Of Yeasts and Humans

Humankind, the biological species Homo sapiens, lives today in a very different world from the one for which it was evolutionarily selected in the geological epoch Pleistocene (2.6 million to twelve thousand years BC). The Anthropocene, as the epoch we live now has been called, is characterized by increasing tension between human nature and technological civilization, and humans live in an atmosphere of uncertainty, insecurity, and threat. By “naturalizing” the human condition, cognitive biology offers the only painless alternative to the many scenarios that depict the extinction of Homo sapiens as a consequence of violent conflicts and unimaginable suffering.