The universe started after Big Bang around 13.8 billion years ago. Earth originated approximately 9.3 billion years after that significant moment. Things on Earth were very unsettled initially, but gradually things cooled down. Some chemical reactions started taking place in the primordial organic soup. Plant cells and animal cells began to appear. Slowly animal cells grew larger in their complexity. Fast forward a few billion years, various species of various kinds of animals began roaming the waters and the lands of the Earth. I’m one of those animals. But I have changed over the years. I can not point to a specific moment in the history of time when I first appeared, for it has always been a gradual process, which the Darwin dude refers to as evolution. Some can say that I appeared when the first cell appeared, or may be I was there even when the Earth originated. But was I not present when the Universe itself started? Yes, so that’s why I will not point to a specific moment of my birth. But I have always been changing.
Before I took my present form, I used to look like a dumb monkey. True, I might have been the most intelligent thing alive at that time, but compared to the current standards of intelligence, I was way too dumb. It was sad. All I could think of was survival, and survival, and some more survival. I used to look for food and shelter as part of this survival instinct. I felt safe when I had these in my reach. I don’t know where or why or how I got this target of my survival though. Why was my survival so important to me? Was it important? What did survival mean to me at that time? I did not know the answers to these questions then. To be honest, I did not even ask these questions then. I just wanted to survive, to continue being what I was. As a result, to enable that target, I automatically developed a lot of instinctual reactions in my body. Questions like whether something is dangerous or safe for me were quickly answered by this efficient instinctual reaction system. It could also decide whether I needed to flee away from a perceived danger or fight it. Over time, other monkeys like me whose instinctual reaction system was better than others persisted, and others ended.
During that time, I also discovered this irrational raging drive inside me to reproduce. There were some other monkeys who were of a different kind than some of us. We used to stay together and find food, and ensure our survival. And then we found out that we could play together in very specific way to create smaller monkeys like us. Then we had to ensure that those monkeys were fed and sheltered so they could grow up to become big monkeys like us. We found that the set of monkeys that had more number of smaller monkeys felt safer and survived for more time than the ones who did not engage in this kind of play. Usually, the more monkeys you created, the better it was for your survival. One could also engage with multiple other monkeys for this purpose.
It was simple life: find food, create more monkeys, sleep, and ensure you stay alive. It was simple, till the simplicity vanished one fine day. It occurred to some of us that we had started to develop a very complex ability to simulate future, to imagine that which did not exist. Initially, it seemed to help us a lot. Those of us who had more of this ability performed very well in various tasks because we could predetermine to some extent what could possibly happen and prepare for that. We became stronger and for some reason, we sought similarly strong monkeys to play the sport of reproduction. The weaker monkeys continued to engage in their simple life. But the rest of us continued to make our boring simple life more complex due to our ability to imagine. Gradually this ability became very strong, and we started to think what can be done to make our lives even more comfortable. Whereas the simpler monkeys could not imagine any future, we wanted to run towards exploring the so many possibilities and shape our lives. Future became more important than present. We began experimenting as a result of this and that’s how the concept of clothes, cooking, and travelling came up. We started to think a lot on communication, and gradually we created a set of sounds that meant specific things. Some of us went a step ahead and began to form symbols for those sounds, so anyone could infer meaning just by looking at those symbols. We started to note down a lot of things on rocks.
And one fine day, I realised that I was no longer a monkey. I had become something else. The simple life had changed significantly. We had formed intriguing societies with complex norms and undue expectations. Everyone was expected to behave in the constraints of those societal rules. Some of us started to get stressed out due to the nerve wrenching complexities of life. Some of us wondered why it couldn’t have been less complex. Some of us showed to others that it could actually be taken as a simple life but more often than not, that needed people to come out of the societal constraints. And that was a lot of hard work. Not everyone could do it. And so it goes even now. Some people lead simple lives like that of apes. Happy and content and using the prefrontal cortex for the right things. Most of the other people continue to feel complex due to using their prefrontal cortexes in the wrong way.
Obviously, evolution has not stopped. It is still on-going. But it is a slow process, and it might take thousands of years for some significant change to appear in me. I might develop wings someday, get gills to breathe in water. My toes might disappear due to the future uselessness. My brain might become even bigger and connected in some way to other humans. There are a lot of possibilities that are being chosen right now by evolution on my behalf and I don’t get a say in it.
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PS: The timelines, and scientific facts in this post are just indicative. Please do your research before acting on anything.