. . . The unique operations of the brain are the result of natural selection operating through the filter of culture. They have suspended us between the two antipodal ideas of nature and machine, forest and city, the natural and the artificial, relentless seeking, in the words of the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi-Fu_Tuan an equilibrium not of this world.
. . . For millions of years human beings simply went at nature with everything they had, scrounging food and fighting off predators across a known world of few square miles. Life was short, fate terrifying, and reproduction an urgent priority: children, if freely conceived, just about replaced the family members who seemed to be dying all the time. The population flickered around equilibrium, and sometimes whole bands became extinct. Nature was sometimes not there – nameless and limitless, a force to beat against, cajole and exploit.
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Dinesh said:
. . . For millions of years human beings simply went at nature with everything they had, scrounging food and fighting off predators across a known world of few square miles. Life was short, fate terrifying, and reproduction an urgent priority: children, if freely conceived, just about replaced the family members who seemed to be dying all the time. The population flickered around equilibrium, and sometimes whole bands became extinct. Nature was sometimes not there – nameless and limitless, a force to beat against, cajole and exploit.
~ E.O. Wilson in “Biophilia”
Valeriane ♫ ♫ ♫¨* said: