The species of our Genus Homo eventually became predominant hunters because they refined instincts for justice as an “immune system” against individual dominance, which is a pathology for organic teamwork. Modern hunter-gatherers are egalitarian (Pringle, 2014), and justice (punishing dominance) has been observed in far-flung hunter-gatherers,not influenced by wealth-creating agricultural practices (Boehm, 1999). There have been …
The Last Reality Show Jan. 19th 2021: Sun sets on a bruised America
Election 2020 Roots of American Dynamism European Enlightenment∞Stone Age America American Dreaming
How parties view each other . . . —————– . . . and themselves
Like the shadows in Plato’s cave, the genes, chemistry, and cognitive computations inside the brain are diffuse reflections from the evolution of emotions and motivations “outside” in the theater of human minds interacting with human minds.
The proposal in this book that I am most adamant about is that justice is a collective human instinct (in addition to our individual ape instincts to dominate). Justice is not just something we dreamed up as Yuval Harari would have us believe in his book, Sapiens. Justice has been naturally selected over millions of …
I have been running this blog since 2012 with one blog/week until last Spring when I took a “leave of absence” to complete the final summary of the blog’s thinking in a short book, which is to bepublished soon. The central thesis is that justice is a collective human instinct that has evolved over the …
THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE and up-to-date lay book on the science of behavior is Stanford neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017). The book is an encyclopedic compendium of behavioral science, written with folksy, down-home idiom. Here he lays out evidence that the fundamental “default” of human social behavior …
The fundamental divide between right and left is the clash between the role of the individual vs. the role of the collective. The right wins this argument because, in a post-Darwinian world without religion, the very existence of a collective will is in question—it has been made an orphan in Darwin’s age bereft of evolutionary …
Collection of morphs
After drafting sections of an essay in the blog, it was finally published in the Montreal Review and can be seen by clicking here. This is the cover letter I sent: For many years the political right has implicitly drawn on the authority of Darwin’s paradigm of life as a struggle for fitness to support …
The “radical” conservative philosophy being introduced by the Trump administration is old hat to Darwinian evolutionists. This is the philosophical strain flowing from Nietzsche to social Darwinists through Ayn Rand into Paul Ryan. It supports the businessman’s belief that he is the winner of life’s competitive contest is like the alpha male in a troop …
A glaring weakness of the agenda of the political left is that social justice does not appear to be rooted in the flesh and blood of human nature. The two most influential thinkers on our attitudes about what makes us tick are Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud: we are ape-men who when psychoanalyzed are revealed …
The Blog’s “natural philosophy” of human evolution has many intellectual patrons. First is Carl Jung, whose studies of dreams and symbols revealed our collective unconscious. The Blog considers Jung’s collective unconscious in modern humans to be the submerged continent of the consciousness that for six-million years constituted the entire consciousness of our noble hominin ancestors. …
The boss of “Miracle Mover, Inc.” makes a deal with a client to move some furniture and then pays three employees to actually do the moving. These are two straightforward tit-for-tat transactions. But then, when the three guys actually get down to squeezing a large sofa through a small door, they shift into a behavior …
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.
Liberty is the fruit of justice. In order to make the flower stay in bloom, it is the plant that must be tended.
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.
The means by which dominance and submission between ape individuals metamorphosed into the single group structure of obedience to the authority of hominin groups.
In 1975, while working in a jail, I conceived that morality has been maintained for millions of years by means of justice exercised in groups.
