An Evolutionary Ladder of Social Motivations
Each layer can exert its own influenced if needed,
And is modulated into the layer below:
Each layer can exert its own influenced if needed,
And is modulated into the layer below:
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, …
the authority of truth, which had reigned supreme over six million years of collaboration within the countless tribes of our ancestral species, all in passionate deliberation as to which path would be the most righteous and correct way forward for all as a single creature.
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 …
The known facts of human evolution are interpreted as evidence for theory that, for six million years, our ancestral human species lived within a collective mentality intrinsic to their sole adaptation of coordinating their divided labor, i.e., teamwork.
Undoubtedly, many individuals, both male and female, prefer Donald’s bright fluffy bangs to my bald head!
Humans are unique in that both sexes have both motivations simultaneously: all of us both desire beauty and desire to be desired for being, acting, or wearing something beautiful. We Homo sapiens compete with bonobos as the primate species that most desire one another.
Sensitize yourself to the gracefulness in their manner that relentlessly draws all of us together to make us vulnerable to this pestilence.
Leavened by fresh ideas, vivid clinical vignettes, and narratives of the emotional life of our ancient human ancestors
The same experiences of mental illness stigmatized through the ages become ancient beacons illuminating a fresh and uplifting vision of Who We Are.
The mentally ill should be honored for paying the price for our extraordinary mental capacities.
Justice is the one virtue indispensable to productive social engagement because justice is the collective instinct naturally selected to allow the benefits of productive social engagement to take root and blossom
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 …
Like the shadows in Plato’s cave, the genes, chemistry, and cognitive computations inside the brain are diffuse reflections from the evolution of emotions and motivations “outside” in the theater of human minds interacting with human minds.
As a psychiatrist, over the course of many decades treating patients with severe mental illnesses, I have wondered why humans are plagued with these problems. My explorations led me to develop the theory I present in this essay. The essence of my theory is that mental illnesses are among the many unfortunate side effects of …
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 …
All manner of rhetorical flourishes and beautifully constructed phrases can pour out in a torrent. Often there is a magnetic quality to this verbal virtuosity, the meaning (semantics) of which can constitute a brilliantly creative flight of ideas. Beyond the grammar and meaning, the sheer musicality of it can elicit rapt fascination.
A follow-on to the last post. When multicellular organisms were first expanding their internal complexity five hundred million years ago, neurological systems were evolved to co-ordinate their behavior. The key is rapid and continuous real-time communication to all constituents of the organism. How could such communication have been established in the first hominin group-organisms? To …
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: …
