Rythmn out of the Blue

Dr. David Suzuki

...The human brain was the key to our survival. It endowed us with curiosity, inventiveness and a massive memory. The French Nobel laureate, Francois Jacob, says the human brain has an inbuilt need for order. We find chaos frightening and there is an innate tendency to try to organize our observations and speculations so it all makes sense. We recognized patterns, cycles and rhythms in nature - day and night, seasons, tides, lunar cycles, movement of stars, animal migration, plant succession - and that knowledge gave us some predictive capacity that was useful.

The human brain invented an amazing concept - a future. Because we had a notion of future, we (I believe uniquely among all animals) recognized that we could deliberately choose a path into the future. We understood causal relations ("If I do this, this will happen, if I don't do that, something else might occur.") and deliberately chose, from a number of options, the kind of future we were heading for. And it worked. It got us to where we are....

Very cool series, pointed out by Creative Generalist. Partstwo and three.