Why can we ask who we are?

The source of our concept of self, the seat of the soul if you're that way inclined, is one of the great mysteries. What is it about humanity which allows us to feel that we are conscious, to have a sense of ourselves? In 2000 Edge.org posted an essay by V S Ramachandran entitled "Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind the "Great Leap Forward."" He was referring to the great leap that humankind has made, far outstripping the rate of progress of any other observed species. The essay was about the so-called "mirror neurons." In experiments on apes, it was found that specific groups of neurons fired whenever the apes performed voluntary tasks such as button pushing or reaching out for food. This is not particularly interesting in and of itself; the interesting part is that a small subset of these neurons fired when the apes merely watched other apes performing the task. Ramuchandran speculated that the presence of these mirror neurons in humans permitted us to learn by imitation, sparking the great leap which allowed the sharing of knowledge about how to replicate useful events which would otherwise have occurred only once.
Now, nearly 7 years later Ramuchandran has extended the theory in the new issue of Edge. He speculates that it is these very neurons that allow us self awareness by allowing us to imagine ourselves performing an action as if we were someone else. That is a gross oversimplification, so if you have any interest at all I would suggest that you read the full text of his surprisingly concise essay.

What has natural selection ever done for us?

Pictured left is the goddess Parvati, consort of Lord Shiva. In the Hindi pantheon she represents feminine attributes desirable by Hindi tradition. She is depicted in art as buxom, wide of hip, narrow of waist and bounteous of bosom. She's a porn starlet for the 12th century. In a 2003 lecture Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, the director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego, suggests that this form was found by amplifying the differences between male and female to create a kind of uber-femme, a body fit for a goddess. Everything down to the posture is throwing femininity in the viewer's face. When westerners arrived in India they saw the images in a different light. Seen through the lens of a lifetime's exposure to classical and renaissance art, the image looks unrealistic and cartoonish; it was declared primitive and unworthy of consideration. In this case, cultural conditioning had overcome the natural reaction that viewing this almost scientifically derived expression of ultimate womanhood would be expected to have caused.
As an analogue, when a woman is caught by surprise in a state of undress in the US, she covers her breasts and genitals with such unthinking rapidity that it could be taken to be a universal human trait. In Arab countries, however, the natural reaction would be to cover her face, and in Samoa the startled woman would rush to cover her navel. In every case culture is the dominant force in the nature of the reaction.
What biological natural selection has done for us is well documented by now; in the light of the frenetic speed of cultural evolution, maybe the real question is: What has it done for us recently?