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I was afraid you might ask that. I was so proud of that compact little quote.

Try rolling the clock back, see where it goes. Before Darwin, we didn’t have a solid theory for where our instincts came from. All the ideas of spirits and gods were still in play. Those go back before nation states developed, back when we were small tribes, slowly migrating around the globe. We have some theories about how hyper agency detection led to those superstitions and we excuse our ancestors for it because it was how they survived. We wouldn’t be here now if someone didn’t sacrifice a goat then. You could speculate that we could have taken a different path, but you are really heading toward science fiction with theories like that.

When you get far enough back you can’t describe even the building of sophisticated structures and cultures. Everywhere you look in ancient ruins, there are cultures and belief systems that are tightly woven with how they governed themselves. It seems unlikely that we would have learned to cooperate as we do without that. To simply declare we now understand all those parts and can just break them apart write up a nice neat system of how to keep all of them order, seems like hubris.