Why are we so VAIN?
The same vanity that makes the peacock so vigorously shake its tail has not just drawn us together to seed culture, it has proceeded to become the motive engine driving our economies,
The same vanity that makes the peacock so vigorously shake its tail has not just drawn us together to seed culture, it has proceeded to become the motive engine driving our economies,
The mentally ill should be honored for paying the price for our extraordinary mental capacities.
Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote, “Nothing can be more gentle than [the human] in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes, and . . . civilized man.” If Rousseau were around, he would probably identify apes as the stupid brutes, but I would extend his “civilized” qualifier to …
Excerpt from forthcoming edition of Ape Mind, Old Mind, New Mind: There is paleontological evidence for sexual selection. What makes early human fossils recognizably modern has less to do with brute survival than with the attractiveness of males and females for each other. Modern human adults are more gracile and childlike, which is the result …
Upon my son and daughter-in-law’s graduation from Harvard Medical School, the Dean gave the students three pieces of superb advice. The first two are fairly standard: (1) “Be kind” (2) “Listen to your patient” A quick and easy way to determine whether you have a good doctor in the first ten minutes of an appointment …
The megaliths at Brogdar, in the Orkney Islands stand as a clarion ring straight through to very heart of who we are.
Although not really caring about truth, the bullshit artist requires a sensitivity to the variable tensile strength (stretchability) of truth (particularly about oneself) with each and every audience.
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.
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?
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 …
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 …
