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bowl of porridge, the conditions were just right. The change was enough to shake us out of our comfortable trees, but it wasn’t enough to kill us when we landed.
    Landing was only the beginning of the hard work, however. We quickly discovered that our new digs were already occupied. The locals had co-opted the food sources, and most of them were stronger and faster than we were. Faced with grasslands rather than trees, we rudely were introduced to the idea of “flat.” It is disconcerting to think that we started our evolutionary journey on an unfamiliar horizontal plane with the words “Eat me, I’m prey” taped to the back of our evolutionary butts.
    jazzin’ on a riff
    You might suspect that the odds against our survival were great. You would be right. The founding population of our direct ancestors is not thought to have been much larger than 2,000 individuals; some think the group was as small as a few hundred. How, then, did we go from such a wobbly, fragile minority population to a staggering tide of humanity 7 billion strong and growing? There is only one way, according to Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. You give up on stability. You don’t try to beat back the changes. You begin not to care about consistency within a given habitat, because such consistency isn’t an option. You adapt to variation itself.
    It was a brilliant strategy. Instead of learning how to survive in just one or two ecological niches, we took on the entire globe. Those unable to rapidly solve new problems or learn from mistakes didn’t survive long enough to pass on their genes. The net effect of this evolution was that we didn’t become stronger; we became smarter. We learned to grow our fangs not in the mouth but in the head. This turned out to be a pretty savvy strategy. We went on to conquer the small rift valleys in Eastern Africa. Then we took over the world.
    Potts calls his notion Variability Selection Theory, and it attempts to explain why our ancestors became increasingly allergic to inflexibility and stupidity. Little in the fossil record is clear about the exact progression—another reason for bitter controversy—but all researchers must contend with two issues. One is bipedalism; the other has to do with our increasingly big heads.
    Variability Selection Theory predicts some fairly simple things about human learning. It predicts there will be interactions between two powerful features of the brain: a database in which to store a fund of knowledge, and the ability to improvise off of that database. One allows us to know when we’ve made mistakes. The other allows us to learn from them. Both give us the ability to add new information under rapidly changing conditions. Both may be relevant to the way we design classrooms and cubicles.
    Any learning environment that deals with only the database instincts or only the improvisatory instincts ignores one half of our ability. It is doomed to fail. It makes me think of jazz guitarists: They’re not going to make it if they know a lot about music theory but don’t know how to jam in a live concert. Some schools and workplaces emphasize a stable, rote-learned database. They ignore the improvisatory instincts drilled into us for millions of years. Creativity suffers. Others emphasize creative usage of a database, without installing a fund of knowledge in the first place. They ignore our need to obtain a deep understanding of a subject, which includes memorizing and storing a richly structured database. You get people who are great improvisers but don’t have depth of knowledge. You may know someone like this where you work. They may look like jazz musicians and have the appearance of jamming, but in the end they know nothing. They’re playing intellectual air guitar.
    standing tall
    Variability Selection Theory allows a context for dual representation, but it hardly gets us to the ideas of Judy