Introduction

Well, we have come to a point in getting to know each other that I’m going to offer you a choice.

Do you want to know the truth?

This is your only chance, however. After this, there is no turning back. I’m offering you a unique opportunity.

I have two pills, one in each hand.

In my right hand is a blue pill.

You take the blue pill and our story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.

In my left hand is a red pill.

You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Remember. All I am offering you is the truth.

Nothing more.

– The Matrix (1999)

Let’s look first, in our story of human development, at where we actually end up and how there might be many different ways to get there, now that there are 8 billion individuals on Planet Earth, drawing on the lives of people from very diverse backgrounds.

Working from the end of life to the beginning. No doubt, a novel approach.

It’s like reading the end of a novel first–“100 Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez (Nobel Prize, 1982), which traces 7 generations of a South American family–to understand the final outcome in the present day by re-tracing the steps that led to the amazing dénouement at the end of the novel.

And there is a major organizing concept that drives all human growth and development that will inform the backbone of our story. It’s called “neoteny” or the retention of juvenile characteristics in the adult and a major feature of human evolution. That is, the slowing down of brain and bodily development through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, results in the heightened cognitive, affective, and creative abilities of human adults.  And those capabilities are found nowhere else in the animal kingdom although there are glimpses of many of those abilities in other species.

So our “story” starts out at the end so as to explain how these astonishing abilities in human adults (e.g., language, thought, visuospatial abilities, concept formation, theory of mind, emotional intelligence, sociality, artistic abilities, and athletic prowess) developed and evolved from a tiny zygote. It’s a classic narrative device…