“The crucial point is that in creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark… The archaeological evidence indicates that the earliest representative of homo sapiens – the Cro-Magnon man who enters the scene a hundred thousand years ago or earlier – was already endowed with a brain which in size and shape is indistinguishable from ours. But however paradoxical it sounds, he hardly made any use of that luxury organ. He remained an illiterate cave dweller and for millennium after millennium, went on manufacturing spears, bows and arrows of the same primitive type, while the organ which was to take man to the moon was already there, ready for use, inside his skull. Thus the evolution of the brain overshot the mark by a time factor of astronomical magnitude. This paradox is not easy to grasp; in the The Ghost in the Machine, I tried to illustrate it by a bit of science fiction which I called the parable of the unsolicited gift:

“There was once a poor, illiterate shopkeeper in an Arab bazaar, called Ali, who, not being very good at doing sums, was always cheated by his customers – instead of cheating them, as it should be. So he prayed every night to Allah for the present of an abacus – that venerable contraption for adding and subtracting by pushing beads along wires.

But some malicious djin forwarded his prayers to the wrong branch of the heavenly Mail Order Department, and so one morning, arriving at the bazaar, Ali found his stall transformed into a multi-storey, steel-framed building, housing the latest I.B.M. computer with instrument panels covering all the walls, with thousands of fluorescent oscillators, dials, magic eyes, et cetera; and an instruction book of several hundred pages – which, being illiterate, he could not read.

However, after days of useless fiddling with this or that dial, he flew into a rage and started kicking a shiny, delicate panel. The shocks disturbed one of the machine’s millions of electronic circuits, and after a while Ali discovered to his delight that if he kicked that panel, say, three times and afterwards five times, one of the dials showed the figure eight. He thanked Allah for having sent him such a pretty abacus, and continued to use the machine to add up two and three, happily unaware that it was capable of deriving Einstein’s equations in a jiffy, or predicting the orbits of planets and stars, thousands of years ahead.

Ali’s children, then his grandchildren, inherited the machine and the secret of kicking the same panel; but it took hundreds of generations until they learned to use it even for the purpose of simple multiplication. We ourselves are Ali’s descendants, and though we have discovered many other ways of putting the machine to work, we have still only learned to utilise a very small fraction of the potentials of its million of circuits. For the unsolicited gift is of course the human brain. As for the instruction book, it is lost – if it ever existed. Plato maintains that it did once – but that is hearsay…”

–  Arthur Koestler