The function of the domesticated primate brain, insofar as we have described it up to this point and leaving out the higher, newer circuits, is to serve as an “organ of adaptation” in Freud’s phrase. Specifically, the oldest, most primitive, most mechanical centers serve simple bio-survival. The more recent (500,000,000 year-old, roughly) emotional territorial centers serve to maintain pack identity, habitat-space and hierarchy. The distinctly hominid semantic circuit (100,000-year-old?) makes maps and models — reality-tunnels — which we tend to confuse with reality itself, and, worse yet,
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