Let's face it: you're a complete misfit.
Fortunately, because our ancestors seem to have spent a certain amount of time on the forest floor before their enforced and extended stay on the ground, the open country wasn't a totally alien place to them, so they could muddle along, which gave them a sporting chance. But life was still hard.
On the ground any creatures that might make a nice meal for us could run faster than we could (even the rodents). Possibly more importantly, any creature that wanted to make a meal of us could also run faster than we could - and in the open savannah we couldn't just climb into a tree to get out of harms way (There are trees on the savannah, but they are more thinly spread than would be convenient).
Fortunately there weren't enough predators around to eat all of our ancestors in one go. This was because in the wild the number of carnivores is always relatively low compared to the number of herbivores, at a ratio of about 100 to 1. If the carnivores were numerous enough to eat all of the herbivores they'd soon run out of food, and would die out themselves.
Our ancestors may have had pathetic locomotive skills on the ground in comparison to those of the other creatures there, but they did have one quality that worked in their favour - they were omnivorous. Most medium to large sized ground dwellers were polarized into either the vegetarian or meat-only camps, but we could eat almost anything. This meant that, very usefully, we could survive by eating from a larger menu than was available to most similarly sized creatures. Choosing from this menu had its problems though, meaning that we had to act slightly differently to other creatures while making our choices.
Take this scenario. A small group of our ancestors are walking across a typical patch of savannah, with its open areas of tall grass and scattered trees. Suddenly, there's the rustling of a largish animal that's hidden from sight behind a bush. How should our ancestors, as omnivores, react to this rustling, and in what ways might their reactions differ from those of other creatures? Any herbivore - a gazelle for instance - that heard such a rustling would assume that it may be a predator and would head off in the opposite direction, just to be on the safe side. There'd be no point in hanging around. Doing so was potentially dangerous.
Equally, any carnivore that heard a rustling would assume that it may possibly be caused by a creature that was a potential meal, and thus it may stealthily approach the source of the noise rather than flee from it. If the carnivore discovered that the rustling was caused by another carnivore it would probably decide to turn around and look for a meal elsewhere (as carnivores tend to steer clear of one another rather than making meals of each other).
For our omnivorous ancestors it was different. When they heard a rustling the noise could be either a predator or it could be something to eat. They had two choices - either run away and be safe (but hungry), or stay and possibly have a meal (or be eaten). Tricky.
These two conflicting choices, governed by different emotions and different parts of the brain, made life confusing. Rather than simply acting on impulse, on the basis of very straightforward rules, as most creatures do, our ancestors had to work out the correct response to two distinct and opposing drives - they had to be aware of the balance of risk and reward when deciding whether to flee or stay. A whole new area of mental activity needed to gradually develop.
This dilemma, whether to run or stay, applies to all omnivores to some extent. But for our ancestors it was far more pressing than for most. Most medium-sized omnivores eat creatures that are much smaller and lower down the food chain than they are themselves, because they are cowards. Thus an omnivorous warthog will eat a carnivorous lizard. As a result these omnivores could avoid the flee or feast dilemma as long as there is enough potential food around. If they heard something large rustling, they'd sensibly retreat, while if they heard something small, they'd eat.
This didn't apply to our ancestors however. As misfits in an alien environment they had to eat creatures that were frequently much greater in size and strength than was generally advisable.
Thus the awareness that the world held alternatives (the rustling in the bushes may be either predator or prey) developed to a much greater extent in our ancestors than it did in other creatures, and with this the greater awareness that you could, or indeed had to, make choices about which action to take - to run or to stay.
Due to the importance of knowing what type of creature (predator or prey) was doing the rustling in the bushes even though the cause was hidden, it was especially necessary to develop the ability to wonder what the cause of the rustling was. This marked a leap in the degree of curiosity that our ancestors possessed. As a result our ancestors developed a highly tuned ability to think about things that were hidden, and an awareness that it was useful to know more about a situation than was immediately obvious.
Not only would wondering about what was hidden heighten our ancestors' curiosity, but the act of trying to envision what was hidden may have been a huge boost to the development of imagination.
Under the pressure of the complexities of the new and hostile world that they found themselves in, our ancestors gradually became cleverer and cleverer.
This doesn't mean that they deliberately "thought themselves cleverer" just by thinking a lot.
It was much more a simple matter of cleverer people surviving, because they were the ones who could deal best with the complex pressures that they encountered in their alien environment. These survivors would then have children who on average were as intelligent as they were, and thus the average intelligence of humans would increase (in the same way that the average colours of the moths described earlier became closer to that of tree bark).
Other creatures weren't in situations where being more intelligent would be a definite advantage, as they were already well adapted to their environments. They already had their own means of surviving, such as by reproducing in large numbers or by staying out of harm's way in their own ecological niches.
When our early ancestors wondered about what was making the savannah's grass rustle (predator or prey?) they were exhibiting a degree of curiosity. It was a relatively primitive manifestation of the quality, as its only concern was "What's that?" (Is it a lion or a warthog?) However, this was definitely a sophisticated response when compared to that of most creatures, for which the response to a rustle was much closer to a simple "There's something there!" (which, you may notice, carries no question mark: it isn't a question).
Our ancestors' "What's that?" response, while being very much a question and thus the result of curiosity, was however only the result of a limited type of curiosity that seeks the acquisition of useful facts - facts of a very static kind (It's a lion. It's a warthog). It was a form of curiosity that didn't call for any degree of analysis to be undertaken.
This is a type of curiosity that's possessed in some degree by many higher animals.
You can see it in action (I think) when a dog inside a house hears someone approaching the door. The dog pricks up its ears and becomes alert.
This "What's that?" level of curiosity works fine for dogs, but for our misfit ancestors it wasn't enough, on its own, to ensure survival. However, it was a step in the right direction.
The "What's that?" level of curiosity emerges within a brain that's capable of discerning that there are things in the world that are hidden from view (such as animals on the other side of bushes or people on the other side of doors). Our ancestors must have grasped at some point that if there was a creature behind a bush before they could see it, then the creature was probably there before they could hear it. They realised that just because you couldn't see, hear or otherwise sense something didn't mean that it didn't exist: that things didn't just pop into existence when their presence was made known by sight, sound or smell. (This is something like a very early version of the classical puzzle, popularised by Bishop Berkeley in the eighteenth century, about whether or not chairs still exist when you've left the room.) Armed with this realisation that there are hidden objects in the world, the cleverer individuals amongst our ancestors developed the realisation that there were also hidden events going on, unnoticed, behind the scenes too.
This awareness of hidden events, or mechanisms at work behind the surface, allowed our ancestors to develop a form of curiosity that rather than simply asking "What's that?" asked "How's that?" This type of thinking involves the noticing of links between things.
This is a different order of thinking altogether to the simple fact-acquiring "What's that?" way of thinking, as it requires a grasp of consequences - of cause and effect.
The ability to be able to think in terms of cause and effect was of paramount importance in the development of our mental capabilities.
As a result of their enhanced ability to cope with what the world threw at them the members of our ancestors' groups who could think in terms of cause and effect survived better than their less gifted relatives, and they thus reproduced more profusely, creating future generations of our ancestors who were similarly a little bit more insightful on average - a good example of the process of cause and effect itself.
These new generations with their superior brain-power had the intelligence not only to ask "How's that?" but could ask an even more sophisticated question: "Why's that?" They could now ask why questions as well as how questions.
A typical how question could be: "How do I kill a crocodile?" Answer: "By hitting it on the head with a big stone." In contrast, a why question would be "Why does hitting a crocodile on the head with a big stone kill the crocodile?" To possess this "Why's that?" curiosity needs the ability to wonder about the reason that things are the way they are, rather than just accepting that things are as they are. It means not just accepting that for some mysterious reason a crocodile drops dead when it's had its head caved in. Thus the qualities of analytical intelligence were born.
This form of curiosity is so sophisticated that it's possible that only we humans have it (Or perhaps other creatures are just hiding it very well to avoid being subjected to tests).
The concept of cause and effect is something that we tend to take for granted. However, it's not something that we're born with. It takes a few years of growth before the brain is capable of understanding it. I still remember the time when, as a child, I first grasped the concept myself.
It was night. I lay in bed in the dark looking upwards. Every so often, to my perplexity, a rectangular area a few feet wide on one of the bedroom walls would suddenly become lighter than the rest of the wall. This light rectangle would then slide across the wall before vanishing. I was obviously aware enough to think that this was interesting, but I had no idea what it was.
I pointed out this fascinating phenomenon to my twin brother who shared the room with me.
"What do you think that is?" I asked him.
"The lights from the cars on the road outside (stupid)." Of course! Suddenly it was all so obvious. Every time the rectangle of light traversed the wall it was accompanied by the sound of a car passing on the road. The shape of the light patch was very similar to the shape of the window, which was another clue.
It hadn't even occurred to me that the light on the wall was being projected through the window. I'd just seen a bright rectangle of wall - perhaps I'd assumed that the wall itself was temporarily lighter for some reason. After all, why not? Linking two seemingly unrelated phenomena - in this case the sound of a passing car and the appearance of the light on the wall - was a major revelation to me.
I vowed to use the concept again.
Out on the savannah we were ill-suited creatures in a dangerous world, so the only way that we could survive was to live by our wits.
Most creatures slotted neatly into their position in the established animal hierarchy: we however didn't know our place, so we had to literally think on our feet.
Life on the ground was hard for our misfit ancestors. Just imagine it. When a predator threatened they couldn't just climb a tree like the ancestors of the other great apes, nor could they flee at great speed like the ancestors of the antelopes, nor could they scurry for cover down a hole like the ancestors of the rodents or fly off like the ancestors of the birds. For these other creatures the only thing that was necessary when danger threatened was to react and retreat to a position of safety, where equilibrium was restored. They could then disengage their brains and relax in a state of relative thoughtlessness.
Our ancestors didn't have that luxury (although it wasn't really a luxury at all - it was actually the norm). Whenever our ancestors retreated to relative safety from any danger they almost invariably found themselves still in a position that was almost as exposed as ever. They were still on the ground in a hostile environment. They found that they were never in a situation in which they could safely drop their guard. They were in a constant state of trepidation, uncertainty, wariness, alertness and fretfulness (Does that sound familiar?).
Needless to say, amongst the groups of our ground-dwelling ancestors there'd be some individuals who were less fretful and less anxious than others - ones that were reasonably contented with their lot. They'd sit around thinking "Things aren't so bad." Guess which members of the groups were the ones that didn't notice when the sabre-toothed tiger came creeping up.
With the more laid-back members of our ancestors' groups eaten by tigers, the balance of personality types within the groups would have become heavily weighted towards the fretful, the nervous and the neurotic. The personality trait of laid-backness was largely selected out, while the traits of anxiety and edginess were reinforced.
And so it was that the discontented amongst our ancestors survived and thrived, passing this useful personality trait on to future generations. Such as us.
As mentioned above, under the pressure of having to live by their wits our ancestors started to develop the concept of consequences (The rustling in the grass may be a predator or it may be prey - do we eat or get eaten?). A degree of analysis was called for.
Embryonic concepts of cause and effect began to emerge in their brains.
One of the consequences of this was the development of tools.
Tool use probably started by accident. Our ancestor who invented the first tool didn't pick up a stick or a bone and think "What can I do with this?" The inventor was much more likely to be holding a stick or a bone and noticed that it had useful secondary qualities (such as the ability to poke an annoying neighbour in the eye). Fortunately, our ancestors had developed an awareness of cause and effect by then, so the implications of this were duly taken on board. The concept of using objects such as sticks to achieve particular ends was born. We had grasped the concept of tools.
On the subject of grasping tools, one of the features that made tool use possible was that our ancestors had hands that could literally grasp things. This was a direct result of abilities acquired during their tree climbing past in which holding onto branches was a necessary skill..
We were very lucky in this respect - if a creature such as a zebra was by some chance to be born as clever as a human I don't think it would ever have been able to master, for instance, the bow and arrow.
Our ancestors also walked upright, although possibly with a bit of a waddle. This freed the forelimbs from any role in ambulation, allowing them to be used for holding objects. Originally these objects would have been food, later on, tools. Our ancestors could achieve this bipedalism due to their tree climbing past, where the forelimbs were used for grasping.
If our ancestors hadn't originally been tree dwellers we probably wouldn't be here now. We'd have still been out there with the zebras.
(It's generally assumed that other apes, such as chimps, put their hands on the ground when they are walking - a technique known as knuckle walking. It's sometimes argued that this debarred them from developing significant tool use, and may thus have been a factor in their lack of development. I'm not sure of the validity of this conjecture: although they do indeed use knuckle walking, they are also quite capable of walking solely with their hind limbs, which they do frequently while in the branches. Personally I suspect that they didn't develop beyond their current position purely because they didn't need to, because they were just fine in their trees.) Many creatures other than humans use tools - thrushes use stones as "anvils" on which to smash snail shells, finches use sticks to poke into holes as a way of extracting insects, and even insects themselves sometimes use tools. This in general is very limited tool use however, chiefly involving the manipulation of a handy object such as a stick or twig. It doesn't involve any significant modification of the object. Exception has to be made for one of the most adept tool users on the planet, the Caledonian crow, which, like all members of the crow family, is far from being bird-brained. (This pun is always used when the Caledonian crow is mentioned, therefore I'm obliged to follow tradition. Sorry.) This crow has been studied by Professor Russell Gray, Dr Gavin Hunt and colleagues at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and had been found to be capable of sophisticated manipulation of tools in the form of specially chosen and modified twigs. Quite why a bird would need to be quite so extravagantly intelligent is a mystery that only the bird is clever enough to answer.
The great apes use tools in a more sophisticated manner than most creatures, with chimps sometimes even using sticks as rudimentary spears. It's not surprising that apes are capable of this relatively complex tool use, being so closely related to us, but they never took the idea and ran with it to the point where it put a chimp in space.
That's because the chimp's basic arsenal of tools are perfectly adequate for the tasks that are required of them. They do the job. There was never any pressure on the chimps to do better. Their lives didn't depend on it. As a result they were perfectly content with their basic stick idea.
We, however, were never in that privileged position. For us it was more a matter of develop tools or die.
Once we'd developed the use of tools something interesting happened to us. The fossil record seems to show that about 300,000 years after the first significant use of tools by our ancestors we'd evolved noticeably larger brains.
It's postulated that by using tools such as spears and primitive cutting implements our earlier, smaller-brained ancestors could eat more meat. The digestion of meat required less energy than did vegetables, so as a result there was a surplus of energy that was diverted into powering the energy-hungry brain. The appendix shrank and the brain expanded. In modern humans the brain demands about 20-25% of the body's energy.
There's also the possibility that meat contains brain-enhancing nutrients that are unavailable in plant matter. There is some evidence, for instance, that the compound known as creatine which is found in animal tissue and is commonly used as a muscle booster by athletes may increase mental ability..
It's the sort of substance that's nowadays given the name of super food (by food company marketing departments). The name creatine comes from the Greek kreas (flesh) and its similarity to the word creative is purely coincidental, I think, even if the substance does turn out to boost creativity in some way.
In parallel to the development of tools the related acquisition of cooking skills may have had a highly beneficial influence on the brain. It's possible that cooking, by breaking down the chemical constituents of food, makes digestion easier and more efficient, thus again allowing energy to be diverted away from food processing and into brain-building..
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Food for thought indeed.
Raw vegetable food faddists take note.
Chimps have smaller brains than we do.
Consequently the chimp doesn't have the mental capacity to envisage a process whereby it could alter a tool (in the form of a stick) so that it works better - it can only use what is presented to it. Our ancestors however realised that they could improve on things. For instance, they could combine the sticks and the stones that they used as rudimentary tools (for poking and smashing and other generally aggressive activities) to make a much-improved tool: an axe. This ability to combine two elements, such as sticks and stones, to create one greater thing, an axe, is very important. Once our ancestors realised that it was a useful strategy they used it endlessly, and not only for creating more complex tools. For instance they used it with language, taking a few simple grunts and related noises and grafting them together in new combinations in order to convey more complex information.
They used the same combining system within their thought processes too, splicing together a few simple concepts in order to create new and intriguing ideas.
All of these combinatory processes conform to the saying "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts".
As a result of our acquisition of the ability to combine things, from tools to language to concepts, we developed in leaps and bounds. But despite these leaps and bounds we were still two-legged animals in a four-legged world. We were fish out of water. Wherever we went we were still in a state of near constant emotional discomfort and general dissatisfaction.
It's probable that our all-pervasive feeling of dissatisfaction was made even worse by our recently amplified awareness of the concept of alternatives and of choice (flee or stay). After all, once you realise that there are alternatives you realise that things could be different - and it soon dawns on you that things could be better. And that if you make one choice from among the alternatives there's always the nagging feeling that you may have chosen the wrong one.
This feeling of dissatisfaction is a strong driving force in our development.
You can imagine one of our ancestors sitting looking at the perfectly serviceable axe that he's just made - and being dissatisfied with it. Because he just was.
He'd then try to make an even better one. And would succeed.
But he'd still be dissatisfied with the result. It could surely be better still? Dissatisfaction of this sort is the fuel that keeps driving us forwards.
Our tendency towards a feeling of dissatisfaction, and the accompanying constant desire to improve things, such as by creating better axes, was a critical factor in our ability to sustain ourselves in a hostile environment. No wonder we've got dissatisfaction as our constant companion, hard wired into our brains: it's a wonderful survival tool.
It was this feeling of dissatisfaction that fuelled the long journey of humanity from misfit to overlord. The underdog finally triumphs - it's a classic dramatic arc.
Unfortunately, as I've mentioned before, our tendency towards a feeling of dissatisfaction has propelled us onwards and upwards to such an extent that we're now at the point where we're dangerously close to destroying most of what we've achieved. So the dramatic arc may all end very badly indeed.
The development of intelligence was our key to survival, in that it helped us to negotiate the strange and inhospitable world of "the ground", but you may have noticed that we seem to be of an intelligence that's way beyond the needs for that function alone. We seem to be too intelligent merely for the purposes of immediate and stable existence. In fact, judging by the mess that we're making of the world right now, we seem to be way too intelligent for our own good.
Why did we become so seemingly preposterously, unnecessarily clever? It's possibly the result of a secondary pressure that we were under, beyond that of basic survival. This pressure was the internal pressure from within social groups rather than the external pressure from the surrounding environment.
Pressure from within social groups doesn't automatically encourage the development of intelligence - other creatures live in social groups but they didn't develop in the way that we did. This was probably because (as usual) they didn't need to.
The reason that social pressure meant that we developed higher intelligence may again come back to our position as a misfit species on the ground. We'd had to learn to live as tight-knit packs, where individuals had to pull their weight and help the whole group, such as by keeping a watch out for predators and by seeking out food.
Our ancestors were a bit like the characters in one of those disaster movies in which civilization breaks down and only a handful of people survive (possibly after a nuclear war or a world-wide epidemic of a killer virus): small bands of people roaming around a hostile environment, having to pool their resources and skills, or die.
It was essential that we developed the relatively high intelligence and sophisticated communication skills that would allow us to survive adequately in this situation, and that were necessarily far beyond those of other creatures that were in general hunkered down in their ecological niches. But once we'd developed those skills we didn't stop.
Like the characters in the aforementioned disaster movie, life for our intrepid bands of hominids wasn't just about basic survival. There were internal rivalries and jealousies within the groups that had to be reckoned with too. In order to negotiate these complicated social interactions, the more complex a person's brain, the better.
Needless to say, many of these social interactions would revolve around sex. The males in a group would have their eyes on the females. Just as now. The need to compete with rivals for the affections of the most gorgeous females would be intense, and all of the males who thought they were in with a chance would try to impress these females. Just as now. Up to a point these males would rely on their good looks and strapping physiques, but beyond that they'd try to turn the female heads by using displays of skill and intelligence. Just as now.
According to this scenario our excessively high intelligence is largely for the purpose of showing off with, a bit like the peacock's tail. This is the sexual display theory of intelligence.
I think that this has the feel of at least a certain amount of plausibility to it - after all I'm pretty sure that most of the stuff that men do even today is motivated by the desire to impress women, whether it's driving a car too fast or becoming a professor of cognitive neuroscience. Indeed, a friend of mine who recently had to change careers from being an acupuncturist to a plumber (due to a surplus of acupuncturists in his part of California) commented that the main drawback of his new occupation was that it had a lower cachet with the ladies.
Males don't only want to impress females though - they also want to impress other males. A lot of inter-male interaction is geared towards status enhancement and attempts at dominance - because the dominant males get a bigger share of the resources that are available. Amongst these resources are food, shelter, and sexual partners, so there's still a sexual element involved, which I'm sure doesn't surprise you.
It's sometimes obvious which pursuits are carried out by males specifically in order to impress other males rather than females. In the modern world such activities include for instance - skateboarding. Have you ever seen a young woman who's in the slightest bit interested in the skateboarding prowess of young men? Me neither. Such skills are almost purely for the purposes of (young) men testing themselves against each other.
Over the generations the competition between males to out-perform each other has resulted in an inevitable upwards spiral of intelligence levels (along with increasing skateboarding skills). Intelligence increased as a result of more intelligent males having to compete with more intelligent males.
You may have noticed that I've just described the runaway increase in human intelligence as stemming from competition between males for female approval and between males for inter-male dominance. In other words, I've described the increase in intelligence as being male driven.
A reasonable conclusion to this may be that women should therefore lag behind men in the intelligence stakes, just as women obviously lag behind men in the physical brawn stakes.
However, women aren't on average less intelligent than men - they're exactly the same.
It's notoriously difficult to conduct studies of variations in intelligence between different groups of people, as it's very tricky to separate the culturally imposed variants from innate ones. It's also quite hard finding a representative sample of people to test (rather than the usual group of university students). However, very interestingly, some recent studies into the differences between the intelligence levels of men and women claim to find that at the bottom end of the intelligence scale there are noticeably more men than women (with about the bottom 2% being almost exclusively male). Why would that be, if intelligence was male driven? If you're a woman reading this and you're now thinking "Ah ha - I knew it. Men are stupid!" - not so fast. The same studies also found that men outnumber women at the other end of the intelligence scale too (with the top 2% being almost exclusively male). Essentially, there are more male geniuses and dunces, with the vast majority of the men in between being exactly the same as their female counterparts..
When human intelligence is likened in its development to the peacock's tail it's interesting to see that for humans the females develop the elaborate "tail" as well as the male. The reason for this is sometimes argued to be that the showy male intelligence needs a similar degree of intelligence in its female audience in order for it to be appreciated.
While many men will happily accept this and jump to the conclusion that it shows that it was primarily the males who were powering the intelligence race and as a result dragging the females along behind them, it could equally be argued that it was the females who drove the intelligence race forwards by demanding that the males perform better in the intellectual prowess stakes.
Indeed, the fact that the average male and female intelligences seem to be exactly the same possibly suggests that it isn't the case that women's intelligence follows or pushes men's in any way. The real mystery is why male intelligence has a wider spread (if indeed it turns out that it actually does).
Let's say that the whole thing was a joint effort.
For anyone who resents the fact that the most intelligent 2% of the population are supposedly all male, bear in mind that high intelligence of the IQ variety isn't everything, and that judging by the personalities of some people who've got it, it sometimes comes at quite a high cost in terms of other, perhaps more desirable, human characteristics. And while you're resenting those top 2%, don't forget to give a bit of sympathy to those unfortunate people in the bottom 2% - all men.
This whole subject is a minefield of sexual politics of course, so I think I'll move rapidly on.
There are other reasons why we may have become as ridiculously intelligent as we are, on top of the need to survive and the need to impress.
It's possible that our increase in intelligence is partly driven by our innate tendencies towards dissatisfaction and curiosity.
As outlined earlier, all creatures that are capable of emotions are burdened with their share of dissatisfaction. Think of the moose standing in the blizzard.
In our case the trait was reinforced by our descent to the ground, where the feeling was amplified by our total immersion in a hostile environment that gave us no hope of remission.
Also, as mentioned earlier, on the ground our nascent sense of curiosity was heightened due to our need to be very aware of any hidden threats and opportunities around us (Is that a predator or prey hiding in the long grass - a dinner or a diner?).
Due to the fact that our ancestors were constantly in danger on the ground these significant levels of dissatisfaction and curiosity became permanently fused into their psychic make-up. They were like little irritants prodding away, forcing our ancestors to react to them all of the time. Our ancestors just couldn't turn them off. And we still haven't been able to turn them off to this day.
Having become intelligent and aware of the possibility of alternatives and choices, we now find ourselves not only being dissatisfied because we're discontented anyway but also because we have the sneaking feeling that there may be better alternatives than those that are available - even if such alternatives don't actually exist.
A chimp will be content when it selects a perfectly ripe banana from amongst a bunch of otherwise unripe fruit, but that's because to a chimp a ripe banana's as good as a banana can get, as it's the best on offer - it can't conceive of the alternative of having the banana with maple syrup and ice cream. Unfortunately, we can. What's more, we fret over the idea that there may be an even better way to eat bananas that we haven't thought of yet! Or at least I do.
There's always the nagging and dissatisfying possibility that something can be better still.
This quandary is known as the infinite progression dilemma.
Dissatisfaction is like the inverse of the carrot on a pole, suspended in front of a donkey. With the carrot, the donkey moves forwards to grab the carrot, but never reaches it, because the carrot moves forwards with the donkey. Dissatisfaction is like the same pole reversed, and with a spiky ball in place of the carrot: a spiky ball that keeps poking the donkey from behind. The donkey will move forwards to get away from the irritant, but to no avail. The spiky ball just follows it along. The irritated donkey is condemned to keep moving forwards forever, whether it wants to or not. Unfortunately, in reality it's not a donkey that's in this predicament - it's us.
So it is that the human race has been bequeathed a tendency for dissatisfaction and discontentedness that has had a hand in driving it forwards through the ages. A tendency that we still have today.
Even in our modern age in the western world, where in terms of material well-being we are unarguably more affluent and altogether better off than people of any era that has gone before, we still suffer the constant nag of discontentedness. Even if your life is utterly, totally, absolutely fantastic, the chances are that you're never truly, completely, unequivocally satisfied with it. At least not for more than a day or two at a time, if things are going particularly well. We're just not supposed to be.
Like that donkey, we all have a spiked ball prodding us from behind, making us just that little bit uncomfortable almost all of the time.
The existence of our dissatisfaction tendency has major implications for the trajectory of the human race through history. Essentially, our innate feelings of dissatisfaction are one of our major motivations to change things (linked to our constant need for status).
Although just about everybody suffers to some extent from this nagging prod of chronic discontentment, not everybody has equally dire symptoms. Different people are born with different discontentment quotients. Some people seem to be able to amble through life as though it's something of a breeze, while others are constantly on the verge of exploding due to the total wrongness of everything (ranging from the decline in the spelling skills of the younger generation to the fact that we're about to destroy our planet).
Generally speaking, the more dissatisfied a person feels, the more motivated they are to change thinks.
As a result, such people have the largest effect on human history.
They are the ones who, due to that chronic itch in their heads that they just can't get rid of, get up and shape the course of civilisation, for better or worse.
Contented people don't do much as a rule.
Look around yourself today. You'll notice that a very significant percentage of the movers and shakers on our planet are chronic malcontents, people who are driven by some sort of ever-present dissatisfaction demon that they can't seem to shake off.
These are the people who get up early in the morning, prodded by that pang of discontent.
It's people like them who shape the world. Not the guys who are happy enough to have a lie-in.
It's because of the fact that people were dissatisfied that we have such things as - to pick an example at random from the almost endless list of possibilities - handles on cups (to stop our fingers from getting burned while drinking hot beverages). It's why we have cups at all, so that we don't have to drink from pools of water in the way that many other creatures do. And it's also why we have nice hot beverages rather than cold muddy water to drink from the cups with handles.
Next time that you're sipping a pleasingly hot coffee from a nice mug remember that you can only do so because of people's dissatisfaction with what went before.
The moral of this is that we should treat dissatisfaction as a friend.
In our modern world, where happiness seems to be people's primary goal, the pursuit of which is even written into the United States' Declaration of Independence as a self-evident, unalienable right; where people think that if they're the tiniest bit dissatisfied (perhaps in an unspecific, unresolved sort of a way) then they must be ill and must therefore go and get therapy: in that world I think we need to stand back and see just what an ally dissatisfaction has been to us.
So if you feel vaguely unhappy with your life, don't go and try to snuff out that unpleasantness in the therapist's consulting room - you're trying to destroy one of your most valuable human assets.
Go and write a poem or develop a new way of feeding starving people. Or create an improved design for a coffee cup.
Harness that unhappiness! Don't be dissatisfied with feeling dissatisfied. Embrace it.
There is, needless to say, a downside to the fact that it tends to be the most chronically and acutely malcontented among us, the most driven and obsessive, who tend to rise to the very top of any scale of human achievement.
The personal commitment, effort, ruthlessness and sheer unpleasantness that's necessary in order to get to the higher echelons of any area of human endeavour debar most of us from those ranks.
As a result, the course that the human race takes through history is more often than not steered by people of somewhat questionable character: at best they're overachievers, at worst they're mentally deranged. Just look at some of our politicians and business leaders. Not to mention religious leaders. Our planet is hurtling through space with a succession of dangerous misfits at the helm.
