How important is community to humans, and where did the rules governing community come from?

Filed under: Evolution of Emotion, Evolution of human motivation, Evolutionary psychology | 1 Comment

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, …

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The Dawn of Everything

Filed under: Evolution of Emotion, Evolution of human motivation, Evolutionary psychology, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

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 …

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vanity is all

THE DESIRES THAT BREAK LOOSE IN MANIA DEFINE OUR OWN HOMO SAPIENS SPECIES

Filed under: Emotional Fossils, Evolution of human motivation, Human Nature, Mental illness | 4 Comments

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.

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WHY WE STOOD UP

Filed under: Evolution of human motivation, Language

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 …

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Michael Tomasello and Collective Consciousness

Filed under: Belief, cognitive capacities, Evolution of Emotion, Evolution of human motivation, Justice | 2 Comments

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: …

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