I came to an understanding that the secular progress in the history of our fallen species has been due the long evolved capacity for individuals to construct and subjugate themselves to rules of fairness in the form of secular law in ever expanding groups. Under the authority of law, political and economic competition has progressively …
Vital to dating a fossil is to be able to carefully evaluate the surrounding stratum in which the fossil is found which possibly could be accurately dated. Embedded within the symptoms of the manic phase of bipolar disorder is the equivalent of such a stratum, which is clearly of strictly Homo sapiens origin. One of …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed Ardi, is arguably the most significant fossil find in the history of paleoanthropology due to its completeness and antiquity – 4.4 M. years, just 1.6 M. years after the last common ancestor with Chimpanzees. The theoretician of the group, Owen Lovejoy hypothesized that the reduction in the size of the male canine …
While in my residency, Freudian psychoanalytic theory was still dominant. There are several cornerstones from my training that, through all the vicissitudes of my career, remained as foundations. First and foremost is the validity of the mind as a subject of study as opposed to the brain. This was difficult to maintain when psychiatry was …
