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Photo by Gian Cescon on Unsplash

The power in our hands

November 16, 2018

By now most folks know about the brain-hacking psychological powers of app designers - the infinite scroll, the random reward systems, the bright red notifications. But we barely stop to think about how the simple security of holding something powerful might be in our genes.

Professor and author William von Hippel was on The Joe Rogan Experience this past week. He talked about his new book "The Social Leap" and a great deal of the evolution story, as von Hippel details it. And one segment caught me off-guard in a way I don't think von Hippel meant it. In discussing our evolution toward bipedalism and this massive brain of ours, Hippel tells Joe about the reason we would learn to hang onto our tools:

“A chimp can plan for needs that it currently feels. It can say, “Oh I want to go get termites out of that mound. I’ll break this stick off, I’ll strip the leaves, and then I’ll go over there and do that.” But it can’t plan for the fact that it might have that need again tomorrow. If it doesn’t feel the need, it can’t plan for it.

And humans can plan for unfelt needs and the best example of that is the notion of taking the tool with you that you’ve now used and say, “Well I’ll want to use it tomorrow” right? So whichever Australopithecus was the first one to start walking upright was almost assuredly incapable of planning for the future for unfelt needs, but it could plan for felt needs, cause a chimp can do that too.

And if you think about how would you feel if you’re about to walk across the open savannah and you’re kind of small, and the leopards and lions are way faster than you, I think the primary thing you’ll feel is fear, like “Oh shit, I’m going to get attacked.” And so I want something in my hands to help me defend myself - a spear, a club, a stick, something. And so what I suspect is a part of the process is my desire to hold something in my hand as I’m looking around and I’m scared and a bunch of us are doing that. And so I suspect that that’s what played a role in leading to bipedalism. There would have been other factors at play, like persistent hunting and stuff, but I suspect that came later.”

Could that be why we're so attached to holding these things?

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