And then people say competition is what makes society go around.

Nah, cooperation is the core of everything we do, and we should embrace it as much as possible.

More broadly, we developed more slow twitch muscles that granted us greater fine motor skills, and subsequently the ability to create and use tools. Other apes retained their fast twitch muscles, so their ability to use tools is limited, but pound-for-pound they're FAR stronger than humans.

I agree. I don’t know that I’d rank it quite as high as some other factors if we’re trying to find some function for “causal elements for human ecological success” or something like that, but there’s no doubt it was selected for and the degree to which we are good at it is a good indicator of its importance. Good call.

That’s a fascinating question. I am not sure about animal research on dreaming, but Thomas Metzinger is an experimental philosopher (for want of a better term) who studies the basis of the concept of the self as a coherent entity, and his work includes extensive research on phenomena like lucid dreaming, phantom limbs, and out of body experiences. I’m not talking about anything paranormal - there’s conditions under which people’s experience of perception and self become separated from our ordinary experience of “my self is sitting behind my eyeballs.” He collaborates closely with experimental psychologists and neuroscientists, so between his work and references you might be able to see if there’s a correlation.

That’s a fantastic question!

There’s archeological evidence that modern humans were far more mobile than we have generally assumed (see eg David Graeber), but we’re talking 10-20k years ago there, which is very recent in evolutionary time where we’d be talking about physical adaptations.

SJ Gould, who was the origin of the spandrel idea, warned frequently against telling “just so” stories to try to reverse engineer the processes of selection that led to this or that feature. However, I do think that the hominid physique enabled multiple things. It has been observed that you won’t ever see a spider or octopus or dolphin moving fire from one place to another. That’s something that bipeds are able to do, and fire is one of the things we think was a key development. It’s the same with generalized tool use. So we can see there may have been multiple selection pressures leading towards bipedalism.

If distance running were truly a spandrel, we’d have to say that it was a consequence of these selective pressures giving rise to the body plan, but wasn’t itself selected for. I’d be more conservative on that one, and hazard a guess that distance running (or efficiency in long distance movement) was also a selective pressure. I just don’t think the evidence is there to say that it was the dominant one at that time.

I would say that, like chatgpt, agent smith managed to be not entirely wrong but also not right.

Yes, human beings are absolutely massacring life on the planet - the only planet that we know has life on it. I have a whole hours long spiel on the potentials for extraterrestrial life which I’ll spare you, but it’s truthful to say that, as far as we know, we’re all there is. Does that matter? That’s something that people (who are the only beings we know of who ask questions like that) will have to answer. As of now the answer is between undecided and no.

Anyway, unlike what Agent Smith says, literally everything is trying to do the same thing. If anything, the problem is that we’re exactly like all of those other organisms that are spamming the environment with copies of themselves. All of that fun alcohol we use to manage our perception of our existential crises come from the same dynamic - yeasts reproducing on sugars until they poison themselves with their own waste products, for which we as humans found a useful application.

The key is that when the species co-evolve as part of the same ecosystem, they mutually adapt. When one species invades another ecosystem, the other species there haven’t have had a chance to adapt in evolutionary time and so it sends shockwaves and possibly extinctions throughout the system. Some people believe (with a fairly strong argument) that the disappearance of megafauna - big land animals - followed human radiation over the land masses, and didn’t happen in Africa because all of the big animals co-evolved.

So we started out as an invasive species that just went pretty much everyplace. Were finishing up as a species that has the same kind of tight reproductive loop as those yeast friends, but in doing so we are going to take down a lot of our fellow beings.