The Evolution of the Holy Spirit
A scientific creation myth involving the transformation of dominance and submission into authority and obedience to Morality and Justice (The Holy Spirit).
A scientific creation myth involving the transformation of dominance and submission into authority and obedience to Morality and Justice (The Holy Spirit).
Since I had worked in prison as a young psychiatrist, and had observed the natural facility for communication between individuals within enslaved relationships, I was sure that the interactive human mind was the evolutionary result of the internalization of the relationship that defined the signature primate hierarchical social system—dominance and submission. As discussed in the …
For two decades, I was focused on the evolution of the strengthening of political alliances between dominant and submissive individuals seen in chimpanzees as the most likely cause of the powerful group bonding that I had from the very beginning determined was the hallmark of the hominid advantage. I had written so frequently about it …
In the first two blog-posts of the “Deep Evolution of Emotion” series, the attractive force of sex arrives on earth to forge the mother-infant bond for the purpose of the protection of the mother’s genetic investment in her offspring. The genes constructed for this purpose were “turned off” before entering the lonely struggle for adult …
In my psychiatric training, I felt the Freudian analysis that emotions are divided into id, comprised of ancient primate drives to dominate and the superego, representing the prohibitions of society was self-evident. Starting my career in a prison observing dominant-submissive relationships approaching the model of master and slave, I observed the extraordinary aptitude of a …
By means of the transformation rendered by by selection inclusion between dominance and submission mentalities, a new kind of organism emerged comprised of twenty or thirty individuals made up of four to seven families. These newly organismic group entities were connected to one another by the full range of kinship and in-law relationships by virtue …
Most people are not aware that our own Homo sapiens species within our original hunter gatherer bands were decidedly not hierarchical. In Hierarchy in the Forest, the evolution of egalitarian behavior (1999,) Christopher Boehm brought to my attention one of the most important enigmas to be solved in the subject of human evolution: how and …
In the last post, Alain de Botton in his book Religion for Atheists says “He finds it impossible to take faith in God seriously. He assumes that none of his educated readers could possibly believe in spooky ghosts in the sky.” I am sure that de Botton would find this cartoon amusing. It poses the question …
Recall that Tim White’s team of Ardipithecus ramidus experts chose Owen Lovejoy to interpret that the mating system of this founding species of our hominid Family was monogamous. Recall also that this is reinforced by the finding that the mating systems of the founding species of all the other super-cooperative species besides us (insects) were …
To me, Charles Darwin’s discovery of sexual selection rivals that of natural selection. In natural selection, the selecting is done totally by nature and change is rendered through chance mutation of genes. In sexual selection, a portion of the power to select is seized by one of nature’s creations, usually the female of a species, …
While in my residency, Freudian psychoanalytic theory was still dominant. There are several cornerstones from my training that, through all the vicissitudes of my career, remained as foundations. First and foremost is the validity of the mind as a subject of study as opposed to the brain. This was difficult to maintain when psychiatry was …