. . . Justice is The Human Instinct Anthropologist Christopher Boehm has been a pioneer in documenting in nomadic hunter-gatherers their “deliberate use of social sanctioning to enforce political equality among fully adult males including ridicule, shunning, and even killing those with persistently selfish dominance behavior,” giving detailed examples from tribes on every continent. Why …
[Kindle version $5] The Sighting What was it like living in one of these early hominin groups? In my imagination, I picture becoming aware of a continuous chirping sound threading up from below while hiking on a promontory high above the East African savanna three million years ago. After lying down with my binoculars to …
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 …
The naturally and functionally “submissive” partner propels him or her into resentfully dominating the relationship.Similar to my experience treating the mental illnesses, the core emotional sickness of the reverberating resentment had to be wrestled to the ground first.
Could not the key to a simple understanding this underlying democratic leadership in baboons lie inside the relationship between the leader and the led?
Is self-domestication new with Homo sapiens, or does it underlie our entire Hominin Tribe
In Brian Hare’s book, “The Genius of Dogs,” he discovered that freshly domesticated foxes in Russia automatically have the cognitive abilities that only exist in dogs and humans.
In my psychiatric training, I felt the Freudian analysis that emotions are divided into id, comprised of ancient primate drives to dominate and the superego, representing the prohibitions of society was self-evident. Starting my career in a prison observing dominant-submissive relationships approaching the model of master and slave, I observed the extraordinary aptitude of a …
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 …
YOU AND I HAVE A LOT IN COMMON One of the core ideas to emerge with respect to the unique property of human language is the ability for a group of individuals to share a single intention. When an adult points out a toy to a child to share in the experience, something unique …
God creates by cohering things together into increasingly more complex forms. 1. God caused cosmic debris to fall together to create the earth (gravity). 2. God caused certain chemicals to be attracted to one another to create life, which is the gift of re-creation. 3. Each in its own time, God brought early forms …
So, prior to 6 million years ago, things were looking bad for us Apes. If the last common ancestor between us and chimpanzees, had anything like the chimpanzee social pattern, males were spending most of their time and energy competing in their hierarchies for females, and the females were left to fend for themselves …
Recall that Tim White’s team of Ardipithecus ramidus experts chose Owen Lovejoy to interpret that the mating system of this founding species of our hominid Family was monogamous. Recall also that this is reinforced by the finding that the mating systems of the founding species of all the other super-cooperative species besides us (insects) were …
Mental illnesses lift out into bas-relief segments of our normal emotional function that have been evolved in the successive eras of our six million year hominid legacy, as if placing them under a microscope and magnifying their fundamental elements. The anxiety disorders reveal that the source of their emanation is our social ecology. Separation …
