Niel Tyson DeGrasse! Yup. We aren’t that smart.

Our brain, despite their amazing complexity and cleverness are full of issues, blind spots and defects. Culture development seems to be what truly has made a difference. Culture is our software: logics, mathematics, gemometry then phisycs, chemistry...

The amazing software that took millennia to be developed, once installed in our very fallible brains, makes us look very smart. Take the software away, we are back to being monkeys.

Imagine humanity lost computers, and all the knowledge acquired through the centuries. Some argue it would take centuries just to redevelop a language complicated enough to express ideas or feelings. Despite the baby steps, culture is still much much faster than biological evolution. That’s why culture is thought to be a new trick of evolution to accelerate itself. Same rules that apply to evolution apply to culture/ideas if you think about it.