How we got to where we are

In the beginning was the cosmos, fundamentally as incomprehensible to our human brains as quantum chemistry is to a dog’s brain.

What our human brains can understand is that our ultimate emergence from countless generations of less complex organisms can be largely explained by a  simple mechanism that tests the reproductive fitness of varying replicants.

Systems that try to predict the future and dictate whether to go for it or scram - from the chemotaxis of bacteria to the predictive processing of our humans brains - have proved to be more likely to survive and propagate.

Modern neuroscience has ...