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Impatient with the geological pace of human evolution, some scientists worry that our brains are too old-school to keep up with the contemporary world's cheek-flapping speed of change.

But maybe we shouldn't be in such a hurry to change our nature. Our old brains may be a lot wiser than we think.

The issue arose in an interview I read earlier this fall with Satoshi Kanazawa, co-author of "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters," published on openculture (oculture.com).

Kanazawa is a sociologist at the London School of Economics with a research interest in evolutionary psychology. He seems sharp, but the interview stresses his concern (and he is not alone) that our brains "are essentially frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age," while the kinds of changes Alvin Toffler examined in "Future Shock" four decades ago are revving into the red zone. The brain can't keep up, because natural selection leading to evolutionary changes takes many thousands of years at least.

This causes problems. Harvard psychiatrist Gregg Jacobs brings up an example in "The Ancestral Mind." It is the act-first-think-later stress response, intended to protect our progenitors from isolated, short-lived events, such as animal attacks. But life in the modern fast lane pushes the yikes! button so often that the physiological changes it causes — adrenaline, tension and such — are making us sick.

Rather than lament our slow pace of change, however, Jacobs celebrates the ancestral mind — the older, pre-verbal brain we share with mammals and reptiles, behind the thinking, neocortical brain that tends to distinguish us as human.

Jacobs notes that the older brain evolved over millions of years — before even the advent of Homo erectus — back to the beginning of mammals and beyond. It has been successful at protecting and sustaining our ancestors through eons of changes in climate, habitat and pre-history.

I like the way Jacobs looks at our ancestral brain as a sort of benign guardian angel whom we should heed better.

The new brain — and the use humans have made of it since the Upper Paleolithic Revolution 40,000 years ago — is a blessing. It has helped us produce a wealth of arts, culture, history, science, medicine and technological advances. It may save us from ourselves yet. Genetic engineering — God help us — could prove a quick way to adapt to whatever reality we decide to promote.

But what, exactly, is real reality? Even 40,000 years, on the geological clock, is a very short time. The last 150 years, which have brought us the industrial and information revolutions, massive population expansions, global climate change and more, is an even shorter period.

It's been a nice, 40,000-year ride. But I think we look down on the old brain's millions of years of success at our peril. Rather than behold it with frustration, maybe we should regard it with respect — and pay close attention to what it can teach us about surviving for a million years hence.