Education Week – John T. McCrann
“Our mathematics relies on the idea that the difference between 1 and 2 is the same as the difference between 99 and 100. This idea feels intuitive to most of us, but is actually counter-intuitive to the way we evolved. You see, from an exponential standpoint the difference between 1 and 2 is huge, the latter is double the number of fruit trees or saber-tooth tigers. That’s an important difference to an evolving species. Less important is whether or not you have found a grove with 99 fruit trees vs one with 100. The evolutionary move towards arithmetic sequences (1, 2, 3, 4…) as opposed to geometric (1, 2, 4, 8, 16..) enables the math and science we have today. To get there we have had to trick our minds into a new way of understanding quantity. Radiolab has a great episode on this where the cite the work of Stanislas Dehaene and Susan Carey to explain “the trick” of our number system.”(more)