Let me shortly describe what I think and by short, I mean I go into every detail. Why is it that the human is so smart compared to other species.
My theory is that puberty is a big part of it. Not the only but in my humble opinion a major one. Let’s start with evolution:
there are generations over generations of one species over time. The top of the barrel of each Generation defines what useful inventions evolve, while the center just barely makes it through and the bottom dusting tasting bit sadly goes extinct. Each new generation takes it genes and experiences and take aways from the old generation and optimizes it’s living.
The question I asked myself is how to decide what experiences and take aways are there to live on. I would argue that our role models define what we choose. Naturally that would be our parents because they raise us and we spend the most time with (let’s just evade the discussion of shitty parenting). At the beginning of our life we take everything for granted and take everything we learn from our parents. But only learning from our parents would limit us to only two persons (also evade step parent talk here). So we also learn from friends and people we meet. Especially from our role models.
And here comes puberty. While at the beginning we would start to be a perfect mixture of only our parents, taking all of their experience (as long as there is enough memory on the hard disk) puberty makes big changes. We no longer take for granted what our parents taught us. No we actually reverse stuff and shake our foundation a lot and just take in what others think.
So we focus on a wide range of individuals of our own species but not necessarily closely related or closely befriended. And that is what gives every evolution a big advantage in learning. We are not bound only to our genes but we take experiences from humanity. This is something which gives us as humans a big advantage for each Generation to distill the best of ours.
This is today’s part of wisdom. Got distracted. Need to go. Cya!