Since my retirement 10 years ago, Ape Mind, Old Mind, New Mind has been a work in progress. The basic ideas arose from my knowledge of the internal experience of the major mental illnesses directly imparted to me by thousands of my patients in 35 years of practicing psychiatry. The “data” of these composite descriptions …
I have been re-editing my book, and thought that this key juncture might hold together on its own. As mentioned, [Richard] Dawkins popularized the concept that natural selection can proceed at the level of genes. For example, some insects will sacrifice themselves for several of their genetic relatives. This is because it is actually the …
You can quibble around the edges about his analysis (and painfully trite take on religion), but I think he is generally right just as I have been claiming in this blog: over the long haul, human history has been in the direction of greater justice accompanied by prosperity—resulting from the progressive coordination of our increasingly divided labor.
How E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins introduced me to the spiritual dimensions of evolution.
How E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins introduced me to the spiritual dimensions of evolution.
There is very little argument that the reason that Homo sapiens has become the most dominant species on earth is our extraordinary ability to cooperate—I would say coordinate—in their behavior towards mutual goals. The issue addressed in this blog is how this came about. The demonstration by William Hamilton of “kin selection” in which the …
Grasp in a single graphic 50 million years of human evolution into thousands of years into the future.
While I am on vacation, I am reposting some of my more popular past posts, such as this one on the roots of schizophrenia.
I had had glimmers of spiritual yearnings with a dreamy schoolboy’s love of Wordsworth and which returned when reading Kierkegaard and Jung that year in the World Trade Center when this all began; but all that had been dormant for years. However, concurrent with my purely intellectual ferment, there were several events that began to …
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 …
This is a complex FAQ, but a very important one because deep misunderstanding on this issue is a large reason for the hostility against religion. I am going to use E.O.Wilson as my philosophical foil to begin with because there are two important points on which we agree. First is that all human power …
I wish to be clear about the differences between Dr. Wilson’s vision of who we are based on his knowledge of ants and various other insects and my knowledge based on my direct observation of human emotions. First, as far as the “kin selection” debate, he dismisses the importance of William Hughes’ landmark finding …
Richard Dawkins in his brilliant book on evolution, The Geatest Show on Earth (2009,) he relegates the entire subject of group selection to one footnote, which follows: “The popular cunard about Hitler being inspired by Darwin comes partly from the fact that both Hitler and Darwin were impressed by something that everybody has known for …
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. …
This morning I read David Brooks’ review of a book by Alain de Botton entitled Religion for Atheists in which “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.” Brooks goes on to say that, “Instead, he …
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 …
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 …
The central thesis of this narrative of human evolution is quite simple. The distinguishing feature of our 6 million year old hominin Family from the beginning is the common heritage of evolution by a unique mechanism resulting from a rare and controversial form of natural selection that occurred at the level of small groups. I …
