How to Tell a Republican Baboon from a Democratic Baboon?
Which are Democrats & which are Republicans? Hints: This is red CLICK HERE FOR ANSWER This is Blue CLICK HERE FOR ANSWER
Which are Democrats & which are Republicans? Hints: This is red CLICK HERE FOR ANSWER This is Blue CLICK HERE FOR ANSWER
The fundamental unit of behavior in a hierarchy consists of a political triangle: two attempting to intimidate a third. When four possible political triangles between four individuals socially interact, the individual with the most alliances ends up at the apex of a stable social pyramid in which all four members are bound together by bonds …
With two high-profile suicides in the news, it is timely to discuss the inner experience of the most lethal form of depression. Seeking escape from an intense feeling of entrapment is intrinsic to melancholic depression, among the most dreaded of all mental illnesses. Aptly named by Hippocrates, melancholia means “black bile,” a potent metaphor for …
I practiced psychiatry during the period in which the paradigm of the mind shifted from the perspective of how it is experienced from the inside (i.e.: phenomenology, mainly psychoanalytic theory) to the examination of how it works from the outside, i.e.: neurochemistry, genetics, and cognitions. The impact of Prozac on this shift cannot be exaggerated. …
During the decade in which I was actively engaged in marital therapy, I became convinced that hidden beneath more superficial reasons that people marry each other is an evolved instinct to re-balance their respective temperaments. Temperament is the component of personality that is derived exclusively from genes and is comprised of blends of paired social …
This is a new section, added for the next edition of the book. It contains some early thinking about sexual selection while I was working in a prison. *** During this period in prison, I discovered a book written in 1930 by a brilliant English polymath named Ronald Fisher, who updated Darwin’s idea of co-evolution …
A glaring weakness of the agenda of the political left is that social justice does not appear to be rooted in the flesh and blood of human nature. The two most influential thinkers on our attitudes about what makes us tick are Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud: we are ape-men who when psychoanalyzed are revealed …
The Blog has stated before that the philosophical difference between the political left and right have their roots in their different views of human nature. This very moment of transition offers the philosopher of human nature a rare opportunity to have the distinctions on display. Thomas Hobbes expressed attitudes human nature popular on the political …
First off, biological instincts for morality were evolved and refined over the millions of years of hominin evolution prior to the appearance of our own Homo sapiens species some 200,000 years ago. Over and above deep feelings for justice, our peculiar species has overlain a motivational layer animated by a mania to be admired by …
This Blog is based on the premise that there was an evolutionary “metamorphosis” in the mental and emotional sphere that gave rise to our hominin “tribe” six million years ago. Pushed by harsh climates and the threat of extinction, the target of natural selection shifted from the fitness of individuals to the productivity of relationships. …
In the June 3rd Issue of Science, a research report appeared on the status of a large collaborative effort to nail down the origin of dogs. The Abstract: The geographic and temporal origins of dogs remain controversial. We generated genetic sequences from 59 ancient dogs and a complete (28x) genome of a late Neolithic dog …
We pick up the narrative as I am describing a prison inmate: He spoke slowly and deliberately with no emotion whatsoever. He had shot his wife dead after drinking one night. He said that he would always love her and was just waiting to die. He then went on to describe in spare, clear language …
When one grasps the Darwinian dimension of psychoanalytic thinking, all the exquisite riches of a century of this creative thought about the inner dynamics of child development can viewed as the effect of natural selection.
You can quibble around the edges about his analysis (and painfully trite take on religion), but I think he is generally right just as I have been claiming in this blog: over the long haul, human history has been in the direction of greater justice accompanied by prosperity—resulting from the progressive coordination of our increasingly divided labor.
This alternative view of human nature is a deeper, richer, and far more noble narrative of our exclusively human legacy: that of an indomitable spirit possessed of a will for justice and sustained through the millennia by the bounty that it fosters.
Primate cognitions focused on competitively reading each other’s minds are adaptations to an environment comprised entirely of social emotion.
Just as dogs might have been domesticated to be submissive to humans hominins might have been selected to be submissive to the interests of their groups.
Ontology (the development of the individual) recapitulates phylogeny (the evolution of the species) is more applicable to the mind than the body. The process of identification in the oedipal complex is related to communication in early hominins.
In Brian Hare’s book, “The Genius of Dogs,” he discovered that freshly domesticated foxes in Russia automatically have the cognitive abilities that only exist in dogs and humans.
New book on Stanley Milgram exposes his conclusions about authority as “theater.”
