Many traits that influenced our ability to spot predators or flee from them have been under strong natural selection for much of the past 40 million years of primate evolution and even before then. (We have been prey essentially since the beginning.) Researchers are just beginning to explore these possibilities. Lynne Isbell at the University of California-Davis has argued that the range of our color vision evolved in part because those of our ancestors who could see more colors were more likely to spot snakes. A study this year found that children spot snakes more quickly than they do flowers . They also spot snakes when using color vision more quickly than in gray scale. Our interactions with other species (be they snakes, or as some have argued, fruits) shaped our eyesight. Our screams, those preverbal (and universal) utterances, are alarm calls signaling, simultaneously, both a threat and the need for help.

Many primate species have alarm calls that are specific for different predators. The first primate nouns were almost certainly those embedded in calls that meant, “Oh shit, big cat!” “Oh shit, giant eagle!” or “For the love of god, did you see the size of that snake? ” In this way, predators may have had a positive impact on who we are now, having given us the precursors of language, or at the very least, cussing…

Even today, where humans live alongside predators, both children and adults get eaten. Harry Greene, a herpetologist at Cornell University and one of a handful of my colleagues more likely to be eaten by a wild animal than to die of old age, and Thomas Headland, an anthropologist, recently conducted a study of Agta hunter-gatherers in the Philippines. Harry was excited to find that the Agta lived among a high density of pythons. The Agta tend to be not quite so excited; Greene and Headland found that one in four Agta men had been attacked by a reticulated python . Of the 120 men whose stories were considered for the study, six had been killed by a python. That’s a death-by-python rate of 1 in 20…

Nor was it just cats. Humans were eaten by giant hyenas, cave bears, cave lions, eagles, snakes, other primates, wolves, saber-toothed cats, false saber-toothed cats, and maybe even—bless their hearts— giant, predatory kangaroos . Amazingly, these are just the predators that consumed our ancestors during relatively recent history, the past 100,000 years or so. Go further back in time, and the diversity of things that ate our kin goes up (particularly given that our earlier, pre- hominin ancestors were progressively smaller). Some predators, such as leopards, ate many of our ancestors. Others, like crocodiles, komodo dragons, or sharks, took their bites, but more opportunistically, savoring the occasional human or proto-human the way one might enjoy some special holiday treat…

“How can the human eye can see more shades of green than any other color? ‘Cause of predators. Used to be, monkeys we were, right? And in the woods, in the jungle, everything’s green. So in order to not get eaten by panthers and bears and the like, we had to be able to see them, you know, in the grass, and trees and such. Predators”

In a way, of course, they were. All those gut feelings, right or wrong, that had kept the breed alive in the Pleistocene savannah—and they were wrong, so much of the time. False negatives, false positives, the moral algebra of fat men pushed in front of onrushing trolleys. The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.

Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.

Fossil feelings. Better off without them, once you’d outgrown the savannah and decided that Truth mattered after all. But Humanity wasn’t defined by arms and legs and upright posture. Humanity had evolved at the synapse as well as at the opposable thumb—and those misleading gut feelings were the very groundwork on which the whole damn clade had been built. Capuchins felt empathy. Chimps had an innate sense of fair play. You could look into the eyes of any cat or dog and see a connection there, a legacy of common subroutines and shared emotions.

The Bicamerals had cut away all that kinship in the name of something their stunted progenitors called Truth, and replaced it with—something else. They might look human. Their cellular metabolism might lie dead on the Kleiber curve. But to merely call them a cognitive subspecies was denial to the point of delusion. The wiring in those skulls wasn’t even mammalian anymore. A look into those sparkling eyes would show you nothing but—

~ Echopraxia by Peter Watts