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 similarity of ancestral humans and dolphins.
In the past several years, a series of books and studies by prominent scientists are quietly revolutionizing the human evolutionary narrative. Yuval Harari in his Sapiens (2014) makes no bones about his view: “The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment …
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 …
Simplifies an understanding of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, language, religion, self-awareness, free will, and the experience of being human for the last three million years.
Or are we undergoing a progressive awakening to our tribe’s ancient mission to transform the power of aggression into the bounty of communion
Undoubtedly, many individuals, both male and female, prefer Donald’s bright fluffy bangs to my bald head!
Everyone is born with a different configuration of three mentalities, and mental health is a balance between all three.
In spite of centuries of traps, poisons and fumigations, no pied piper has ever managed to eradicate this most perseverant of pests.
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
I began my career working in a maximum-security prison with a state-mandated treatment program. One of the inmates there, whose countenance still haunts me from time to time, was a gaunt middle-aged man who used to stand in the corner of the common room and blankly stare out the window all day, chain-smoking. His posture, …
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 …
That was out of the question, he said, and besides, their [chimpanzee] society would not suit me: it was much too harsh for a human being.
Below is a TED talk by Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who wrote The Righteous Mind, in which he introduced six belief categories: important issues to Democrats are care/harm, liberty/oppression, and fairness/cheating, whereas for Republicans the most important issues are loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/ degradation. In this video he tells us that openness to new …
“A true saying it is: Desire hath no rest, is infinite in itself, endless, and as one calls it, a perpetual rack, or horse-mill.” –Saint Augustine (354-430) The modern science of happiness appeared on the radar screen in 1978 with Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman’s paper entitled “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” In …
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 …
