“What brings you in today?” you ask after a new patient sits down in your office. The first order of business is a chronology of the present illness. Precisely when did the problem start? What was happening both at that moment and more generally in his/her life? Then the present illness prompts targeted questions about …
BACK COVER OF THE BOOK The Ascension of the Human Spirit (excerpt) The remarkable aspect of evolution by sexual selection, which Darwin so courageously proposed, is that it is driven merely by the desire for a trait, in this case the desire for justice. I had realized that sexual selection is not only driven by …
How E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins introduced me to the spiritual dimensions of evolution.
Grasp in a single graphic 50 million years of human evolution into thousands of years into the future.
A scientific creation myth involving the transformation of dominance and submission into authority and obedience to Morality and Justice (The Holy Spirit).
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 …
Sex is intermittent with a beginning, middle and end. Sex first transformed into the continuous state of attachment in the mother-infant bond. In this process, the sexuality of mating was toned down, stripped of its aspect of consummation, and, thereby, the pleasure of increasing closeness was “stretched out” in time into a constant “feeling state.” …
In an earlier version of Apes, Ants, and Ancestors, I wrote the following mystical account of the evolution of emotion prior to the appearance of hominids. I had just finished a chapter on the glaring prominence of dominance and submission in prison life. “Let us fly out from the nested bondage within that prison through …
My psychiatric training in the early 1970’s was completely dominated by Freudian ideas. After finally comprehending the basics of how the superego is installed into the child’s mind during growth and development (last post), my interest shifted to the evolution of human emotion since the last common ancestor about six million years ago. This blog …
“They provide an insightful and comprehensive overview of methods and techniques from the origins of brain science to today’s MRI scanners. However, rather than emphasizing state-of-the-art procedures and technologies, they focus on the limitations of the field… …Because the question “what happens in the brain when…?” fits practically any aspect of human activity, fMRI has …
The premise in this blog is that, the event that initiated our hominid biological family was the ascendance of the will of individual apes to dominate each other into the entity of group justice in small monogamous hominid bands of 20-30 individuals. But what would drive such a unique natural process? There are two important …
In The Social Conquest of Earth, E. O. Wilson soft-pedals and sugarcoats the darkness of his vision of human nature so transparently expressed in his novel, Anthill, as similar to chronically warring colonies of ants – all our virtue derives from the cooperation necessary for groups to successfully wage war. In his ant myth of …
The next task of our Narrative is to resolve the paradox of the virtually static nature of the hand ax industry from Africa and across their vast Eurasian diaspora for 70,000 generations while, during the same time, there occurred an unprecedented growth in the brain. I believe the solution to this riddle lies in considering …
I feel compelled to write on the momentous occasion E.O. Wilson’s newly released The Social Conquest of Earth. Those few who know my thinking know that I have high regard for E.O.Wilson and that he has inspired me for many years. I would point out a couple things though. Dr. Wilson knows ants. …
Before proceeding on the FAQ series, we need to establish some definitions. The word, “belief” has been hijacked by science to refer to theories that have been tested sufficiently to accept them temporarily until the next theory comes along. Before serious science arrived in the 17th century, belief used to mean loyalty, like to a …
My book, Apes, Ants, and Ancestors, is a response to this challenge by E. O. Wilson to draw a “new mythos” based on the “facts of evolution.” For centuries the writ of empiricism has been spreading into the ancient domain of transcendentalist belief, slowly at the start but …
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