God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs. - Michael Crichton

But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost — they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.

You could not predict what would happen in a single instance, a single throw of the dice, a single pitch in the seventh inning, a single toss of the coin. But you could predict three out of five, four out of ten, seven out of sixteen, and to that extent chance governed everyone, all the time. Just as surely as two equals two.

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so.