From Rome to the U.S. Constitution: How Laws Shaped Human Progress
“this binding force has been the emergence of laws, which were then disseminated by common languages to ever larger populations. “
“this binding force has been the emergence of laws, which were then disseminated by common languages to ever larger populations. “
Our complex communication and understanding depend on our uniquely evolved cooperative interactions.
Darwin: “Language is the instinctive tendency to acquire an art.”
It is truly as if dogs live inside our mind. In this same way, our human ancestors lived within the mind of the groups that domesticated them.
Because these newly acquired traits all enhance the capacity of this burgeoning organism to survive, it is transformed into a subject with the intention to survive, and in the process has achieved the rudiments of mind.
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.
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.”