2. Language is innate but using text is “painstakingly bolted on.” Maryanne Wolf notes that reading has “no direct genetic program passing it on…” It can’t have: text has been widely available for only about 20 generations, and most of us have illiterate ancestors much more recently. 3. Yet you are using your painstakingly acquired textual skills effortlessly, decoding this string of symbols without a second—or even a first conscious—thought. That thoughtlessness is a second-nature miracle, which billions of us routinely repeat. 4. Darwin understood the importance of second natures noting that: “anything performed very often by us, will at last be done without deliberation or hesitation, and can then hardly be distinguished from an instinct” and that “nature by making habit omnipotent, and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian” to his environment. Those short sentences sow the seeds of ideas still insufficiently harvested and of confusions yet unclarified. - bigthink.com