It’s almost universally accepted that learning the history of something — the true story of how it came about — is one way to understand it. It’s almost as widely accepted that learning its history is sometimes the best way to understand something. Indeed, in many cases, it’s supposed that the only way to understand some things is by learning their history.

All three of these suppositions are wrong. Cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, and, most of all, neuroscience are in the process of showing us at least three things about history: (1) our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long evolutionary pedigree and a genetic basis; (2) exactly what it is about the human brain that makes almost all the explanations history has ever offered us wrong; and (3) how our evolution shaped a useful tool for survival into a defective theory of human nature.

Many readers may find the first of these assertions easy to accept. Our recourse to history — true stories — as a means of understanding is proverbially “second nature.” If science can show it’s literally “first nature,” bred in the bone, a part of what makes us tick, somehow genetically hardwired, it may help us understand features of human life and culture that are ancient, ubiquitous, and fixed beyond change. But the next two assertions will strike most readers as literally incredible. How could all the explanations history offers be wrong, and how could evolution by itself have saddled us with any particular theory, let alone a theory of human nature that is completely wrong?