Ironically, it was the monkey's need to be an expert hunter gatherer that brought it to its apex status with intelligence. Then the monkey traded it all away for "security". There was a natural environmental pressure to be intelligent in nature as the monkey had to know what was safe to eat and where to go. This jack-of-all-trades attitude was traded for experts that are seemingly useless outside of their field of expertise. A diverse omnivorous diet for traded the security of the same bowl of grains every single day. The monkey traded a 4-5 hour workday for endless toil, but hey at least the monkey wasn't getting rarely eaten by tigers now.
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To be fair, if I had to do the whole evolution thing again I'd probably take the same route, if the alternative was being eaten by tigers. But I do lament the expert monkey concept. Jack of all trades lifestyle just feels so much more respectable as a character, and much more interesting (Stephen Fry, for example)
I mean not only that, but the pressure is literally your intelligence. Forget that fungi is poisonous? Adios. Now our pressure is more dependent on resistance to pathogens that cross over from our domesticated animals.
Sure, the predator tiger thing happened, but car wrecks didn't. I bet the tiger thing was rare. (And you worked less!)
I guess it's one of those cognitive biases we make as an imperfect creature. We can visualise a lion ripping our liver out while we're still screaming and we associate that as being far more dangerous than whipping down a road and hitting the back of a truck at 70mph, where you don't really tend to imagine your lower jaw flying alongside one of your eyes through the windscreen (lol).
People in the educated and wealthy part of the world still live under the illusion that wealth = quality of life which, although is a contributing factor, doesn't do much to quell the needs of those spending $3,000 a month on a crippling whiskey habit. If we were more content to just be around a trusting village of people we trust, we'd never have a lot of the problems we have today. I think we were tricked into a lot of our beliefs and drives.
But oh well, here I am -__-
It's weird because everything about us neurocognitively is fitted to a circle of about 100 people. Grow beyond that and you need a story or fiction to hold it together (corporation, government, money, religion etc).