability to “step out” of our instinctual, primate mode of perception and instead to create a purely imaginary, learned, rational environment that has enabled us to transcend the prison of the present, as Julian Jaynes first proposed almost 50 years ago (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Houghton Mifflin, 1976). Adaptation is the first law of evolution. So, when language gave us the ability to imagine and share new experiences with each other, we also became able to learn and imagine new choices of meanings and behaviors to meet our rational needs. This new biological architecture also increased the very speed of evolution itself from the glacial speed of biological change to the almost unlimited speed of thought. It was this quantum advance in the rate of evolutionary change that enabled our species to transcend the limitations of all previous life on earth. In short, the essential ingredients of this transcendence, which we are still just beginning to develop, are our symbolic self-consciousness, our capacity for imagination, and our emerging technology for creating our own environment.

12. I am suggesting that, for all practical purposes, our species is now evolving a second, additional nervous system. We are now discovering a still emerging, entirely new, human form of consciousness. The history of human thought has always taught us that we have two minds: (1) the selfish, primate mind; and (2) our purely creative imagination. When our reentry circuits first emerged, we instinctively used them to imagine a non-empirical, social environment that best served our primate instincts. This imaginary world consisted of an immaterial form of life after death (regardless of which religion) that was selected for simply because it had the power to reduce our primate fear of death and also to modify many of the anti-social impulses found in all primate species. What I am proposing is simply a more rational, scientifically accurate model of our environment, our human nature, and the purpose of human life. For at least the last 50,000 years, our species was driven by the semi-instinctual values of religion; but this stage in our evolution has now brought us to the point of no return. The age of religion has produced civilization, but it has also amplified our basic, kinship-rooted, primate instincts. This fundamental ambiguity has inevitably brought our species to the verge of self-destruction. In order to merely survive as a species, we need to transition to a form of self-consciousness and behavioral norms that integrates our primate needs with the need to create a worldwide, healthy human community that is driven by rational values, not our instinctual, primate needs or fears. (I will discuss later that there is already a primate species, the bonobos, that by means of natural selection has already largely achieved this goal.)

13. One of the most recent and compelling scientific models that supports my proposal about human cognition and perception has been provided by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate in economics (Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). He proposes, just as I did (After Religion: Scientific Spirituality — The Next Stage of Consciousness. CreateSpace Publishing, 2012), that the mind operates by means of two different neurological systems concurrently and unconsciously. The first system is what he calls the fast system, which I have called the original form of primate consciousness. He calls it the “fast” system because our primal living by hunting and gathering selected for it since it provided the fastest possible response times. (In any environment of scarcity, competition for resources is inevitable, and speed of response is essential to survival.) The second system, which Kahneman calls the “slow” system, is what I suggest is the form of consciousness made possible by the instinctually driven emergence of grammatical language, which made conceptual, symbolic thinking possible. This second system is relatively slow because, as Edelman (1989) had already proposed, the neurological architecture that produces the remembered present and that also produces self-consciousness requires the activation of considerably more neurological pathways and, thus, requires more time to operate than our original, entirely instinctual, primate consciousness. What Kahneman calls System 1 and System 2 describes well what I refer to as our instinctual consciousness and symbolic consciousness, respectively. His description of the differences between his two systems fits very well within my own model of the two forms of consciousness:

“When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps.” (Kahneman, p. 21)

14. I very much agree with Kahneman’s proposal that the mind has two kinds of CNS hardware and software: fast and slow. However, I have to differ with his assumption that our System 2, which made grammatical language, was nothing more than linguistic programming. Of course, grammar and syntax are essential to our verbal language, but the changes in our CNS that were selected for required much more CNS development than that. The animal brain evolved long ago to preconsciously integrate the totally separate synaptic patterns it constantly receives from two eyes; it fully integrates those different streams of synaptic patterns into a single, three-dimensional visual field. In a similar way, our reentry circuits, constantly flowing into our neocortex, integrate all of our sensory stimulations and also all of our associated past experiences, including past learning. For example, think of a two-year-old child seeing a $100 bill on the sidewalk. That stimulus will be more or less meaningless to her because it has no instinctual value nor is there any relevant past learning to give the bill any emotive content. But when that child grows up, that same stimulus will have a very positive meaning, such that her or his response behavior will be very different.

15. It is our instinctual, preconscious ability to integrate past experience with our emotional centers that determines the meaning that we assign to any stimulus, just as our primate brain evolved to do. I think of our reentry circuits as a kind of time machine that has the potential to turn our immediate, perceived experience into a panorama of all of our related past learning and then preconsciously choose our response behavior accordingly. But there is a serious evolutionary flaw in this cognitive facility because it is also preconsciously driven to select whichever associated synaptic pattern has the most emotive content. In other words, in our present stage of cognitive evolution, our primate perceptive function automatically assigns the meaning of every stimulus based solely on whichever stored synaptic pattern has the most emotive energy. For example, anyone who is walking down the street and is suddenly struck by a passing stranger will perceive that as a negative stimulus and, thus, will respond violently. No normal person in that situation would take the time to stop and think about the many possible motives the stranger may have.

16. To understand the full import of this disconnect in our brain between our rational circuitry (originally due to the emergence of grammatical language) and our primate instinctual wiring, consider the famous experiment done by Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University in the 1960s (The Marshmallow Test. Little, Brown, 2014). His research explored how young children make decisions, by studying how they respond to a simple, ordinary choice. Each child, one by one, sat at a classroom desk with a single marshmallow on a plate in front of her or him while the professor explained that the child was free to eat that marshmallow whenever they wished. But, the professor added, if the child decided to wait for fifteen minutes, without eating it while the professor stepped out of the room, then she or he would be given a second marshmallow when he returned. Given this choice, many of the children ate the treat immediately, but others were able to overcome that instinctual response. Subsequent long-term research found that the children who had delayed gratification for the full 15 minutes scored better in their future years in terms of academic success and higher incomes (and were also less prone to obesity).

17. This experiment in early childhood rational decision-making attracted considerable attention at the time, and Mischel then published a comprehensive review and analysis of its implications. He argued that such non-instinctual behavior (i.e., self-control) can be learned and, thus, should be an important part of every child’s early education. Of course, Mischel’s methodology and his conclusions were questioned and debated, as all scientific experiments should be. But in light of the recent explosion of related discoveries in epigenetic learning, we may have a new cognitive technology for shaping the preconscious processes that we all use to create meaning out of our experiences. We have already seen that our primate instincts are the default setting for all perception and, thus, for all of our creation of meaning. But we may now be discovering how to reprogram our preconscious, primate thinking to include a rational process.

18. It seems to me the most important question the Marshmallow experiment raises is not yet addressed. Why did some children make a significantly different choice in the first place? According to my model of our CNS, we are quite capable of learning to modify our instinctual mental processes. I am suggesting that the human brain is quite capable of learning to create any meaning out of any stimulus it consciously chooses. The problem is that the stimulus with the most emotive power will preconsciously be chosen and, thus, will determine the response to that experience. In other words, the conscious mind never chooses one stimulus by deciding it is the best one to be chosen out of the many present in the immediate experience. The meaning of the experience is the essence of the perception itself. Every educator knows that non-instinctual learning is not easily achieved, but it is quite possible. I believe that epigenetic learning may be the key to our next stage of evolution (if we survive long enough to achieve it). I define the essence of rational thinking as perception combined with empirical associations. Primate thinking is purely instinctual, but rational thinking means creating meanings that include, whenever possible, not only individual needs but also the logical consequences of the behavior in question. Fully human decision-making should always include the understanding of the probable long-term result of any decision, not only for the decision maker, but also for society at large.

19. David Scott Moore is Professor of Psychology at Pitzer College and Director of the Claremont Infant Study Center. His research focuses on infant cognitive development and also on behavioral epigenetics. In the concluding chapter of his pioneering book (The Developing Genome: An Introduction to Behavioral Epigenetics. Oxford University Press, 2015), Moore summarizes what he believes to be one of the most important contributions of epigenetics: our DNA does not lock us into any predetermined personality type, IQ, or any particular behaviors, beliefs, or values.

20. What DNA does within its epigenetic function, according to Moore, is enable us to adapt neurologically to our environment and our experiences by way of our reentry circuits. This cognitive function to learn to adapt seems to be stronger the younger we are. This new genetic discovery suggests that the human genome always programs a two-stage process of organismic adaptation to its environment. I am proposing that this genetic mechanism, including the psychological process by which we create meaning out of our experience, emerged because it reinforced every child’s ability to adapt the cultural norms of their particular reproductive community. Of course, the purely biological stage of genetic development is caused by the combination of the mother’s and the father’s DNA, thereby creating each embryo’s unique DNA. Epigenetics, however, is the second stage in the psychological development of the individual by requiring the CNS to adapt to the constantly changing natural and social environment beginning in the womb and extending through childhood and, to a lesser degree, adulthood. It is important to note, however, that this new discovery of epigenetic learning in no way challenges the scientific consensus that human thought and behavior are primarily driven by our human instincts unless altered by epigenetic learning.

21. Moore implies that the role of DNA in personality formation could be just as much due to epigenetic adaptations as it is to DNA genetics alone. This research opens the door to a completely new way of thinking about the psychological development of the individual personality. It may well be that the environment plays a much greater role in the formation of the adult personality, beginning with the neurological mechanism for the creation of meaning. Our culture teaches us to believe that we are rational; but that is only because that belief, like other instinctual beliefs, makes us feel better about ourselves. A very important challenge to that belief is what I call emotional fungibility. Psychology calls this hardwired tendency “priming,” i.e., a phenomenon in which exposure to one stimulus influences how a person responds to a subsequent, related stimulus. This mechanism is simply another example of how powerful our sensory environment is on our preconscious creation of meaning. When people are happy, they tend to create positive meanings; but when they are sad or angry, they tend to create negative, anti-social meanings.

22. When speaking of the personality, psychologists frequently use the terms “personal identity” or “self-concept,” and these necessarily include the psychological framework for the creation of personal meanings. It is in that context that Moore concludes:

“Taken together, the available data on epigenetics and memory suggest that ‘long-term behavioral memory regulates, and is regulated by, the epigenome.’ This conclusion would surprise an earlier generation of biologists, who failed to recognize roles for epigenetics in any processes other than development. The memory data imply that epigenetic marks are responsive to the experiences we have as mature individuals and that epigenetic mechanisms have important, dynamic roles to play in the formation of adult animals’ memories. Thus, like our genomes, our epigenomes contribute to who we are; but unlike our genomes, they appear to be dynamic, and influenced by the experiences we have over the course of our lifetimes.” (p. 114)

23. What Moore is saying here is that the bedrock of the human personality is not just its DNA inheritance. We are also shaped by the psychological influence of personal experiences, i.e., our environment, especially in childhood. However, this idea contradicts one of the most fundamental assumptions of western culture, namely, that the individual’s core is the spiritual soul implanted by God and, therefore, everyone is fully responsible for whatever meanings/behaviors they generate, regardless of whatever their past experiences may have been. I am suggesting that all children can be taught to never immediately react to an instinctual stimulus based only on their first instinctual, perceived meaning. Primate meanings are always immediate because of our primate instinctual need for speed. But this instinct was only selected for by evolution because all animals had to deal with the inevitable result of living in an environment of scarcity. Research has shown (Wrangham, R. & Peterson. Demonic males: Apes and the origins of human violence. Houghton Mifflin, 1996) that chimps became bonobos in response to the radical change in their environment, i.e., from the competitive instinct necessary in an environment of scarcity to one of abundance. I am proposing the same for our species.

24. Finally, I want to review the research of one of the most important cognitive scientists in the United States today. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University with research appointments at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry and the Department of Radiology. In her book (How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), she presents her theory of constructed emotion, which proposes that all human emotions are created by means of our newly emerged language circuits, including our default mode network. Barrett explores and integrates the implications of this new, discrete operating system within our CNS by explaining it within her theory of how the brain constructs all emotions. As I understand her theory, she is proposing a new explanation of how emotions and, thus, behaviors are neurologically generated. It seems to me that this theory implies that we need a new understanding of epistemology, which is the foundation of philosophy. She suggests, for example, that our CNS did not evolve to know reality AS IT IS. The human mind did not evolve in order to perceive the truth, but only to determine our best instinctual response behavior to the everyday events that make up the meaning of our lives. The brain achieves this very pragmatic and immediate response based on past experiences so as to enable us to know how to respond as quickly and successfully as possible to the continuous stream of hundreds of thousands of synaptic patterns flowing into our CNS. I conclude from her theory that our human nature is not designed to know the truth per se, but only to react to stimuli in order to generate a biologically beneficial behavior for us as quickly as possible in that specific situation. She often refers to these responses as preconscious predictions because they predict and, thus, bring about what the body should immediately do.

“Your brain also uses predictions to initiate your body’s movements. These predictions occur before you have any conscious awareness or intent about moving your body. Neuroscientists and psychologists call this phenomenon ‘the illusion of free will.’ The word ‘illusion’ is a bit of a misnomer; your brain isn’t acting behind your back. You are your brain, and the whole cascade of [unconscious] events is caused by your brain’s predictive powers. It’s called an illusion because movement feels like a two-step process — decide, then move — when in fact your brain issues motor predictions to move your body well before you become aware of your intent to move. And even before you actually encounter the [stimulus in question].” (p. 60)

25. She later summarizes her theory of constructive emotion by saying:

“All sensory information is a massive, constantly changing puzzle for your brain to solve. The objects you see, the sounds you hear, the odors you smell, the touches you feel, the flavors you taste, and the interoceptive sensations you experience as aches and pains and affect…they all involve continuous sensory signals that are highly variable and ambiguous as they reach your brain. Your brain’s job is to predict them before they arrive, fill in missing details, and find regularities where possible, so that you experience a world of objects, people, music, and events, not the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ that is really out there.

To achieve this magnificent feat, your brain employs concepts to make the sensory signals meaningful, creating an explanation for where they came from, what they refer to in the world, and how to act on them. Your perceptions are so vivid and immediate that they compel you to believe that you experience the world as it is, when you actually experience a world of your own construction. Much of what you experience as the outside world begins inside your head. When you categorize using concepts, you go beyond the information available…” (p. 85–86)

26. When Barrett says, “your brain,” she is referring to our self-conscious frontal lobes, not the entire CNS, which is always hidden from awareness. Also, her use of the word “concepts” is a referral to the symbolic thinking that we have already seen as the foundation of grammatical language, self-consciousness, and rational thinking. Her model of the mind has vast philosophical ramifications because it implies a completely biological cause for self-consciousness, and that requires the rejection of the neoplatonic epistemology that has been an essential part of western culture for two millennia.

CONCLUSION

27. Modern science has already revealed that natural selection’s development of grammatical language has set our species apart from all preceding animal species. However, that same science is now demonstrating that the advent of symbolic consciousness will only lead to disaster unless we voluntarily extend our own cognitive evolution to achieve a worldwide, empirically based, pro-social culture that enables all of our descendants to take control of all their meanings and, thus, create only rational meanings out of their life experiences. In practice, this would result in a universal culture in which everyone creates only rational, positive emotional responses to every experience. I believe that the founders of all the great religions were advocating for just this kind of thinking. However, they had no way of explaining how it could actually be achieved, so they had to rely on non-empirically based thinking to bring such a culture about.

28. Rational thinking can be easily taught to children in much the same way we teach them how to read, which is not instinctual learning, even though speaking a language is instinctually learned. If we do not soon create a single, world-wide rational culture based on the empirical facts that underpin our world, our species will inevitably self-destruct because the human mind is instinctively disposed to preconsciously favor self-serving, instinctual meanings over rational thinking. Our best way to avoid self-destruction is to eliminate deprivation entirely and cultivate a cultural regimen of exclusively positive, emotional responses to all possible stimuli. I suggest that the community of experts in early childhood education should address how we can begin to develop a curriculum for enabling our children to learn to create only rational, constructive meanings and behaviors. Such a universal, cultural value system would produce a universal social environment that would inculcate such prosocial meanings that would vastly increase human happiness and creativity.

Summary of the 3 Stages of Human Evolution

29. In the beginning stage of our species, we had the same instinctual values as our chimp predecessors. But because we were forced to constantly migrate, due to recurring overpopulation of our small kinship groups, natural selection gave us bigger brains with expanded memory capacities and communication skills. The reproductive success of that greater learning capacity led to the emergence of more reentry circuits, which eventually made symbolic thinking possible. That led to the emergence of circuits specifically for learning the rules of grammar and syntax, without which language would never be meaningful to the listener. All of this evolved because the enormous increase in survival rates that came with this preconscious, instinctual learning enabled us to share past and present experiences with our contemporaries, which evolved into the first form of truly human culture.

30. The next stage in our evolution of consciousness was purely due to an environment marked by recurring scarcity, due to our reproductive success. All the founders of our world’s great religions taught what was essentially a bonobo value system. But because their followers had not achieved the essential insight of their teacher, the vast majority necessarily interpreted those teachings within the context of their own patriarchal, chimp values. I am suggesting that such a radical change in how our CNS creates meaning out of experience — from the context of instinctual patriarchal values to one of learned matriarchal ones — can only be achieved by epigenetic learning. All animal cultures were only selected for because they increased the survival rate of that species in that environment. Furthermore, since evolution itself is a biological process, driven by behaviors and not by concepts, major cultural changes must also be originated by the deepest form of learning, which is epigenetic, i.e., precognitive. Grammatical language itself, for example, had to begin on the behavioral level of our CNS, not the conceptual level, since concepts are a product of symbolic thinking, not the cause of it.

31. Now that we are beginning to understand our own evolution, we can use the power of epigenetic learning to cultivate a revolutionary cultural change from one of instinctual competition to one of rational cooperation. We need to evolve a third evolutionary stage of preconsciousness that replaces our primate instincts with a culture of rational values, which is to say, values founded on universal, prosocial meanings and behaviors. For example, every child should epigenetically learn not only their native language, as they do now, but also prosocial values, and thus, behaviors. Without such preconscious, epigenetic learning in childhood, human cultures will continue to inculcate our instinctual, primate competitiveness and judgmentalness.

32. Think for a minute what our world would be like if we created a culture in which all children learn to assume that everybody, given that person’s unknowable circumstances at that moment, is doing the best they can at that moment. We can all easily conceptualize such a radical change in how we create meaning, but concepts will never replace our chimp, instinctual meanings unless we achieve that replacement on the preconscious, instinctual level. We like to believe that our modern world is making great progress, but that perception only includes our advances in science and technology, not our social values. If we do not consciously commit to replacing our chimp perceptions with bonobo values and then change our behaviors accordingly, we are doomed to the self-destruction inherent in all patriarchal cultures. Cooperation is necessarily more productive and more conducive to health and happiness than intraspecies competition could ever be.

33. It is obvious that much of our current social media are now promoting a distinctly toxic (i.e., primate) and dangerous value system of competition. True democracies can only exist within a social value system based on reasonable compromise. United we stand; divided we fall. A growing threat to our democracy is the combative language that is now freely expressed in many of our internet chat rooms. I personally believe that this dangerous trend can be traced back to the ever-growing influence of the egocentric, profit motive in our culture. An example of these primate values can be seen in the influence of Rupert Murdoch. His style of journalism was chosen, perhaps unintentionally, to attract our most primate instincts, such as sex and violence. He has since spread his culture to television, with the help of Roger Ailes, in the guise of national news presentations. Because this dramatic incarnation is deeply instinctual, it has now infected our political landscape, beginning with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. If this primate influence continues to spread through our body politic, it is hard to see how our democratic form of government can be maintained. Dictatorial governments thrive on the lowest common denominator in any society simply because the people do not understand their own human nature. Knowledge is power, but only when it includes self-knowledge.

34. Our planet was formed just like so many others. Its tree of life only evolved a self-conscious life form because of that species’ particular history. We emerged like so many other hominid species. We only evolved into self-consciousness because of our unique history of migration, which randomly produced a CNS with reentry circuits. In other words, every one of us is born a primate; but because of our present stage of biological evolution, we are able to achieve the freedom to create our own meanings out of any experience we have. The biological process that makes this individual transformation possible is epigenetic learning. It is the most powerful form of learning, one so powerful that it can enable us to create a human community that can eliminate all forms of negative emotions and replace them with positive, cooperative, creative meanings. I like to think of that possibility as a kind of “heaven on earth.”

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