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I think both are true but mostly the first. Human evolution has sped up dramatically in the past 15,000 years, but it's still very slow.

Arabic numerals, literacy, maps, bayesian reasoning, etc are unnatural, but better ways to conceptualize the world around us and these tools and others have steadily become more prevalent throughout the population.

Maybe quicksort hasn't permated through much of society, but binary search has! People born 100 years ago became comfortable flipping through phone books and quickly finding a name, whereas that would have taken a conceptual leap for most born 200 years ago.




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