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Why Reason Has No Power
How the human brain’s hardwiring prevents us from understanding reality
Aside from those benighted folk who think the universe was made by one or more magic pixies, the mechanics of evolution enables the rest of us to understand a great deal about why we are the way we are. We humans, like all other living creatures, have been shaped by millions of years of selection pressures acting on our ancestors. Adaptations that on average enabled organisms to survive and reproduce are conserved while less helpful adaptations tend to drop out of the gene pool over time. Thus we end up with what was largely adaptive for our ancestors.
Our immediate ancestors lived on the African savannah and then in the primordial forests of Eurasia. Life wasn’t tremendously complex and as we lived in small groups of a few hundred individuals, our brains evolved to cope with relatively simple problems. Mostly we had to concern ourselves with social relationships: who was on the way up, who was on the way down, who could help us and who might hinder us. Everything in our mental universe was essentially anecdotal.
As thinking burns precious calories which back then were scarce and uncertain, we naturally evolved to get through life with as little thinking as possible. This means we accept assertion automatically provided it comes from…
