Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Basing all your behavior on a pre-programmed set of instructions written in the ACGT language places no undue demands—as long as the environment is the one you were evolved for. But no pre-programmed set of instructions, no matter how elaborate, no matter how successful in the past, can guarantee continuing survival in the face of rapid environmental change. Evolution through natural selection involves only the most remote, generalized, almost metaphorical kind of learning from experience. Something else is needed. When you hunt food; when mobility is high and organisms can roam among very different environments; when social relations with your own kind as well as predator/prey interactions become intricate; when you’re required to process enormous amounts of information about the external world—at such times, especially, it pays to have a brain. With a brain you can remember past experiences and relate them to your present predicament. You can recognize the bully who picks on you and the weakling you can pick on, the warm burrow or protected rock crevice to which you have safely fled before. Opportunistic scenarios for gathering food, or hunting, or escaping may occur to you at a critical moment. Neural circuitry develops for data processing, pattern recognition, and contingency planning. There are premonitions of forethought.

The style of evolution of brains—and much else—is not usually a matter of steady progression. Instead, the fossil record speaks of short periods of rapid and radical evolution, punctuating immense periods of time in which the sizes of brains hardly change at all. This seems true from the evolution of the earliest mammals to the evolution of our own species.⁹ It’s as if there’s a rare concatenation of events—perhaps changes in the DNA sequence and the external environment together—that provides an adaptive opportunity. The new environmental niches are quickly filled, and for a long time subsequent evolution is devoted to consolidating the gains. Major advances in neural architecture—in the brain’s ability to process data, to combine information from different senses, to improve its model of the nature of the outside world, and to think things through—may be very expensive. For many animals these are such broad-gauge talents, requiring so many separate evolutionary steps, that the major benefits may come only in the far future, while evolution is transfixed by the here-and-now. Nevertheless, even tiny advances in thinking are adaptive. Spurts in brain size have happened sufficiently often in the history of life for us to conclude, from this fact alone, that brains are useful to have around.

Feeling, in mammals at least, is mainly controlled by lower, more ancient parts of the brain, and thinking by the higher, more recently evolved outer layers.¹⁰ A rudimentary ability to think was superimposed on the pre-existing, genetically programmed behavioral repertoires—each of which probably corresponded to some interior state, perceived as an emotion. So when unexpectedly it is confronted with a predator, before anything like a thought wells up, the potential prey experiences an internal state that alerts it to its danger. That anxious, even panicky state comprises a familiar complex of sensations, including, for humans, sweaty palms, increased heartbeat and muscle tension, shortened breath, hairs standing on end, a queasiness in the belly, an urgent need to urinate and defecate, and a strong impulse either for combat or retreat.* Since in many mammals fear is produced by the same adrenaline-like molecule, it may feel pretty much the same in all of them. That’s at least a reasonable first guess. The more adrenaline in the bloodstream, up to a certain limit, the more fear the animal feels. It’s a telling fact that you can artificially be made to feel this precise set of sensations just by being injected with some adrenaline—as sometimes happens at the dentist’s (to shorten the clotting time of your blood, another useful adaptation when you’re confronting a predator. Of course you may also be generating some of your own adrenaline at the dentist’s.) Fear has to have an emotion tone about it. It has to be unpleasant.