Knowing my interest in human evolution, my son’s Texan mother-in-law gave me the brochure of an exhibit at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas that she visited, entitled “First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figurestone.” The brochure contained many pictures of beautifully rendered paleolithic hand axes as well as naturally formed sculptures that had been “framed” by …
The New York Times ran a story last week about “going flat” after breast surgery. With no idea of how it relates to such a decision, I thought it might be useful to frame-out one aspect of the evolution of human breasts according to the Blog’s two-mind paradigm. This one aspect concerns the fact that …
Why, after 6 million years of aversively motivated group selection for cooperative monogamy, did Homo sapiens all of a sudden evolve a highly goal-oriented inclination for sex and vanity?
What exactly is it about gold that drives us crazy?
As I have said several times in this blog, I decided that mania (the “up” part of bipolar disorder) is a disorder purely of our own species, because one of its main symptoms is the hyperactivity of grammatically complex speech, which is clearly only recently evolved. I then deduced that mania itself represents a pathologically …
Freud’s observation that humans are hypersexual has become such a cultural staple to have settled in as the sitcom-with-canned-laughter cash-cow. Although I had long been steeped in Darwin’s theories of sexual selection and sexual display, I hadn’t put the two together until I read Geoffrey Miller’s book, The Mating Mind (2000), the thesis of which …
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 …
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 …
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 …
