Page Not Found — Wait But Why

Animals are just a hack these outlier genes came up with—temporary containers designed to carry the genes and help them stay immortal.

By sliding the animal’s feelings up and down, an animal’s software uses the feelings like reins to keep the animal’s goals and the genes’ goals perfectly aligned.

The problem is that the animal world isn’t really an animal world—it’s a world of trillions of strands of genetic information, each one hell-bent on immortality. And in a universe that wants to turn order into chaos whenever possible, the immortality of anything—let alone a delicate and complex genetic code—is a constant uphill battle. Most of Eart... See more

Humans had also gained the superpower of imagination, making them the world’s first animal that could fantasize and tell stories and dream of places they had never been.

These superpowers took their place in the human mind as powerful new enhancements.

So genes are like gravity—but animals aren’t like atoms.

Not only could this mind within a mind think its own thoughts, it could actually overrule the will of the genes, override the software’s commands, and drive human behavior.

When you have a relentless force consuming finite resources, something’s gotta give. In a star, atoms give, fusing into bigger atoms. In the animal world, animal species give, morphing into new, mutated species—or, more often, going extinct.

The Primitive Mind doesn’t care about you any more than gravity cares about atoms.

They evolved into a variety of hominid species, all of whom have since been discontinued, except one—a saucy one called homo sapiens. For them, the advancements in intelligence proved to be a major survival asset, so their cognitive capacity rapidly increased, developing into an array of shiny new tools that no animal had ever possessed before. Thr... See more