+And yet—it seems like humans _are_ special, in some ways. Of all the creatures on [the tree of life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biology)), our lineage "took over the world" in the sense that if humans want a resource that cats or crows or octopuses are using, the nonhuman side of the ensuing conflict is predictably going to lose. (To the extent that we don't usually think of ourselves as engaging in a "conflict". Animals aren't _enemies_; they're just in the way.) This is not because humans are stronger or have sharper teeth than other creatures, but because of something about our "intelligence" in the natural-phenomenon sense, not the IQ test variation sense. It's not even necessarily about _individual_ human intelligence being a particularly formidable force: given no tools and no friends, and confronted by a hungry lion at ten paces, it doesn't seem easy to survive by thinking of some incredibly clever plan. If you had a gun, you could shoot the lion, but [no one individual knows how to make a gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil) all by themselves, starting from nothing.
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+Rather, the power of humanity over the rest of the biosphere has to do with our species having evolved a suite of cognitive capabilities adequate to support the accumulation of culture and technology. If you already had a spear, you might be able to think of of some incredibly clever plan to get a slightly sharper spear—which everyone in your tribe could imitate. And so on up the tech tree.
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+[TODO: ↓ clunky prose probably needs a rewrite after better outlining]
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+You can think of events on Earth before the rise of human civilization as mostly being shaped by evolution by natural selection: new complex ordered phenomena arose as the product of genetic mutations that allowed their bearers to survive and reproduce, thereby increasing the frequency of the mutation. Natural selection is a form of _optimization_: the accumulation of beneficial mutations creates functionality that looks "designed" for the purposes of reproduction, because they were selected for existence on that basis.
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+But _after_ the rise of civilization, biological evolution stopped being the dominant force shaping planetary events, just because cultural evolution runs on a faster timescale. If some other species were on the evolutionary path towards developing the capabilities that would eventually result in them developing their own civilization, it basically "wouldn't matter".
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+To the extent that our civilization is better for us to live in than the state of nature, it's because civilization is the product of the cumulative optimization of humans trying to acheive their goals: vast, complex infrastructure and economies look "designed" to cater to human needs—supermarkets to feed us, hospitals to heal us, cars and airplanes to take us where we want to go—because we selected them for existence on that basis.