Though emotions and motivations are shaped by family and social environments, our focus here is on the genetic aspects subject to natural selection, including sexual, social, and group selection.
cellphone users push start button below Monogamy Facts: Approximately 85-95% of birds and 3-5% of mammals are monogamous. Among primates, about 15% are monogamous (Díaz-Muñoz, 2013). Monogamous social systems began evolving in some primates around 16 million years ago, emerging from promiscuous mating systems similar to those of chimpanzees and bonobos (Opie, 2012). Monogamy typically …
Belief, in the Enlightenment sense, became an individual cognitive stance rather than a communal act of trust and loyalty.
“God” is the principle that creates the universe by bringing unity out of the state of multiplicity known as matter. —John F. Haught
The key is to draw the distinction between cooperation, in which each party co-opts something from the other in a win-win “game,” and coordination, in which the synchronized engagement of divided labor leaves no room for individual–group trade-offs, and everyone rises and falls together.
Vaclav Haval: The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.
Hand Ax: these diurnal chains of communal functioning wove an unbroken fabric for 50 thousand generations across the expanse of entire continents.
cellphone users: push start button below Emerging research using ancient DNA techniques reveals that Neanderthals tended towards inbreeding and static social structures, as shown by genetic traces of close-relative mating in a Neanderthal woman and thirteen other individuals (Prüfer et al., 2017; Skov et al., 2022). In stark contrast, the genomes of Homo sapiens from …
Robert Bellah: We saw in the case of Israel that Yahweh emerged gradually from being one of many other gods, even the greatest god, to the status of the one and only true God.”
Darwin: “. . . a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good . . . “
Darwin: “On the whole, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have…”—The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)
Darwin: “Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.”
Franz deWaal: “That was out of the question, he said, and besides, their society would not suit me: it was much too harsh for a human being..—”Chimpanzee Politics”
Nick Lane: “. . . the exquisite beauty of flowering plants, which swept through the world some 80 million years ago . . .”
Wm. Styron: “the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion” Darkness Visible
FDR: “. . . a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.”
In animal communication natural selection favors callers who vocalize to affect [i.e. manipulate] the behavior of listeners and listeners who [are selected to] acquire information from vocalizations. . . . Whereas signalers may vocalize to change a listener’s behavior, they do not call to inform others. Listeners acquire information from signalers who do not, in …
Emmanuel Kant’s Awe in AI Images & Music
Causal narratives seek to knit together disparate observations, facts, and events into a coherent and inclusive whole that convincingly links later events to prior events.
William Butler Yeats: “We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.”