Focus : The Big Questions : WHO ARE WE? WHY DO WE BEHAVE THE WAY WE DO? KCET LOOKS TO THE BRAIN

Rodney King wasn’t the only person to ask: Why can’t we all just get along?

It’s also one of the main questions Roger Bingham sets out to answer in his ambitious new series “The Human Quest,” produced by KCET’s Science and Society Television.

In what he likes to call “four essays in natural philosophy,” the science documentarian takes on perhaps the only subject matter bigger than Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos”: the human mind.

What is thought? What is consciousness? Why do we behave the way we do?

The short answer is: Because it works.

Behavior has evolved along with traits like upright walking and opposing thumbs because it helps us survive long enough to pass along our genes to our progeny, thereby ensuring their success. Everything from the foods we crave to the mates we desire is chosen at least in part by the forces of natural selection.

“The brain is not an amorphous blob,” says Bingham, who is a visiting associate in biology at Caltech. “It is a set of specialized circuits for choosing a mate, for forming aggressive coalitions, for language. It’s a jury-rigged, problem-solving machine.”

Every human on this planet is prewired to make love, and make war; to laugh and to learn a language, he explains.

“The key thing is, everyone has it,” says Bingham. “It’s a great unifier.”

The idea that people are prewired for anything is not always a popular point of view.

“The whole idea of biological determinism has been taken as a negative statement,” says series producer Carl Byker. “Liberals would throw apples at you for saying that. But the whole point is that we have such a vast amount in common with everyone on the planet, and so little to separate us.”

It’s uncanny to see the identical smirks and smiles and winces on the faces of drooling Asian babies, African tribesmen, English schoolgirls. From the day we’re born, we learn to read the stars and the daggers in each others’ eyes. It’s part of our personal survival kit, they say.

Bingham does not flinch from the dark side. In Part 2, “The Social Brain,” he shows images of L.A. burning during the summer of 1992. “As a society, we reap what we sow. We have a real talent for destruction and self-destruction.”

But he also points out that we wouldn’t be here if violence wasn’t the exception rather than the rule--the last resort after negotiation, compromise and cooperation have failed. “The golden rule is found in almost every culture that exists.”

If we want to understand ourselves, we have to go back to our roots. Not just the homes of our parents and grandparents, but back to our shared heritage in the Stone Age. Unfortunately, Bingham points out, our cultures have evolved a great deal faster than our brains, leaving us stranded in the Space Age with brains from the Stone Age.

We inherit cooperative instincts as well as destructive ones. Why would anyone leave a tip, for example, for a total stranger at a restaurant halfway round the world from home? The answer is: We evolved this circuitry at a time when we were living in small, closed societies, where everyone knew everyone else, and everyone remembered what everyone else did.

Bingham doesn’t know exactly how this knowledge is going to help us make the world a better place. “All of this is offered with great humility. I don’t pretend to have the answers,” he says. “But I want people to raise the questions. Isn’t it worth a try to come up with policies based on what we know about the human brain?”

Aside from social interactions, Bingham is just plain fascinated with how our brains understand anything. “Think of a big floating red balloon. How does your brain put it all together? The form, the color, motion?”

The brains of people with missing arms or legs create “phantom” limbs so real to them that they feel sensation in a thumb that no longer exists. Tricks with mirrors can “teach” the brain that the limb no longer exists. The mind is far more flexible than anyone had thought.

Bingham, who has been producing science documentaries for two decades, clearly has a great deal of fun with all this. Science is the most fantastic brain game of all. To think that the same minds that created gods created chaos theory. To think that the richness of thought evolved from a combination of chance and a few simple rules, the “gossip of neutrons,” Says Bingham. “The brain is made of all these dumb units. ... It’s amazing that we can have this discourse!”

Since Bingham has been a Darwin fan for years, much of the pleasure of doing the show came from retracing Darwin’s steps. “There’s the sheer fun of sitting in Darwin’s chair and walking down his sandwalk and holding his cane.”

At one point while filming in Darwin’s house, he needed a brain for a prop, so he borrowed one from a nearby teaching hospital. He put the brain in a bucket, set the bucket on top of a taxi cab and pulled it out in front the bewildered driver, who “almost lost his lunch.”

This spirit of playfulness, according to executive producer Joyce Campbell, is one of the series’ great strengths. Indeed, for all the stellar philosophers, neuroscientists and psychologists Bingham trots out, the players never lose their sense of awe or humor.

“Creativity comes from the playfulness that’s part of being a questioner,” she says. “So often you think of scientists as dogmatic, cut and dried. But they’re continually questioning and discovering.”

“The Human Quest” airs Tuesday and Wednesday at 7 p.m. on KVCR and at 8 p.m. on KCET.