Why don’t cows choreograph dances? Why don’t alligators invent speedboats?” These are questions that Anthony Brandt, a composer, and David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, ask—and immediately answer—in the first chapter of their new book, The Runaway Species. Animals can’t match human ingenuity, they explain, because of “an evolutionary tweak in the algorithms running [our] brains.” We’re different because we see the world not just as it is but as it could be. We think What if? and can therefore create our own futures. And what an existence we’ve fashioned so far: language and accounting, the wheel and the plow, vaccines and medicines, cinema and skyscrapers, satellites and smartphones.
A version of this article appeared in the September–October 2017 issue (pp.148–149) of Harvard Business Review.
