Ray Ray’s Reviews > Primate Change: How the World We Made is Remaking Us > Status Update

Pg 357 The knowledge that we have acquired over a few thousand years seems vast. With each generation that knowledge is built on and passed down to the next. But can it ever compare to the complex ingenuity our bodies have developed over many hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary experimentation and adaptation?

Pg 356 In a world in which...genetic code will soon become as editable as HTML..., what will we do about anxiety, depression and low pain thresholds? These were all incredibly useful to the Holocene and Pleistocene human, especially those who needed to be wary of predators.

Pg 355 For Heidegger. The realm of experience that preceded technology had gone, but but we might find glowing embers of it in the activities practised by our earliest ancestors...and in experiencing, accepting and revelling in the limits and pleasures of the human body

Pg 349 The hands of primates have successfully evolved to take advantage of their environment. What happened to human hands is much more revolutionary. We are unique among species because instead of waiting for evolution to provide us with the right tools for the job, our cognition reversed the process. Other apes' hands have adapted to their environment, but humans used their primitive hands to make an environmen...

Pg 331 Once you have knowledge transfer, the possibilities for biological transcendence begin. This is the point at which the limitations of the human body can be treated, enhanced or bypassed because intellect, whether individual or of a group, can work around a particular problem.

Pg 331 ...once knowledge, customs, ideas and ways of living can be transferred at greater than an arm's length (visually or through the written word) the possibilities become endless.

Pg 330 At the core of our difference from other animals is supposedly our imagination, the ability to go beyond the present into the future and past while simultaneously gathering moments and a community into ideas snd a shared system of belief in how a society might or ought to function. With the emergence of art in our species, all these things speak in unity.

The Old Friends hypothesis suggests that the immune system has not been effectively socialized and is as aggressive as a frightened dog retaliating against the slightest stimuli.

For more than 2 million years our species has fought predators and starvation to stay alive; today we mostly die because we eat too much.

The idea that a species can degenerate when its food is too easy to come by is a troubling one.