It's nice to have the ape relatives because their behavior in the wild gives us a bit of a baseline against which to compare ourselves. As we move into an age of machines and symbols, some of our difficulties stem from still being ape-ish in this different world. Here, we want to remember, decode, be self-aware and have self-insight and be aware of others and their ways, too. There are similarities and differences between our goals and the goals we were built to accomplish. With patience and imagination, we can probably do just fine in this connected, computerized world but it is indeed a bit different from searching for food in the wild.
Even the last 50 to 20 thousand years were spent as hunter-gatherers, not as lab technicians, help desk workers or web page coders. The mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, is reported by the BBC to have enrolled in a class on coding for web pages. The BBC has a related article, "Coding: The New Latin". These highly symbolic activities are not the hunting, eating, mating and sleeping that we animals were built for. True, we have found a way to live longer and with more ease. But when we have troubles with our motivation, our tempers, our interpersonal and intrapersonal relations, it could be our basic wiring that is part of the problem.
The modern geneticists say that the similarity of our genetic information and that of the chimpanzees is very great. We don't need to worry. Language, writing, commerce and modern plumbing and electricity are ours and we aren't going to lose them. Still, it is thought-provoking to see how much is identical.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
