This is your brain on humanity.

• Rocknerd: The Campaign for Real Rock versus plastic instruments.

Humanity nearly evolved to extinction. We literally grew this huge peacock's tail of a brain as an evolutionary runaway, just to do chimpanzee tribal politics better. Really — that was the entire reason.

It costs us a hell of a lot. It's a massive metabolic drain and makes reproduction horribly difficult, birth frequently killing the mother and the infant being helpless for years and with a horrific early mortality rate. If the bottleneck 70,000 years ago had killed all of us instead of leaving a couple of thousand, we'd be a perfect example for the next intelligent species to use of a species evolving itself to extinction.

We're just lucky that evolution came up with general intelligence as a solution to convincing that other chimp to give us the fruit, and that general intelligence turned out to be quite useful for some other things.

Remember: we grew this great big brain just to do tribal politics. We grew general intelligence as a better way to do tribal politics. When you find your fellow human difficult to understand or deal with, remember that quantum mechanics and a huge technological civilisation are mere casual side-effects of the hardest problem known to humanity: trying to make sense of the other humans.

References: 1, 2, 3. Cheers to TheOtherDave for the last observation.

I need to make a conscious effort to get out the house on a regular basis and see people other than on the Internet. I plan to go down the Pembury on Sunday evening. Anyone else going?