Page Not Found — Wait But Why

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.

Reason and imagination, combined together, lead to something even more incredible.

Life on Earth is a long succession of temporary animal containers passing genes along to newer containers like a baton in an endless relay. It’s an odd survival system, but so far, it’s worked pretty well—at least for those genes still around.

This light was so bright and so clear and so powerful that it was as if it had its own awareness—an awareness of itself, of the human it lived in, of the ancient software running beside it. The human brain had grown a mind of its own that could think for itself.

Over the years, the Higher Mind has come to see the Primitive Mind as a not-very-smart pet. But he also understands that it’s important to the whole system to let the Primitive Mind get what it needs from its little pet life—to an extent. The Primitive Mind is endlessly greedy, completely untrainable, and the Higher Mind has learned the hard way th... See more

But when the tides turn, the Primitive Mind’s torch grows along with his influence, and the room gets increasingly smoky. The more smoke there is, the more it blocks the Higher Mind’s light, cutting off his access to his human and making it hard for him to do his job.

But genes can’t talk to their animals, so instead they control them by having them run on specialized survival software.

The animal world is a stressful place to be.