Like the shadows in Plato’s cave, the genes, chemistry, and cognitive computations inside the brain are diffuse reflections from the evolution of emotions and motivations “outside” in the theater of human minds interacting with human minds.
As a psychiatrist, over the course of many decades treating patients with severe mental illnesses, I have wondered why humans are plagued with these problems. My explorations led me to develop the theory I present in this essay. The essence of my theory is that mental illnesses are among the many unfortunate side effects of …
I have written a book that describes my version of human nature and has many “moving parts,” but writing it was the easy, fun part. After you finish writing a book, you have to come up with an “elevator” description (short enough to get through during the ride). The main task is to refrain from …
The proposal in this book that I am most adamant about is that justice is a collective human instinct (in addition to our individual ape instincts to dominate). Justice is not just something we dreamed up as Yuval Harari would have us believe in his book, Sapiens. Justice has been naturally selected over millions of …
I have been running this blog since 2012 with one blog/week until last Spring when I took a “leave of absence” to complete the final summary of the blog’s thinking in a short book, which is to bepublished soon. The central thesis is that justice is a collective human instinct that has evolved over the …
All manner of rhetorical flourishes and beautifully constructed phrases can pour out in a torrent. Often there is a magnetic quality to this verbal virtuosity, the meaning (semantics) of which can constitute a brilliantly creative flight of ideas. Beyond the grammar and meaning, the sheer musicality of it can elicit rapt fascination.
Forty-five years ago, while in my psychiatric residency, I moonlighted at DC General Hospital’s emergency room. I never knew ever knew who would come in the doors down there at the General. The “White House cases” were a staple, a motley collection of characters pulled off the fence surrounding the presidential residence. One evening is …
A follow-on to the last post. When multicellular organisms were first expanding their internal complexity five hundred million years ago, neurological systems were evolved to co-ordinate their behavior. The key is rapid and continuous real-time communication to all constituents of the organism. How could such communication have been established in the first hominin group-organisms? To …
Psychologist Michael Tomasello recognizes that, because all the minds of our ancestral species have gone extinct, the only way we can scientifically approach how the mind of apes evolved into our own is to comparatively study the minds of apes and developing children to ascertain what is exclusively human in human nature. In Becoming Human: …
I began my career working in a maximum-security prison with a state-mandated treatment program. One of the inmates there, whose countenance still haunts me from time to time, was a gaunt middle-aged man who used to stand in the corner of the common room and blankly stare out the window all day, chain-smoking. His posture, …
TIGER WHAT ME WORRY? POWER POUT
THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE and up-to-date lay book on the science of behavior is Stanford neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017). The book is an encyclopedic compendium of behavioral science, written with folksy, down-home idiom. Here he lays out evidence that the fundamental “default” of human social behavior …
That was out of the question, he said, and besides, their [chimpanzee] society would not suit me: it was much too harsh for a human being.
Human evolution marked a shift from Thomas Malthus’ struggle for scarce resources—fitness, to Adam Smith’s coordination of divided labor—productivity.
The fundamental divide between right and left is the clash between the role of the individual vs. the role of the collective. The right wins this argument because, in a post-Darwinian world without religion, the very existence of a collective will is in question—it has been made an orphan in Darwin’s age bereft of evolutionary …
The political left is standing on the shifting sands of a philosophical vacuum which I have spent many years filling.
A formidable case that the deepest human motivations in human nature were naturally selected to animate not the fitness of individuals, but the productivity of their associations.
Collection of morphs
