The human brain can do a lot of wonderful things; many of them include 1 mastery of complex feedback systems with long 2 For example, consider how difficult raising a child truly is. Many factors are 3 , including the nutritional, physical, emotional and mental condition of the child, and the feedback of these factors 4 the behavior of those involved in raising the child. To 5 matters, many of the responses of the child/parent "system" take years to 6 themselves. Yet billions of parents have somehow 7 to feed, clothe, protect, nurture, heal, teach, and love their children 8 successful adulthood.
9 all our intuitive sophistication in dealing with complicated situations, it’’s a 10 to see how poorly we deal with some newer systems, most of 11 brought about by technology.
Both raising children and protecting Earth’’s life-support systems are 12 of life and death; in the long term, they are equally important. But 13 our brains seem fairly well prepared for the long-term process of raising kids, we seem to have 14 built-in skill for taking care of the environment that supports us, any children we might have, and all other 15 . It seems that the "thinking" parts of our brains can’’t deal with complicated systems and their long- term 16 ,and the 17 parts of our brains that can deal with complex systems don’’t help us much outside of their 18 areas. One of the goals of systems science is to use math and computers to help people get better 19 taking care of Earth’’s life-support systems. The task involves teaching our thinking brains about 20 complicated systems work.