HEY, I AM BEING FOLLOWED BY MONKEYS!

" The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use"

Recently I have been obsessed with tracing out the human evolution to as far back as possible and to understand whether further evolution is possible and what would we evolve into. Though I have found a lot of data pertaining to the first part, the future of evolution is still work in progress. But one thing is certain. Evolution appears to work in bursts of activity.Some species survived for a very long time and suddenly seemingly overnight  a new variant species seems to have evolved from it. And humans or homo sapiens appear to be like new borns when compared to the first life form about 50 million years ago! And yet the transition from a 500 cc brain to a 1450 cc brain did not take that much of a time.

Here are some list of findings so far:

Man has been a tribal animal since he first walked erect, more than four million years ago. Since he was bipedal, he could not out-climb or outrun his predators. Only through tribal cooperation could he hold his predators at bay. For the next two million years the human was a tribal hunter. He still is.

All of the human's social drives developed long before he developed intellectually. They are, therefore, instinctive. Such instincts as mother-love, compassion, cooperation, curiosity, inventiveness and competitiveness are ancient and embedded in the human. They were all necessary for the survival of the human and pre-human.

The intellect, the magnitude of which separates the human from all other animals, is not unique to the human, it is quite well developed in a number of the other higher animals. The intellect developed as a control over instincts to provide adaptable behavior.
The human is designed by nature or evolution to modify any behavior that would normally be instinctive to one that would provide optimum benefit (survivability). This process is called self-control or self-discipline, and is the major difference between the human and the lower order animals, those that apply only instinct to their behavioral decisions.

Self-discipline, therefore, is the measuring stick of the human. The more disciplined behavior (behavior determined by intellect) displayed by the individual, the more human he becomes. The less disciplined behavior (behavior in response to instinct) displayed by an individual, the more he becomes like the lower order animals that are lacking in intellect and are driven by their instincts.

These findings have led me to conclude that humans became social animals as a survival mechanism. Given a choice there maybe some of us who may still have the old genes which make us solitary people. Humans are also polygynous. Much later on when civilization must have construed, due to the high intellect which also developed by then, people may have realized some of the consequences of a polygynous nature and hence would have trained humans to be monogamous.

In the book Symbolic Species, marriage is defined as " an ancient homonid response to the conundrum of group living as a monogamous species, that is, a socially constrained contract given meaning and force by symbolic concepts"

I am sure a lot many things including the origin of religion is a result of this intellect. There is a lot of guess work that we may have to do to understand if certain behavioural patterns just evolved or they were conscious decisions taken by the tribal heads. To quote my all time favorite, "For the greater good", by all means these decisions (for lack of better word) may have been neccessary at that point of time.

Since we are so strongly driven by our intellect and add to that our instinctive ability what may we evolve into? Is it going to be mutation or transformation? Since we are already adept at adapting to any surroundings and we have also proved that we are predators,we can proudly say that we have taken over not only the world but are also in the process of conquering the universe.Do we really need any further evolution?

Lets wait and watch!