Evolution

"Nature does nothing in vain" Aristotle.

Let's start at the beginning. To understand who we are we need to look back. And surprisingly; not too far.

Many species are driven by their emotions; hunger, reproduction and survival to name a few. But humans have developed something unusual. We have become aware of our emotions, we can think about how we feel. We are aware of our feelings. And the irony of the situation; our emotions don't talk to our intellect. So we often are uncertain where our emotional responses originate.

Clearly if someone pinches you, your brain knows where the pain originated. If someone shouts at you, your ears pinpoint the sound source with a great degree of accuracy. But some days you are sitting on a bus and you "feel" depressed and you just can't figure out where that feeling came from!

Mother Nature has a simple strategy which she ingrains on us all. Survive.

Mainly survival as a species, but obviously to achieve this we need to survive as individuals – but only for as long as we are useful in this pursuit.

To survive a changing environment we adapt, our genes make this possible, this has been reasonable effective in the past; especially when you consider historically environments and social structures change very slowly; over many thousands of years.

Our life-spans are relatively short to enable our genes to change. If we lived longer; the adaptation process would take longer as changes in our genes occur when we reproduce and there is a correlation with life-expectancy and birth-rates.

As a result we, as a species, we have been pretty much the same for thousands of years.

It's probably worth while considering how "young" we are as a species. It always amazes me the issues we are currently struggling to resolve; hunger, poverty, poor education, inequality, sexism, racism, ageism and many more. Even in my life-time we've seen widespread acceptance of women as equals, the acceptance of homosexuality. And a better understanding towards people who are different.

It seems farcical that these issues ever existed. We have computers, we are advanced? How can these issues exist? Some problems feel more akin to children fighting at school. And yet in many parts of the world continuing issues exacerbated by people that should know better. But improvements are being made, and while these exceed decline the world should become a better place. (fingers crossed)

Main points

• We are driven by emotions often post-rationalising our emotionally driven actions.
• Emotions and intellect are not connected. You can't directly control your emotions (i.e. why not try to feel angry or loved, you may find yourself trying to imagine a scenario which will provoke an emotion but you can't directly make yourself feel it).