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Some Biologists Find an Urge in Human Nature to Help - review of Tomasello
biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human.
Genes That Make Us Human
Finding genes that have evolved in humans among our genome's 3 billion bases is no easy feat. But now, a team has pinpointed three genes that arose from noncoding DNA and may help make our species unique. Pennisi 2009 (901): 2 -- ScienceNOW
The Scope of Human Thought | Forum
Biologically, we resemble other animals, but mentally, we leave them in the dust. The scope of human thought is vast. Why are we so different?
Steven Pinker on the myth of violence
Steven Pinker charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given Iraq and Darfur, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. (Video on TED.com)
HOW DID HUMANS COME DOWN FROM THE TREES AND WHY DID NO ONE FOLLOW? By Vanessa Woods & Brian Hare
Edge: OUT OF OUR MINDS:
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Bonobos share more DNA (98.7 percent) with us than they do with gorillas
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A theory of mind allows for complex social behaviors, such as military strategies, and the formation of institutions, such as governments.
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Does evolution explain human nature?
This is the fifth in a series of conversations among leading scientists, scholars, and public figures about the "Big Questions." (A Templeton Conversation)
Purpose-Driven Life
Evolutionary thinking has lately expanded from the biological to the human world, first into the social sciences and recently into the humanities and the arts. Many people therefore now understand the human, and even human culture, as inextricably biological. But many others in the humanities—in this, at least, like religious believers who reject evolution outright—feel that a Darwinian view of life and a biological view of humanity can only deny human purpose and meaning. (Brian Boyd, The American Scholar)
Humaniqueness and the PFC
A nice summary of "humaniquness," or the cognitive talents that make homo sapiens such an unprecedented species (The Frontal Cortex)
Are humans intuitive dualists?
Mitch Hodge has just published an article questioning the hypothesis that human intuitive reasoning about other persons supposes a type of Cartesian mind (or soul)-body substance dualism (see Journal of Cognition and Culture 8, 2008), a hypothesis that has been defended by researchers such as Paul Bloom (see Descartes’ Baby). Hodge draws heavily on the fact that cross-cultural representations of the afterlife invoke embodied beings. Although I’m not convinced that afterlife conceptions provide the type of strong evidence supposed by Mitch Hodge, the article raises interesting conceptual and empirical questions about the nature of our intuitive understanding of other persons.
What is Our Fundamental Nature?
"Humans create and depend on emergent organizations beyond the individual- structures ranging from dyads and families to institutions and cultures. These emergent structures evolved hand in hand with genetic, neural and hormonal mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced. These higher organizations have long been apparent, but we are beginning to understand their neural, hormonal, and genetic substrates and consequences." | Psychology Today Blogs
The Science of Gossip: Why We Can't Stop Ourselves: Scientific American
* In recent years researchers have turned to the study of gossip—our predilection for talking about people who are not present. Why is news about others so irresistible?
* As it turns out, gossip serves a useful social function in bonding group members together. In the distant past, when humans lived in small bands and meeting strangers was a rare occurrence, gossip helped us survive and thrive.
* Our modern-day infatuation with celebrities reveals the ancient evolutionary psychology of gossip in sharp relief: anyone whom we see that often and know that well becomes socially important to us.
Observer review: Our Posthuman Future by Francis Fukuyama | Books | The Observer
Francis Fukuyama was wrong about history. His ideas on science in Our Posthuman Future aren't worth much more
A Dim View of a 'Posthuman Future' - New York Times
" If the human mind and body are shaped by a bunch of genes, as the decoding of the human genome seems to underscore, then biotechnologists will one day be able to change both and perhaps, in seeking to refine the imperfect human clay, will alter human nature.
That prospect should be worrying a lot more people, in the view of the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, because history's central question -- that of what kind of society best suits human needs -- has been settled only if human nature remains as it is, warts and all. "
In Defense of Posthuman Dignity
"From the transhumanist standpoint, there is no need to behave as if there were a deep moral difference between technological and other means of enhancing human lives. By defending posthuman dignity we promote a more inclusive and humane ethics, one that will embrace future technologically modified people as well as humans of the contemporary kind. We also remove a distortive double standard from the field of our moral vision, allowing us to perceive more clearly the opportunities that exist for further human progress."
Cyber Sapiens
"..We will no longer be Homo sapiens, but Cyber sapiens--a creature part digital and part biological that will have placed more distance between its DNA and the destinies they force upon us than any other animal ... a creature capable of steering our own evolution..."
Cognitive Evolution and the Definition of Human Nature (pdf)
Cognitive Evolution and the Definition of Human Nature. Philosophy of Science Monographs, Morris Foundation, Little Rock, Arkansas, 2000, 31pp.
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