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 …
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: …
Knowing my interest in human evolution, my son’s Texan mother-in-law gave me the brochure of an exhibit at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas that she visited, entitled “First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figurestone.” The brochure contained many pictures of beautifully rendered paleolithic hand axes as well as naturally formed sculptures that had been “framed” by …
For a fossil to be designated a hominin there must be evidence of upright posture. However, any orthopedic surgeon can tell you that upright posture produces extreme vulnerability for injuries to the lower back (perennially among the top ER visits), hips and knees, so it is reasonable that the evolutionary advantages of such a costly …
The Evolution of Emotion Precedes the Evolution of Cognition This blog proposes that the primary innovation of our own 200,000-year Homo sapiens species occurred in the emotional sphere and consisted of a marked increase in the motivation for “display” behavior, the function of which can be compared to the emotion-and-motivation of a peacock to display …
The most basic activity of this blog is to maintain vigilance of ongoing science, particularly in the fields of psychiatry and paleoanthropology but also in numerous other fields, and to apply all relevant new findings to the Blog’s broad paradigm of the human mind. In the September 2nd issue of Science an article entitled, …
From Old Mind, New Mind: Emotional Fossils and the Evolution of the Human Spirit Being conscious is one thing, but being conscious of being conscious is quite another . . . . I had been thinking about thinking from the very beginning of my journey as a philosopher. My original notion, drawn from my observations …
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.
Our vulnerability to mental illness is similar to our vulnerability to lower back, hip, and knee pathology, which is the price we pay for the adaptive advantages of upright posture. Mental illness is similarly the price we pay for our mental capacities for large-group bonding, reflective self-awareness, and the complexity of linguistic syntax.
Mental flexibility is the ability to effectively respond to the similar aspects within different situations.
