LIVING

2.5 MILLION YEARS AGO

Homo habilis, “handy man”, hits the scene.

Short and hairy with lanky arms and about half the cranial capacity of modern humans, we’re not expert hunters yet.

Our stone tools are mostly used defensively and we scavenge for our food.

wait what was the setting again?

100,000 years to 1

For perspective, Homo sapien sapien, or wise man, shows up 24.5 years later at this scale.

We now need to walk our way from the handy birth of man to his wise modernity.

you mean wise wise man?

I guess some are wiser than others.

Back to the HM 1300, we have this little stone-toting fuzzball exploring areas previously too hostile to inhabit.

dance your cares away…

By the time little Homo is around six years old we can call him erectus, “upright man.”

This is-

heheheh

THIS IS when pre-conventional morality develops.

Consequences are spotted using a new organ which lets him track distant targets by measuring balance and movement.

A good thing, because he’s also begun to master FIRE which requires a little more responsibility wouldn’t you say?

wait are you mixing metaphors?

child or caveman?

moral or evolutionary development?

Yes, he became a capable little hunter, shedding hair along with body heat to be more active during the day.

Like 1st graders starting elementary school, he learns about complex social groups, language and all the school yard gossip that comes with both.

this is no way to teach anyone anything

But we did learn, at least our ancestors did, doubling brain size during those formative years.

Although cortical grey matter peaked around 13, or Homo antecessor, our common ancestor with other humanoids-

you’re introducing robots now?

Not human droids, HUMANOIDS, human-like species.

We call ourselves wise wise humans because there are other wise human species that may have been comparable to us.

It seems as though around 7th grade we started taking different classes.

Conventional morality is setting in-

pick

your

metaphor

Ahem, conventional morality is setting in.

We’re learning to satisfy the expectations of our social groups and that of society.

Putting that bigger brain to work.

We used to call this early moral socializing civics before we started merely teaching to test, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

wait now you’re getting political?

I am running for President remember.

Just walking my way from here to there.

By the time our temporal lobes, which handle language comprehension & emotions fully evolved we’re 18 and ready to start our future.

Our classmates, however, are not so fortunate.

We’ve made great memories with Neanderthals, Denisovians and rest of the high school gang.

Neanderthal woman easily beat the strongest body-builders arm wrestling.

And Denisovians- well, we’re still figuring them out though I suspect they ate lunch behind the gym and had a lot of inside jokes no one else understood.

I ate behind the gym

But we leave the freaks & geeks to townie fates for the wise wise are college bound.

Once we graduate despite best attempts at debauchery our brains now consume a magnificent 20% of our metabolism.

really?

Yup, I read it on a bottle cap.

Per the HM 1300 we’re physically modern at 22, if not mentally, and ready for a career.

Or maybe we’re going to take a gap year.

I don’t know what millennials are doing anymore.

Do they still call them that?

you’ve lost me

Well, the point is, between 20 and 24 our brain VOLUME triples.

TRIPLES!

So the size doubled in high school, but the real jump in mass came during those experimental years in college and those couple years of wandering shortly after.

Some hypothesize that we might have hung with our older brother Freddie expanding horizons with strange ziploc bags & cool tunes to develop our own opinions on life.

Some say he’s just a bum.

that rug really tied his room together

One way or the other, between fungal cultures & counter cultures we became modern.

We’re somewhere between 24 & 25.

We’ve decided to get a dog.

Oh, and those townies with no prospects or career paths have somehow gone extinct.

wait what?

how?

We…might have killed them.

seriously?

Yeah…we most likely killed them all actually.

Wise wise man can be a bit of an asshole.

The third level in the theory of morality, post-conventional, isn’t guaranteed.

Consensus, universal moral principles and ethics that approach the spiritual are earned through willful introspection.

Some people are still doing the right thing into adulthood just because it’s the law.

Or out of fear of shame.

Or punishment.

Ahem GOD ahem.

hey jesus is love dude

unless you don’t accept him as your lord and savior

then you can go to hell

How lovely.

To dig deeper into our possible sociopathy we’ll dial back the HM 1300 by a magnitude of 250 from 100,000 to 400 years.

We’re exiting the timeline of genetic mutations that allow species to species evolution, but only just stepping into the crux of the age of social evolution.

It’s almost as if innovation is now jumping timeframes from lifeform to lifestyle, genes to memes.

so kawaii

Perhaps we should keep this pattern of jumping in mind as we continue to push modern technology past the pace of anything Granny G’s home and its family of life has yet seen.

you’ve been hanging around freddy too much

Just saying, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Systems seek stability.

We’d be wise wise to rethink actions affecting processes developed longer than life’s even been around.

Some things quickly done cannot be quickly undone.

I can get the toothpaste back in the tube

It was a metaphor.

you just need to shove it back in there

You’re missing the point.

just scoop it up and then you need like a pokey thing, to jam it back in

but maybe blow the tube to inflate it first

ideally before you brush your teeth, so you don’t waste the toothpaste-

Next slide.

that you’re gonna eventually get in your mouth

totally doable

you’re just being lazy

NEXT SLIDE.

I win