Excerpt from The Growth of Mathematical Thought

Once upon a time there were no numbers. We don't know exactly how long ago that was, because to measure that you would need numbers, and they weren't around yet. But it must have been fairly long ago. According to current scientific theories, numbers must have taken considerable time to evolve into their present state of complexity.

Homo Innumerensis - our ancestors - were a race not yet endowed with the ability to measure anything. They survived in an ancient world they didn't know how old, lived under a sun they didn't know how bright, and thrived amid a terrible paleolithic weather for which they had no predictions, especially wrong ones. It couldn't have hurt their chances.

And then, at some point, the numbers started appearing.

Admittedly, no one knows exactly how that happened. Where did all those numbers come from? The School of Exponentially High Divinity maintains that all species of numbers were designed by an Intelligent Designer in the space of a working week (the weekend being set aside for rest). How else would one explain the mind-boggling complexity of numbers, especially that of the complex numbers, not to mention the octonions and the operator fields? Surely, if you stumbled upon a complex object like a smartphone while walking in a garden, you would promptly put it in your pocket and proceed to infer that there must be a smart phonemaker somewhere? Likewise, if you stumbled upon an irrational number in your mathematical ramblings, would you not infer an intelligent, if not actually irrational, number-maker behind it?

There were a few minor glitches in this view, of course. Sometimes, for example, the the Design would not seem as intelligent. What kind of Intelligent Designer, the critics would ask, would consciously design such useless and grotesque absurdities like automorphic modular forms or the theory of superstrings? At this point the professors of Divinity are known to collapse into silence, occasionally after mumbling something about the Creator working in mysterious ways.

So far the most successful explanations have come from The School of Evolutionary Numerology (not to be confused with Revolutionary Numerology, which maintains that the world revolves around certain mystical properties of whole numbers expressed in base ten.) They explain that the simplest numers, the "natural" ones, spontaneously emerged from the primordial soup. After that it was the process of Mathematical Selection by gifted thinkers that produced a succession from natural numbers to rationals to reals to complex numbers and beyond. When asked for the place of the Creator in such a scheme of things, a famous mathematician is known to have remarked - "We did not have need for such an axiom."

Of course, criticisms of such an evolutionary theory have been widespread. Could highly complex mathematical structures really have evolved piecemeal, given that its coherence depends on the simultaneous existence of its many interlocking parts? What would a "field" do, for example, without its identity element? The answer is that it would be a "ring", which, while maybe not as well adapted as a field, is still a consistent mathematical structure capable of independent existence. In fact, the evolutionists explain that all complex structures can develop by a step by step evolutionary process - by a succession of mutations that lead to the addition of one axiom at a time to already existing theories.

In addition to the standard repertoire of Mathematical Selectionist theories, a different school of evolutionary thought maintains that a lot of structures (though not all) evolve simply out of random mutations in certain mathematical minds - mutations that are adaptively neutral. These mathematical theories are often considered "useless" by natural scientists, causing the aforementioned mathematical minds to feel a not inconsiderable degree of pride. But even though such structures resulting from "playful mathematics" may not have immediate practical value, they might later be co-opted for adaptive purposes, especially by physicists who are notorious  for such things (cf. "The theory of Spandrels" by Gould and Lewontin).

Though all the finer details of evolutionary change are still debated, the natural history of numbers continues to be best explained in the light of macro-evolutionary theories. It is expected that numbers will continue to evolve following the same broad patterns, although some have expressed the apprehension that an impending intellectual catastrophe, such as an excessive obsession with smartphones, may render humanity too dumb to carry on with Mathematical Selection. Others have expressed the view that if the invention of the automobile or the motion picture did not do the trick, perhaps nothing will.