Homo sapiens narrator?

Back in high school, I wrote a play for my high school biology class. The whole five-minute reader's theatre production explained mitosis through an allegorical retelling of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The experience taught me there's always a narrative to explain complex topics. 

The same teacher who let me pull this together also encouraged me to read Lewis Thomas' Lives of a Cell, which she thought might help me better understand the world. This week, S. gave us a chapter of Lives of a Cell in the context of human networking. Critters like ants and wasps -- communal critters -- are not so very different than we are, says he. They respond en masse to certain stimuli; they can venture on their own, but they work for the community and have survived for over 100 million years because they work with their environments. 

How belittling a thought that after our triumphant push out of the primordial amniotic ooze, we evolved only to a certain point, and then just got more superfluous by evolving emotions. Yes, we can talk and fly and build social capital and make music. Really, though, isn't this more about scale than anything else? Don't other social critters accomplish a lot . . . without the angst?

I'm teasing only a little bit here, for vanity's sake if nothing else. Emotion gives us the thrust to try, to extend ourselves, to create, to solve, to improve on the boundaries of what we know. And it gives us narrative. Maybe emotion is just another narrative structure explaining some pretty elaborate behavioural math (thanks, N., for starting that idea with your reference to The Matrix, and thanks, B., for the link). If only I could find my copy of Thomas' book, so I can see what he says about this. It's here, somewhere, under the laundry mess of my grad school experience.