Anthroposaurus
Our Dinosaur Heritage: The Weaknesses of Humanity
Abstract
Contents Updated: Wednesday, December 15, 1999
The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological kind, but are psychic events… man is exposed to the elemental forces of his own psyche.
What is the Dinosaur Heritage?
It is possible for societies to live and prosper with advanced technology.
Sagan calls this the Existence Theorem. The evidence presented here does not favor it.
We have surmised that intelligent dinosaurs, the anthroposaurs, destroyed their world 65 million years ago. And the omens are that we too are heading for extinction. At the end of the Cretaceous the vertebrate biomass concentrated into a few highly populous species. Today the same thing is happening.
Now, mankind, the new intelligent lifeform, breeds the few species at the expense of the many. Then, it was the intelligent dinosaur. Genetic variation was narrowed by breeding and environmental destruction until it virtually did not exist. It was literally genocide—without the genes to cope with the slightest stresses, the remaining species died off too.
History is repeating itself. The Existence Theorem is bunk!
Why do things tend to repeat themselves? Karl Popper speaks of the “propensity” that some event will occur. Propensity is probability with intent—it exerts an influence on events as if it were a physical field like an electric or gravitational field. It is reminiscent of Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields. Controversial though they are, these hypotheses imply that when something occurs, it has more chance of happening again. If true, and the anthroposaurs have already destroyed themselves, we might be locked into an outcome that will be nigh on impossible—might be impossible—to alter.
Is it our destiny to verify the Existence Theorem or our fate to falsify it. To verify it we have to break free of a morphogenetic field, to establish a new propensity. We seem to have less chance of doing so than deflecting an incoming planetoid.
Where is the will to change our behavior? Where is the mechanism to do it? Do we suffer from the same affliction as the anthroposaurs and perhaps all intelligent life forms—some self destructive syndrome that is a sine qua non of intelligence? If the answer is “yes” we are doomed. Even if we can see the fault in ourselves, we are powerless to change it.
I believe we have a legacy from the dinosaurs. It is part of our psyche. We cannot reject it.
It is our dinosaur heritage!
What is this syndrome? Strictly we can never know because the psychology of anthroposaurs is not open to study—we cannot make the necessary comparisons between ourselves and them. What we can do is study human psychology and attempt to piece together the elements of the syndrome in ourselves. To see why warnings of doom have had no effect—why people do not want to know. There have been many prophets of the forthcoming catastrophe but they are not hailed and praised for their forethought—they are ignored or condemned as Jeremiahs.
The human race persists in its willingness to destroy itself and most other higher organisms for selfish economic and ideological reasons, all of them short term. There is something strange about the way we perceive things. Small disasters in terms of numbers of dead that occur suddenly, unexpectedly, visibly, shock us. But huge disasters dispersed in space and time, we hardly notice.
Norman Myers points out that the crash of a jumbo jet attracts media headlines, but no headlines shout out the death of a jumbo jet full of children every 20 minutes, the rate of child mortality in the Third World. Yet the cost of a can of beer every three months to the citizens of the First World would stop this carnage by providing money to implement immunization programs and to prevent diarrhoea in infants.
And besides the millions who die every year of disease, starvation and suicide, in the last 200 years perhaps 100 million people have died in warfare. Yet we are totally indifferent to it. We are indifferent to the deaths of our own species as well as to others. Why?
Why are we so perverse? Why are we apathetic about our destruction of the environment and the threats to life we are creating? Why do we allow rapacious industrialists whether of the blue or the red variety to contaminate the earth? Why do we accept the rule of governments that allow them to do it and, through accumulating dangerous armaments and adopting threatening postures, endanger the world in their own way? Why do we retain such an obtuse optimism that we revile those who do warn us of the dangers. Why is it so much more virile to accept the status quo rather than criticize it? Why do we do what we are told even when we know it is wrong? Why don’t we recognize our dinosaur heritage?
The late Niko Tinbergen, the world famous ethologist, thought there were human characteristics that once were valuable to survival but which, through the speed of the evolution of advanced society, have become so ill-fitted to the needs of technological man that they now threaten us.
This idea is compelling because the key characteristic of modern man, as it would have been for anthoposaurus, is the remarkable speed at which technological society emerged, creating conditions quite different from those in which instincts evolved. It happens elsewhere in nature.
Migratory birds like swallows that have a late brood are likely to abandon them to die at the end of the summer if the migratory instinct switches on before the young are mature enough. At one time (perhaps when weather was warmer), they could comfortably raise two broods but now they cannot, and so two instincts conflict. There is a maladaptation. Darwin in The Descent of Man thought this was evidence that such animals could feel no remorse, had no conscience, indeed no memory of their action. They seem just to forget the brood when the greater urge presents itself. If so, the swallows did not even recognize what they had done. Are we similar?
So instincts sometimes conflict. When intelligence evolves these conflicts become conscious posing the creature moral dilemmas. It resolves them by inventing rules, laws and morals. With the growth of society the rules themselves condition our behavior. So far so good. But the original code of ethics, made in primitive societies, might not be forever correct. If we have built on behavior maladapted for modern conditions, we shall find that our mores, rules, norms and habits—our very ways of thinking—are leading us to disaster instead of giving us guidelines for a better existence.
“Are the now redundant side-effects of our own evolutionary history not only inappropriate but actually lethal?” asks Norman F—Dixon, a professor of psychology at the University of London. He asks us to consider the following equation:
Mankind exists and has invented technology. The combination inevitably leads to mankind’s extinction.
Can it be avoided?
Yes, if we get rid of technology. But technology cannot be disinvented, so extinction can only be prevented by changing the nature of man. Mankind will have to change to prove the Existence Theorem or technology will falsify it. Erich Fromm, the social philosopher, concurs. He writes:
The Falangist motto, “Long live death”, threatens to become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to the machine.
In our mechanized, urban societies we have lost the knowledge of our relationships with the rest of the biosphere. Instead we are obsessed with mechanical devices, our cars, TVs, computers and washing machines, and mechanical analysis of the interrelationships between ourselves, our hierarchies, social symbols and selfishness.
Not only are we unaware of the stench of death around us, in some unconscious way we revel in it.
Selfish interest might be one characteristic that was valuable in some evolutionary contexts but is no longer. Other motives which developed in evolution to balance against excessive self regard perhaps fail to operate adequately in our coddled environment.
The thing to be lamented is, not that men have so great regard to their own good or interest in the present world, or they have not enough; but that they have so little to the good of others,
as Bishop Butler put it—selfishness is not excessive self love, but indifference to others.
Obsessive selfishness seems to overwhelm all other feelings—all obsessions do. Ultimately the obsession destroys even the obsessive. Initially selfish, the behavior eventually contradicts self regard by being self destructive! It becomes a death wish. Necrophilia! “Long live death”
And our society depends upon highly specialized people—experts—who have to be obsessive in their field to succeed. Our society selects for obsessiveness. Entrepreneurs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Generals, Scientists—successful people must be obsessive! They must be necrophiles!
We begin to see that we have a very odd civilization indeed!
Through maladaptation we have become necrophiles—and the most necrophilous of all are the experts.
Just like the anthroposaurs?
If the dinosaur heritage comprises a catalogue of maladaptations inclining us toward death, analysis of the human psyche is needed to tease out its elements. Here I discuss three possible components; apathy, obedience to authority, and the dominance of the left brain and its link with obsessive optimism. Each in its different way seems to contribute to our inability to see what we are doing or our inability to respond to it.
Frustration occurs when a goal is blocked by a person or a thing. Animals and humans react to frustration in different ways but aggression and apathy are two common reactions. Inherent aggression stemming from a killer instinct might be part of our problem. But the opposite is also a problem. People can learn to react aggressively or apathetically.
If aggression in the past (perhaps in childhood) has habitually led to a goal being achieved then aggression is likely to be the learned response to frustrating situations. If aggression has not worked in childhood then people may feel “helpless” to do anything about achieving their objective and become apathetic or depressed. Experimental studies of both humans and animals have shown that “helplessness”, the inability to predict or, especially, to control the environment is psychologically highly damaging, yet helplessness can be “learned”.
Dogs are put into a cage where they get electric shocks to their feet. The shocks are unavoidable and, though unpleasant, eventually the dog learns to endure them. The dog is now put in a cage with a second, stress-free compartment accessible simply by jumping a barrier. When given electric shocks, it makes no attempt to escape even though it could easily avoid pain. It has learned to be helpless and to do nothing but endure its torture. It has learned to behave apathetically. Dogs given shocks in the double cage from the beginning quickly learn to escape over the barrier, yet many of the apathetic dogs will not learn how to escape even if the experimenter attempts to show them by physically lifting them into the other compartment.
But is it the electric shock that traumatizes the dog? To test this, experiments have been carried out with rats on treadwheels. Two rats were wired to get shocks in their tails but one rat was given a signal first and then by running the treadwheel faster could delay the shock. This rat had some control over its environment but would, through complacency or tiredness, occasionally fail to pedal and would get the shock anyway. When it did, the other rat got a shock as well. Thus both rats got the same number of shocks but one only had any control over when it got one. Naturally the situation was stressful for the animals and after running the experiment for a long time the degree of stress could be determined by examining the rats for internal lesions and ulcers. The interesting result was that only the rat that had no control was noticeably stressed. The other animal was physically perfectly healthy. Both had received the same number of shocks so helplessness had produced the stress.
Humans have been tested in similar experiments. In one, subjects saw color slides of people who had died violently. They could change the slide by pressing a button, but a another group had no such control and were obliged to look at the slides for as long as the first group were willing to. Both groups were monitored by measuring skin resistance. It was the group with no control of the situation whose anxiety was highest. Another experiment subjected people to the stress of a loud noise. Again the group without control were worst affected. A refinement of the last experiment showed that even when control was not used, the belief that it was available still lessened stress.
The point is that we are in stressful situations every day, whether at work or participating in normal society. At work, for example, we are the slaves of our air conditioned offices and factories. If 70 degrees Celsius is just right for most of us there are still large numbers for whom it is too hot or too cold. The same goes for relative humidity, cigarette fumes, solvent fumes, draughts, micro-organisms, etc., all the constituents, in fact, of a “sick” building. You cannot change things unless sufficient people complain, but, because the conditions are designed to suit the majority, the majority are content. You therefore cannot persuade your bosses that you are being adversely affected. You are helpless.
It goes without saying that, rather than be dismissed, you often have to do jobs at work that you do not like. That too can bring on the apathy of helplessness.
In the UK, statisticians in the civil service, under pressure from the executive, had to manipulate their data to show the government in the best light. The statistician values objectivity. It must really hurt to cheat with the figures. What do they do? Lose their jobs and their pension? Or shrug their shoulders and learn helplessness?
We have elections in the belief that governments will carry out policies we want, but our favorites lose, or join a coalition with another party whose policies we do not want, or on election they simply adopt different policies from the ones we voted for. Is it surprising that 30 to 50 per cent of the electorate commonly do not vote. Yet in comparison with totalitarian countries we make failure to vote into a virtue—it proves how free we are.
The real message is that many people are resigned, like the dogs and rats I have described, to being punished. They have become passive and often despairing, believing that they cannot influence events so there is no point in trying.
Similarly we may all know the planet is dying but we feel helpless about it and so have become apathetic about our fate.
At least in democracies, we can change our leaders. But why do we only too often elect ones that make life unpleasant, that subject us deliberately to stress? One reason is our sense of guilt. Most of us are inculcated with a sense of morality from childhood. Bad behavior is punished by angry parents applying age old codes of ethics. Later, if we do things that we shouldn’t, we feel guilty because we have an inbuilt parent—our conscience.
That seems straightforward. But, oddly, guilty feelings arise if things go too well. Periods of success and well-being are followed by a need for atonement. In political terms this feeling is frequently expressed by the choice of a leader who offers to relieve our guilt by making us take the medicine. The mood of the electorate can unpredictably swing after a period of affluence from tolerably equitable governments to more extreme ones.
At present, human beings, at least in the advanced countries, seem to be obsessed with maintaining their own lives at higher and higher levels of luxury, yet as Fromm says:
Life mainly concerned with its own maintenance is inhuman.
In subconscious atonement for the guilt of our selfishness, are we preparing to sacrifice our lives and maintain in death the humanity which we can see we are losing? Do we justify our drive for this luxurious existence by subliminally accepting that we are committing gigasuicide, self-effacingly cleansing the earth of the parasite that we have become?
According to Professor Stanley Milgram, “a fatal flaw which nature has designed into us and which in the long run gives our species only a moderate chance of survival” is obedience.
Milgram is the US professor who carried out a series of experiments to test whether there was any psychological validity in the pleas of Nazis like Eichmann that they were only carrying out orders in committing millions to the gas chambers. Milgram wanted to find out if people would unquestioningly carry out orders to do something which otherwise might be thought uncivilized and contrary to moral conscience.
He advertised for people to help him with experiments on memory. The volunteers had to give the subject simple memory tests—if the subject made a mistake the volunteer had to administer an electric shock and then proceed to the next test. The volunteers briefly saw the subject strapped in a chair, and Milgram demonstrated to them the nature of the punishment by giving them mild shocks of 45 volts. He then took them into the next room where they sat in front of a panel with a set of levers marked with voltage levels up to 450 volts. The top levels were marked “danger—extreme shock.”
In reality the apparent subject was Milgram’s accomplice; the volunteers were the true subjects of the experiment. Milgram, whose voice was, of course, the voice of authority, sat behind the volunteers firmly urging them, if they hesitated, to apply the appropriate shock lest they spoil the experiment.
The results were astounding. With no feedback of sound from the victim, the volunteers blithely pushed the voltage up to the maximum. When the accomplice cursed, objected and cried in pain (all simulated), a minority, but only a minority, refused to inflict further punishment. Some others obeyed but showed signs of conflict and distress.
Later experiments by other workers used a puppy dog subjected to genuine electric shocks. Milgram’s results were confirmed.
A remarkable fact was that all the women tested were willing to push the voltage up to the maximum when instructed by the authority figure. Women’s assumed natural characteristics of caring and mothering seem easily overwhelmed by the voice of authority.
Milgram’s experiments on obedience might be considered by many of us to have been invaluable revelations about the way we, as human beings, behave. Yet criticisms by his peers, fellow psychological experts, were severe and damaging. “People should not be duped in this way”, they said. “It is unethical.”
But the volunteers, when told the truth, mainly supported Milgram, commenting that he had discovered one of the most important causes of the trouble in the world, that men should avoid harm to their fellow men even at the risk of violating authority, and that the results were valuable if they jarred people out of their complacency. The experiment obviously could not have been done without misleading the participants.
Moreover, Milgram’s critics have found other psychological studies on human subjects involving deception perfectly acceptable. Of course, these did not dig at the foundation of “civilized” society—obedience—the essence of our hierarchical structures, society’s buttress against anarchy!
Milgram’s findings show that many, perhaps most, of us could have been Eichmann. But the general public dupes itself. When people are asked how they would react as volunteers in Milgram’s experiments, most guess that they would stop at about 150 volts. Only four per cent believe they would go as far as 300 volts and only one per cent to the maximum.
Milgram varied the circumstances of the experiments. With the accomplice in the same room as the volunteers, fewer people went to the maximum. When the volunteers had to physically push the accomplice’s hand on to the electrode, fewer still obeyed. But when the volunteers took on the role of the authority figure instructing someone else to apply the shock, even more of them were willing to go to the maximum.
We think we are much more willing to defy authority than we are: authority therefore has much more power over us than we think!
At Mi Lai in Vietnam, all-American, middle-class young men butchered 500 old men, women, children and babies. Their officers had ordered that, to improve morale, the Viet Cong in Mi Lai had to be engaged at all costs. If Viet Cong guerrillas had been in the village, as the US generals supposed, they were elusive enough not to be there when the US troops arrived. But this inscrutable oriental tactic did not deter the unscrupulous occidental generals. They defined the Vietnamese still in the village as enemy combatants: anyone there, irrespective of age or sex, became Viet Cong by definition. The GIs killed them. Only a handful of the young soldiers refused to obey!
By yielding to authority we can absolve ourselves of guilt. Like Eichmann, we are doing our duty, only obeying orders: it is not our fault! Furthermore those who give the order also absolve themselves from guilt: they do not have to do the dirty work themselves. A chain of command or a technological device (like a B52 bomber) diffuses the responsibility, reducing guilt more.
Aggressive behavior within species evolved because it increases fitness to reproduce, but, in the vast majority of animals, it is ritualized to minimize injuries serious enough to weaken the species. The weaker of two animals vying for food or a mate, at some point signals its surrender and the fight is over. Hostilities cease promptly because the combatants are in immediate contact.
In human society, passing the buck to those lower in the hierarchy, and the intervention of technology, allows fighting to be done at a distance. Then there is no compunction and no surrender. Who cares about the fate of those you cannot see? Young Americans dropping vast tonnages of high explosive bombs from B52 bombers six miles high would not have suffered the guilt feelings even of the ground troops killing face-to-face at Mi Lai.
The same applies to those who pollute the environment and rape the world. We feel the benefits but see little of the carnage. We are removed from the outcome. We are absolved of guilt!
Worse. When hostility is pent up and repressed, a person or group of people it is socially acceptable to hate may be chosen as scapegoats. Pent up hostility can be released on them through victimization or pogrom. Then diffusion of responsibility through a chain of command or through technology can be disastrous. Better dead than Red.
The shooting down of the Korean Airlines flight 007 so incensed US senior officers that they were willing to risk a nuclear war. They attempted to send a fraudulent intelligence report to the Pentagon to justify retaliatory action that could have ended in a holocaust. The world was saved by an courageous junior soldier. He disobeyed! He refused to send the mendacious dispatch. Milgram’s work shows that that young officer was one of a rare minority of people. Mankind had a close shave!
The brain has evolved into two distinct halves connected by several bundles of nerve fibres, the largest of which is the corpus callosum. Normally messages that initially reach one side of the brain pass to the other along these nerve bridges so that both halves of the brain work together. This bilateral division of the brain occurred very early on in evolution. Anthroposaurs, though having brains physiologically different in many ways from human beings, would certainly have had two halves to their brains just as we have.
The division possibly arose as a safety device: if the animal damages part of its brain, it can still function using the other half. It might also, like the multiple computers on the spacecraft, Challenger, have provided fail-safe checking, both halves having to agree before a tricky decision was taken.
The two halves in human beings have now developed some functions that are quite different from each other, although each half can take over functions from the other half when necessary. People suffering brain damage in one hemisphere can regain many lost abilities as the undamaged side of the brain learns them.
Broadly speaking the left brain manages language, mathematics, logic and detail while the right brain manages imagination, creativity, dreams, spatial conceptions, recognizing patterns and relationships, intuition and seeing the “whole picture”.
People differ in the degree to which they use the right hemispheres. Those who make more use of the right brain are divergent thinkers, imaginative, spontaneous and intuitive compared with those who stick with the left hemisphere who tend to be more coldly logical, analytical, keen on organization and concerned with detail.
In short, the left brain is generally responsible for rational thinking and the right brain for intuitive. Yet not all right brain inspirations are significant. To determine which ones are, they have to be scrutinized rationally by the left hemisphere. Effective discovery requires both.
Jaynes believes that the dominance of the left brain had its origins only about 3000 years ago. Until then social rules of behavior had emerged from the right brain which processed a welter of experience and returned its findings as dreams or hallucinations, thought to be sent by the gods.
Formalized social organizations, writing and the development of culture, and eventually technology put paid to all that and substituted left brain directives and regulations formulated by priests and politicians.
“Irrational reasonableness gave way to rational unreasonableness”, as Dixon puts it. In the modern world the left hemisphere’s rationality increasingly suppresses the intuitive side. Witness the difficulty of changing a scientific paradigm, the hostility of orthodox thinkers to original thinkers.
Yet intuition is more likely to give advanced warning of impending problems. Reason cannot accept that anything is wrong until the full chain of logic is evident. Try to question experts or warn politicians—express sensitivity to matters such as the environment, the plight of the deprived or the dangers of mass destruction, express right brain values—and out come the establishment assassins.
Since the left brain concentrates on detail rather than seeing the whole, one manifestation of it is ignoring the welfare of the mass in favor of the welfare of self, even when self is part of the mass and inevitably must suffer with it—the obsessive selfishness noted earlier. Thus the purveyors of pollution ignore its effects on themselves and their own children.
Industrialists in time past happily sought absolution at church while the infants they employed were crippling their bodies and lungs pulling coal trucks deep underground, or working looms in cold satanic mills. The poor immigrants to the USA described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle were literally rotting in chemicals in the meat processing factories in Chicago while the nouveau rich Mr Tycoon sheltered Tycoon Jr and Tycoon III in gracious living. They saw only themselves: left brain logic told them to ignore the wider picture that the right brain attempted to thrust on to them.
“That has all changed now”, you may protest, but it has not—it is worse. Now most Westerners are Mr Tycoon! We want to preserve our material possessions and demand ever higher standards of living even though continuous economic growth must inevitably destroy the planet. We all lose, not just those who are obviously exploited. John Donne’s bell is not tolling only for the unfortunates starving in The Sahel—it is tolling for thee, mankind!
Today’s industrialist or politician cannot be squeamish about a little atmospheric pollution, a few dead animals or the destruction of more primitive but more sensitive cultures than our own. Their left hemispheres tell them we need more efficiency, higher productivity, greater economic growth and less interference in their right to manage. So much is logical; all else is soft, wimpish and mawkish if not downright Bolshevik.
The irony is that it is the left hemisphere that is truly illogical: it will lead to our deaths. It can, with intensity and interest, analyze in academic detail the tiger’s fur, tail, muscles, camouflage, claws and teeth. It can debate endlessly about their functions and which are more important than others. But it cannot see the whole animal licking its lips!
Only the right brain sees the whole tiger and the danger it poses!
According to Fromm:
We need to create the conditions for mobilizing the love of life, which is the only force that can defeat the love of the dead.
Death—extinction—stares us in the face. We can expect no sensible response until that is accepted. Yet, in wars, as Dixon points out, “maundering and baseless optimism are the order of the day” until the foe is actually engaged. Men remain ludicrously optimistic about the outcome of prospective battles until the first blows jolt them, like sleepy drunks, into reality and a hasty and often inadequate defence.
Better adapted animals would assess the real situation to be prepared with an appropriate response.
Optimism preserves our peace of mind by evoking positive expectations of future events and a false and deceiving euphoria about possible outcomes. It smacks either of overweening arrogance or of a fear of the outcome that has to be mentally shielded from us—we think that the future will be that which is most preferable to us.
Delegates to the Vienna conference on the Chernobyl accident arrived in a thoroughly gloomy and depressed state of mind. Complacency had been shaken. Pessimism! Five days later—Lo!—the gloom had lightened. Optimism! The world’s nuclear experts, had convinced themselves there was nothing to worry about. Instead of realistically assessing the implications of Chernobyl, they had thought of lots of reasons why disasters like this were rare except in Russia. They left cheerful and elated.
Typically expert: but we all do it—we are all doing it! What is the source of our baseless optimism? None other than the left brain.
The two halves of the brain can be selectively disabled by drugs leaving only the other half functioning. An unchaperoned left brain, the right brain having been drugged, leaves us excessively euphoric: the left brain takes the optimistic, cavalier view by focussing on something familiar, something we can add up or write down, something we “understand”. An unchaperoned right brain, the left having been drugged, on the other hand tends to leave us anxious and pensive: it sees the whole situation, its complexity, the hazards, not just the petty details that take our fancy—it scares us, we feel uneasy. The right brain is the entropic brain. It sees the whole results of our actions not just the immediate results. That is what makes it more sensitive and caring.
Carl Sagan tells us that human societies are hierarchical and ritualistic. Suggestions for social change are treated with suspicion. Is there an explanation for this? Paul Maclean, the head of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior at the US National Institute of Mental Health, called the center of the forebrain the R-complex where the “R” stands for reptilian because we share it with vertebrates above the reptiles but not with amphibians or fish. He believes it is the source of aggression, territoriality, social hierarchy and ritual.
Such irrational properties as emotion have their source in the surrounding layer of forebrain, the limbic system, while rational behavior stems from the large outer shell of the brain, the neocortex. In reptiles, the limbic system is not fully developed and there is no neocortex.
Sagan argues that it is useful to consider the ritualistic and hierarchical aspects of our lives to be strongly influenced by the R-complex and shared with our reptilian forebears; the altruistic, emotional and religious aspects of our lives to be localized to a significant extent in the limbic system and shared with our non-primate mammalian forebears (and perhaps birds); and reason to be a function of the neocortex, shared to some extent with the higher primates and such cetaceans as the dolphins and whales.
Perhaps what we have missed is that the R-complex, though primitive, still exerts a strong influence on the way we behave, conditioning us to perform rituals without any apparent rationality, like people subject to compulsive and obsessive behavior.
There is a worse possibility!
Has the R-complex somehow taken control of the left brain like some mad hacker’s computer virus? As the left brain achieved its present dominance has its control by the R-complex become more complete? And has the right brain all the while been trying to warn us against the monster taking over. The right brain is mute and can only give images, mystical impressions and dreams. Nightmares about monsters coming to get us could be the right brain’s way of saying that there is a real monster taking over—inside our heads! Apparitions, hauntings, UFO contacts and the menagerie of paranormal creatures that loom out of the night, might be right brain warnings of a threat from something intangible… because it is within.
These manifestations might also be signs that the sleeping anthroposaurs are beginning to rouse!
