the neural pathway for empathetic motivation for altruism is the simpler baseline pathway, whereas the reciprocal altruistic motivation is clearly more complexly modulated and derived from it
The social structure of humans was due to a decisive-and-then-stable shift in the level of selection: from the selection of individuals (for fitness) in apes to the selection associations between individuals (for fecundity & productivity) in humans.
Hominin language has always been centrally engaged in the attempt to achieve a “running” consensus about which of a limited number of narratives corresponded to the chaotic events that were happening all around them.
Pope John Paul II issued and Encyclical that stated that the Holy Spirit has been a force in human evolution.
When one grasps the Darwinian dimension of psychoanalytic thinking, all the exquisite riches of a century of this creative thought about the inner dynamics of child development can viewed as the effect of natural selection.
You can quibble around the edges about his analysis (and painfully trite take on religion), but I think he is generally right just as I have been claiming in this blog: over the long haul, human history has been in the direction of greater justice accompanied by prosperity—resulting from the progressive coordination of our increasingly divided labor.
Homo naledi is the usual mosaic of ape and human with nothing branching in any other direction.
My uncle used to work at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He was an artist in his soul and, among many other activities, designed the dioramas for the various exhibits. His favorite by far was the work he did at the Hall of Human Origins. He would often talk with great …
Could not the key to a simple understanding this underlying democratic leadership in baboons lie inside the relationship between the leader and the led?
Liberty is the fruit of justice. In order to make the flower stay in bloom, it is the plant that must be tended.
Note the blog’s new logo: This blog is a response to this quotation: For centuries the writ of empiricism [science] has been spreading into the ancient domain of transcendentalist belief, slowly at the start but quickening in the scientific age. The spirits our ancestors knew intimately fled first the rocks and trees and then the …
A biological dimension to David Brooks’ “The Social Animal” & “The Road to Character.”
Coordination is group behavior characterized the collective synchronization of constantly changing second-by-second, interacting contingencies like a basketball team (see very cool video).
Although not really caring about truth, the bullshit artist requires a sensitivity to the variable tensile strength (stretchability) of truth (particularly about oneself) with each and every audience.
This alternative view of human nature is a deeper, richer, and far more noble narrative of our exclusively human legacy: that of an indomitable spirit possessed of a will for justice and sustained through the millennia by the bounty that it fosters.
Linguist Steven Levinson criticizes evolutionary psychologist Michael Tomasello and linguist Derik Bickerson for being unable to shake loose of the “cold” abstract cognitive prerequisites rather than the “hot” motivational and interactive instincts that lie behind the universal patterns of multimodal communication.
How E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins introduced me to the spiritual dimensions of evolution.
The means by which dominance and submission between ape individuals metamorphosed into the single group structure of obedience to the authority of hominin groups.
Ontology (the development of the individual) recapitulates phylogeny (the evolution of the species) is more applicable to the mind than the body. The process of identification in the oedipal complex is related to communication in early hominins.
In Brian Hare’s book, “The Genius of Dogs,” he discovered that freshly domesticated foxes in Russia automatically have the cognitive abilities that only exist in dogs and humans.
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