This section will be elaborated on over time to provide a hypothesis for how humans have evolved from their earlier primate ancestors to the general collection of homo sapiens that we see and experience today.

Consistent with many of the themes that will be discussed throughout this web resource, it is striking that all of the wonder of the Universe has unfolded while having been left completely unfettered to conform to its own natural laws. Natural laws that have been in place from the beginning.

The Universe's Liberty to behave and evolve naturally has been Conserved throughout time.

While much of the way the Universe has unfolded can be understood from our continuing advancements in working out the physical (e.g. chemical, electrical, magnetic, nuclear, quantum) sciences, there are significant holes in our understanding as they pertain to the unfolding of living systems.

While it is presumed that there are living systems elsewhere in the Universe, we have not yet found others than those that exist here on Earth. For that reason, we'll focus on how living Earth-based systems have evolved. We will update this resource to include other non-Earth-based living systems if and when they are found and studied.

Let's dive deep with a series of focusing maneuvers:

• let's focus on living systems which are community or synergy based
• more particularly, let's focus on mammalian cooperative systems
• specifically, we'll focus on human systems.

The Big Question:

The Preamble:
We understand planet Earth and many of its various environments. And we see that living systems have a knack for adapting to a variety of conditions. Conditions so extremely different that what might be required for survival of one species might actually be lethally toxic to another. The pictures at left exemplify this.

It's also presumed that the variety of living forms in existence today have been "selected" for by their environments and circumstances. We use the term "selection" in its evolutionary biology meaning - no conscious selection is made by Nature. We do not presume an "intentional guiding hand" in all this. Mechanisms of mutation, selection and adaptation appear sufficient to explain the great diversity of living forms and their behaviors that we see here on Earth. We'll use them here to eventually understand the unfolding evolution of humankind and its behaviors.

The Question, begetting the Hypothesis offered in this section
When one checks out all the known and studied organisms on this Earth, not one has developed the degree of cunning and intelligence that humans have. This is not to say that humans are better than any of the other species. Rather, all of the organisms that exist today have obviously made it through the environmental gauntlet presented by the Earth and its environments (which includes all the other species, by the way.) We are ALL at the top of our own evolutionary chains. We are all adapted.

And yet, humans have adapted to become enormously powerful intellectually. It is very clear that for all the other species, this intellectual power is not required for survival.

So one must ask thoughtfully, "Just what was it about human evolutionary history that compelled it to evolve in so dramatically advanced a fashion as it has intellectually?"

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We assume that adaptive evolution is guided by the mutually cooperative mechanisms of accident and selection. A change occurs randomly (e.g. genetically), and if the change enhances survivability (or more specifically, enhances the chance of having larger numbers of surviving offspring,) then the laws of math pretty much ensure that that trait will become prevalent in the population.

High intelligence is not a "low impact or low energy" trait. For it to be selected for and propagated, it must have been crucial for survival over "lower intelligence."

Another way of phrasing The Big Question - "What was the selective process or action that made high intelligence so positively adaptive for us?"

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