Essay on Deep Survival

The speaker, Laurence Gonzales, is a person who is very interested in human survival, the evolution of humans over time, and how human reactions in the past differ from human reactions in the modern day world, as the discovery of Lucy had “Set her mind on fire” (Gonzales 26), how she wondered “how Lucy had survived for so long” (Gonzales 26), and how she was “certainly interested in the evolution for purely intellectual reasons” (Gonzales 26). She’s also very knowledgeable on survival as she is the “Author of Everyday Survival” (Gonzales 26). The authors purpose for writing this is to show us how Lucy survived for so long with minimal intellects and how we have “three times the size of her brain”(Gonzales 27) and can last much longer, the choice is ours. The author is portraying this message to everyone around the world, whether its little kids or senior citizens, we all have to make good decisions and steer away from many dangers out there to survive, “Lucy would have clearly understood the need to flee from smoke and fire, but people at Mount St. Helens stood around to watch”(Gonzales 26). How can we have “brains three times the size of Lucy”(Gonzales 27), yet not be smart enough to flee from a volcano erupting? That’s one of the major things that the author was trying to get us to understand, we have way more intellect and smarts than humans that lived thousands and thousands of years before us, but if we don’t use that intellect and those smarts than we will be wiped out and remembered as the people “who possessed astonishing intellect, but had squandered these gifts” (Gonzales 27). The author organizes this passage by skipping from past events in Lucy’s time such as erupting volcanoes to similar and same events in recent times such as the “Eruption of Mount St. Helens”(Gonzales 26). The events however are in chronological order from which they happened. The author keeps the audience’s attention by talking about how much she was amazed and how shocked she was at all this that keeps the reader intact and draws them in. After reading the first sentence, “Many years ago, I read of a discovery that set my mind on fire” (Gonzales 26), my brain immediately started to wonder what the discovery was and how it was so shocking that it set this persons mind on fire, the only way for me to find out was if I kept on reading and that’s what I did.