Redditors are kind of famous for being really uptight about creativity and metaphor and spiritual and artistic approaches to life. With a lot of them (especially the ones with more free time on their hands), anything that veers away from extreme black-or-white thinking about reality makes their higher functioning brain bits tell the lower functioning brain bits to fight-or-flight.

Ideally, we can all take what others write with a grain of salt, while being open to the idea that other people have different opinions that are equally valid and important, even if we don’t share them, or have the ability to focus on them at the moment. For example, there is a huge problem with people getting confused about the term “designed” that involves a whole lot of very deep inquiry into free will, consciousness, and system’s theory. But that’s not something that you, Kyle, are probably ready to address in your work right now, especially since you’re focused on some other very interesting stuff that’s also quite important. So maybe you can admit that “design” is a somewhat controversial term, while saying that it seemed to be the most appropriate word for your overall goals of helping people understand the very directional structure of Evolution.

So it’s the other way around from what you suggest. The lizard brain doesn’t “hijack” the higher functions, the lizard brain is itself being hijacked by the higher functions.

Had “build” been the active verb I would not have a quibble as the various natural phenomena you enumerate are commonly characterized as having built over time and overall “directionless building” is a reasonable characterization of stochastic processes, unfortunately in this article (and I keep my remarks purely outside of the quotations you have used) evolution is variously characterized as having “poorly designed” or having engineered something: “[. . .]brains were not so poorly engineered.”

These are direct quotations, though I would hope they would be apparent to a critical reader. See: paragraph 2 and also the second paragraph from the end.

It would be awkward and strange to characterize a mountain as having “poorly designed” it’s north face, just as it would be very odd to characterize the Colorado River as having “engineered” the Grand Canyon. I work purely from the phrasing of this article.

“Every aspect of higher thought is a result of the ape brain. Tool use, sympathy, group hunting, symbolic recognition, among many others.”

“…our advanced, intricate, special gray-matter is spectacularly inefficient, poorly designed, and ill-suited to many of our daily needs. On the flipside, evolution’s Frankensteinian cobbling together of various animal brains…”

“Feel that pebble in your shoe? Thank a jellyfish. Ever duck before a rogue Frisbee collides with your noggin? Thank a lizard. Remember where you left your keys? Thank a mouse.”

“Human beings are the peak of evolution, right?”

The first three were to answer your question. The fourth one was from me, and the answer to that last quote is… no. We are neither the “most” evolved nor are we the most plentiful on earth, but we are definitely the most arrogant.

You’re a careless writer. Elephants, dolphins, etc. don’t have ape brains and calling it an ape brain is just dumb and inaccurate. When you were telling us to thank jellyfish, lizards and mice, you forgot the part about the time machine; all of the current versions of those animals came from the same ancestors (or concestors, if you want) as us. Our brains were not designed, are not actually little animal brains on top of one another, and evolution does not, in any way, resemble Frankenstein.

To the people who do know about what you’re explaining, this article is just poor. To the people that don’t, your implications are misleading.

You’re a careless writer using careless analogies and metaphors.

Go read Not Exactly Rocket Science for an example of how to write about complicated things in an accessible way.

@Maxp: I agree, evolution is volition-less, but that does not mean it cannot “build” something. Physics and chemistry work to “build” stalagmites and stalactites in the same sense. The most figurative language, describing evolution as a “cheapskate and tinkerer,” was from David Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins. It means that if something works, the forces of natural selection will preserve it. I’m not implying a “designer” anywhere.

@Xalem: Where do I say the modern versions of these animals are our direct ancestors?

@JAM: Isn’t it funny how the critiques seem unable to provide direct quotations? It’s as if they merely skimmed the article and formed an opinion without actually perusing the piece. But for the sake of clarity, I’ve made some minor adjustments.