℞ for creeping cynicism

Rx for gloomy defeatism re climate, Ukraine, population, etc., etc.

Filed under: Belief, Faith | 7 Comments

Since the Big Bang, the cosmos has had a linear direction toward amalgamation and association such that matter has been transforming into mind. Mind resides within the relationship between objects. At the subatomic “particle” level, matter itself exists as a relational matrix in which everything alters everything else. On Earth, as amino acids amalgamated into …

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The Dawn of Everything

Filed under: Evolution of Emotion, Evolution of human motivation, Evolutionary psychology, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity in which David Graeber and David Wengrow assemble a vast array of archeological evidence from prehistory, much of it recently discovered, and interpret it in a wholly original way. The book, published in 2022, offers an alternative to the widely accepted Rousseauian narrative that, about …

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Middle Pleistocene Homo behavior and culture at 140,000 to 120,000 years ago and interactions with Homo sapiens

Filed under: Ancient human migration

The thesis of this blog is that pre-Homo sapiens hominins existed within a collective mentality as a single creature and were fundamentally not war-like because the advantages of their divisions of labor were so predominant; similarly, for 100 million years after the initial formation of organisms in the Cambrian a half-billion years ago, early species, …

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Opposable Thumb

Opposable Thumb

Filed under: Brain evolution, cognitive capacities

by Pamela J. Hines (Science  23 Apr 2021:Vol. 372, Issue 6540, pp. 357) Hand bones of australopithecine hominid fossils dated to over 2 million years ago have a long, slender thumb that may have added dexterity. Karakostis et al. add muscle to the story of hand evolution with their analysis of torque at the thumb …

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Brain Evolution

Evolution of the Brain

Filed under: Brain evolution

Numbers indicate Brodmann’s areas BC: Brodmann’s cap LA: lambdoid suture In humans, evolutionary expansion of the inferior prefrontal cortex (IPF) resulted in a shift of the pci toward the posterior side of CO (red arrowheads). Concomitant expansion of the parietal bone resulted in anterior shift (blue arrowheads) of the apical portion of CO. In humans, …

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Image of the mnd

The Function of Dreams

Filed under: Mind | 1 Comment

They maintain that dreams, rather than merely repeating the events of the day to cement them into long-term storage, allow our brains to freely explore memories that have been filed away over time, extracting information and developing a narrative based on associations.

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