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.
all images by Chat GPT-4 & DALL-E-3
How do normal bad feeling differ from mental illness?
Is mental illness a “chemical imbalance” or “All in the genes”
The Story of Our Social Emotions Our ability to connect, cooperate, and form societies didn’t just pop up overnight. It’s the result of millions of years of evolution, starting from our ape-like ancestors to the modern humans we are today. By tracing back the history of major mental illnesses, we can map out the journey …
We’ll explore the relationship between severe mental illnesses and our most basic, primal emotions that drive our social interactions.
Embark with me on a journey delving deep into the relationship between severe mental illnesses and the primal emotions fueling our social interactions.
Psychologist Michael Tomasello, who studies comparatively the social behavior of developing children and apes, proposes that collective communication is uniquely human and that it was evolved for collaborative foraging, and so teamwork has been the crucial human advantage. The central facts about our ancestral human species, such as upright posture, large molar teeth, and later, …
I have commented on this blog that doctors have been around longer than soldiers, and now there is proof. At a time when there is virtually no evidence of organized violence (war) there is new evidence of a sophisticated, and successful amputation 31,000 years ago in Bornio. From Science, 7 September, 2022 by Michael Price: …
The same vanity that makes the peacock so vigorously shake its tail has not just drawn us together to seed culture, it has proceeded to become the motive engine driving our economies,
In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity in which David Graeber and David Wengrow assemble a vast array of archeological evidence from prehistory, much of it recently discovered, and interpret it in a wholly original way. The book, published in 2022, offers an alternative to the widely accepted Rousseauian narrative that, about …
When Science places a finding on their cover, it usually means that it is significant, which is indeed the case with the article by D.L. Hoffmann, et al. Entitled “U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art.” A relatively new method of dating utilizing the carbonate drip-precipitated coating overlying the art …
Everyone is born with a different configuration of three mentalities, and mental health is a balance between all three.
Sensitize yourself to the gracefulness in their manner that relentlessly draws all of us together to make us vulnerable to this pestilence.
In spite of centuries of traps, poisons and fumigations, no pied piper has ever managed to eradicate this most perseverant of pests.
While I can only imagine watching the early hominins from afar, I can easily place myself among these early Homo people. Crouching in a circle, we are all glancing back and forth, not merely imitating one another’s work, but watching for strokes made with the authority of how it should be and always had been …
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 …
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: …
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 …