(Note- this little essay was inspired by the works of Richard Dawkins, but his works deserve none of the blame for any inaccuracies. Those are all mine.)

Current science tells us that the human brain evolved, in its present form, somewhere around 200,000 years ago in sub-Saharan Africa. Our brains are superbly adapted to do many things. We evolved to cooperate as social animals to catch prey, raise offspring, defend a small group of extended family and neighbors who we knew very well, and very probably exclude most strangers as a possible threat to that group.

The problems arise when brains that evolved 200,000 years ago try to cope with technology that changes every decade, and sometimes much faster than that. Our perceptions are often still those of tribal humans living in villages, whether we recognize it or not.

Our perceptual "web", as one might call it, is set up to perceive events that occur in a fairly small area around us and affect either us directly or the people we know. We also best perceive (or can best conceive) those events that take place over a timescale of a few decades, in other words, roughly the period of a human life. The reason many people still have difficulty comprehending the mere ideas of evolution, continental drift, or climate change is that these events take place on a scale of hundreds and thousands of years- so long that they seem impossible.

So when we hear, read, or see events outside our immediate perception, we attempt instinctively to fit them into the context of our perceptual web. For many people, I believe, one of two things happens- either the events are fit into their perceptual web as being more "immediate" than they actually are, i.e., events that happen hundreds or thousands of miles away are perceived as if they actually happened in a person's own "village"; or else, events that are on such a scale as to be incomprehensible, for example, climate change, are simply dismissed or reasoned away as nonexistent.

The climate change issue has been discussed ad nauseum. One reason some deny that climate change is real, is that they simply can't comprehend the notion that what we do in our lifetimes has an effect reaching beyond our deaths. It's a leap of imagination they simply can't make, because their perceptual and conceptual web is on a scale of decades, not centuries or millenia. They can't comprehend geological time. (Incidentally, this is probably why young Earth creationists stick to their guns so fiercely, other than their religious zeal- it's their failure of imagination. One wonders if they can really even imagine a 6,000 year old planet.)

So much for the inability to comprehend long-term events- events that are "too big". I want to expand now on why I think it is that our brains make us afraid of the wrong things; that instead of worrying about global changes on a scale we can't comprehend, but endanger the entire biosphere, we fear smaller events that actually present relatively no danger to us as individuals.

The saturation of television and computer media, especially "social" media and the 24 hour news cycle, has flooded our 200,000-year-old brains with information and images that seem to be happening in the same room with us. Our brains are not evolved to comprehend and integrate that these sounds and images are happening across town, across the country, across the world.

Our risk assessment software evolved to take into account the things we see, hear, and sense. The more things we see and hear, the more we subliminally process as elements in our risk assessment. This is why, for example, Americans feel that the world is more dangerous, even as statistics show that crime rates are actually down 50 percent from the peak in 1991.

Not to denigrate the horror and grief of even a single violent death, but statistically, a person is as likely to be struck by lightning as to die in a "mass" shooting, and far more likely to die in a car accident. Mass shootings are a small fraction of all violent crime. Yet people perceive mass shootings as a new and dangerous type of crime, and demand new laws to prevent them. Every new incident arouses fresh fears, without context.

These feelings follow from the perception in our 200,000-year-old brains that whatever we see and hear is happening right there with us. We are evolved to perceive events that happen to people around us, and to evaluate the risk that something that happens to them might also happen to us. But we evolved in small isolated villages. So when something happens in our global village, our perception is tricked into assessing that as an event in our "village"- a village almost infinitely smaller than the one in which we now live, thanks to the mass media.

It doesn't help that the media deliberately plays on our problems with risk assessment. Headlines like "Killer Storms- Could Your Town Be Next?" are purposely misleading, and play on our risk assessment software in the name of generating attention for the news at 6. Devoid of any context, all it does it raise anxiety.

To take another topic, the immigration debate is almost certainly rooted in the state of the brain's evolution. Territoriality and fear of the stranger is seen in almost every animal species, and humans are almost certainly the same. Our evolution as animals living in small tribes for mutual defense left a deep-seated atavistic fear of humans who don't look like us, don't talk like us, don't act like us; fear of "others".

Is all of this saying that our brains control us, and we're helpless victims of our evolutionary history? Of course not. Evolution is also what resulted in our self-awareness, something possibly almost unique in the animal kingdom. Because we're aware of our perceptual web, we can change it and expand it. We can take into account our gut reactions and educate ourselves not to immediately be suspicious of people who don't speak our language or eat the same food. Science has shown us that events happen on a scale greater than we can imagine. We can take into account that the planet will be here long after we and everyone we know is dead, and yet our actions will have a lasting effect on it- unimaginable as that may seem.

Our brains are the products of evolution, but we don't have to be the prisoners of it.