The social structure of humans was due to a decisive-and-then-stable shift in the level of selection: from the selection of individuals (for fitness) in apes to the selection associations between individuals (for fecundity & productivity) in humans.
The strengthening of across-group marital-family bonds has exerted a relentless “ground-level” cohesive force that has resulted in the capacity to cohabitate in ever larger groups-of-groups—which is our species root adaptive advantage, upon which all our cognitive and cultural achievements rest.
Ben Carson can be understood as an archetype of our “old-mind” in which dominance and submission in apes evolved into obedience to the sacred authority of justice that has sustained our bounty and fertility. When our own species arose 200,000 years ago, superimposed upon our six million year evolution since apes, we evolved the passionate desire to attain social admiration, traditionally known as vanity. No one—no one—is going to make the claim that Trump is not vain.
This alternative view of human nature is a deeper, richer, and far more noble narrative of our exclusively human legacy: that of an indomitable spirit possessed of a will for justice and sustained through the millennia by the bounty that it fosters.
Is self-domestication new with Homo sapiens, or does it underlie our entire Hominin Tribe
being conscious about being conscious I had been thinking about thinking from the very beginning. My original notion, drawn from my observations of prisoners, was that the internal dialogue of human thought consists of an internalized interaction between dominant and submissive mentalities. I continue to believe that thought is fundamentally the interaction between two different …
What exactly is it about gold that drives us crazy?
The author’s supposition that sexual selection was involved in hominid evolution is reinforced by the fact that it played a role in the evolutionary innovation of flight.
It was with great excitement that I arrived at the University of Michigan in 1988 to attend a meeting to organize and initiate the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. The meeting was put together by psychiatrist, Randolph Nesse, whose goal was and remains to bring the Darwinian revolution not only to psychiatry but to medicine …
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 …
In the current (September 21:1443) Science, it is reported that the previously accepted assumption that the Neandertals buried their dead has itself been disinterred and brought back into question. “A core issue in the debate is the criteria that should be used to define a deliberate burial, and how well they are fulfilled at the …
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 …
Without realizing it, 30 years ago, I was beginning to conceive of a novel form of group selection. It was only much later that I learned that the idea of group selection was essentially serving time in the academic penitentiary mostly because of its association with Nazism. This drama went completely over my head …
The larger question in this series of posts is why monotheistic religions fight so much. The short answer to that question is very simple. The monotheistic, Abrahamic religions have discovered the reality that all human power derives from a single, living Will usually called God. This force brought prosperity to the ancient peoples that walked …
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 …
In the last post, Alain de Botton in his book Religion for Atheists says “He finds it impossible to take faith in God seriously. He assumes that none of his educated readers could possibly believe in spooky ghosts in the sky.” I am sure that de Botton would find this cartoon amusing. It poses the question …
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 …
Mania is not usually thought of by itself because it is almost always followed by depression, hence the names Manic Depression or the current Bipolar Disorder. However, while the shutdown response is simultaneous with the underlying emotional hyperactivity in major depression, it is manifested serially in Bipolar Disorder. So, the manic part of this condition …
Let’s accept the premise, without understanding it exactly, that, by a mechanism similar to sexual selection, the dominance mentalities of 20-30 monogamously mated hominids began to be selected at the level of their group to select obedience to the essence of the Ten Commandments in all of their submissive mentalities. In addition to obedience to …
To me, Charles Darwin’s discovery of sexual selection rivals that of natural selection. In natural selection, the selecting is done totally by nature and change is rendered through chance mutation of genes. In sexual selection, a portion of the power to select is seized by one of nature’s creations, usually the female of a species, …
