Monkey see, monkey do.
I'm not sold much into the idea that we evolved from primates that once chased bananas and now chase capital gains.
Although, yes, one can find myriad of similarities with both. Bananas are a biological imperative of capital gains. And the latter is a psychological echo of bananas.
I think evolution from that angle and what I've gathered has many gaps that don't quite bridge instinct to intellect convincingly.
For one, this leap from our primal drives, e.g the immediate, survival-focused urges that governed our ancestors, to our capacity for abstract reasoning and complex social constructs feel insufficiently explained by natural selection alone.
There's an evident gap between reaching for food out of hunger and reaching for wealth as a symbolic manifestation of security and status, coupled with a path to meaning making out of life. Does having wealth mean anything at all beyond the chase itself?
At least, in the conventional narrative, the process that account for how we crossed from one to the other seems incomplete.
Makes me wonder if something deeper or different was at play.
See the "web like" feature between the fingers? It is said that it's reminiscent of a trace of a time when we might've belonged to the water.
I can't remember where I did read that, as it was quite a long time ago, but it just stuck with me ever since I looked closely at my hands just after reading that passage.
Now, I sometimes consider that we may have been circling back to an aquatic origin of our entire evolutionary journey.
By that, I mean we clawed our way onto land, adapted to its constraints, learned to hunt and gather on solid ground.
Now, and after having built towers of capital, ideology, abstraction, etc. we're moving back into formless waters, as in the digital age drowning us in information as boundless as the sea our ancestors once knew.
Of course, symbolically, I've read a couple of places where the air element is used for this new digital age but I think the water element is also fitting especially in terms of this strong yet fluid force that sways the capital we chase, which flows somewhat like currents we can't quite navigate from a purely rational standpoint.
The unexplained jump
Yet this doesn't fully explain the inexplicable leap itself.
Why did we develop the capacity for imagination when simple survival mechanics never demanded it?
Why do we want things we don't need, suffer over abstractions and craft elaborate stories about our existence?
I think a primate doesn't ponder on its own mortality or create art to process the absurdity of being alive.
Via conventional frameworks such as evolutionary biology, we're told these are byproducts of a brain that got too big, so to speak.
If I remember correctly, this actually came from the idea of spandrels i.e side effects that weren't directly selected for.
But then, more questions ensue again, byproducts of what, exactly? Of linear evolution that's supposed to only keep us alive and reproducing?
The gaps feel deliberately hidden, as though something essential to understanding our nature has been left out of the story we tell ourselves from that vantage point of linear progress.
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