"Until half a billion years ago, life on Earth was slow. The seas were home to single-celled microbes and largely stationary soft-bodied creatures. But at the dawn of the Cambrian era, some 540 million years ago, everything exploded. Bodies diversified in all directions, and many organisms developed appendages that let them move quickly around their environment. These ecosystems became competitive places full of predators and prey."
"And our branch of the tree of life evolved an incredible structure to navigate it all: the brain. We don't know whether this was the moment when consciousness first arose on Earth. But it might have been when living creatures began to really need something like it to combine a barrage of sensory information into one unified experience that could guide their actions. It's because of this ability to experience that, eventually, we began to feel pain and pleasure."
Half a billion years ago, marine life was dominated by slow, single-celled microbes and stationary soft-bodied organisms. The Cambrian era, about 540 million years ago, brought rapid diversification of body forms and the evolution of appendages for active movement. New predator–prey dynamics created competitive ecosystems that selected for advanced sensory processing. Animal lineages developed brains that could integrate multiple sensory streams into unified experiences to guide behavior. That integration enabled sensations of pain and pleasure, supported curiosity, emotions, and introspection, and eventually gave rise to self-awareness that underlies art, science and philosophy. Scientific study of neural correlates of consciousness has intensified in recent decades.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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