Born Expecting the Pleistocene: Psychology and the Problem of Civilization

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Publisher : Lulu.com
ISBN 13 : 0615608620
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (156 download)

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Book Synopsis Born Expecting the Pleistocene: Psychology and the Problem of Civilization by : Mark Seely

Download or read book Born Expecting the Pleistocene: Psychology and the Problem of Civilization written by Mark Seely and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anarcho-primitivism meets psychological science to provide a unique perspective on the mismatch between our evolved human nature and the demands of life in a global industrial civilization. Our sophisticated psychological systems reflect a finely tuned response to more than two million years of life in small, broadly egalitarian foraging bands. Civilization represents a catastrophic disruption of this response, redirecting our natural proclivities in the service of a planet-devouring machine. But all is not lost. The very elements of our psychology that keep us yoked to civilization's drivetrain are also the source of our potential liberation, lynchpins that can be released as we work to reclaim our freedom.

Anarchist by Design: Technology and Human Nature

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Publisher : Lulu.com
ISBN 13 : 0989233715
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (892 download)

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Book Synopsis Anarchist by Design: Technology and Human Nature by : Mark Seely

Download or read book Anarchist by Design: Technology and Human Nature written by Mark Seely and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology lies at the heart of the issue. The technological order—the expanding web of physical technologies and bureaucratic systems of control that we call global civilization—exists despite our evolutionary preparation for a distinctly different kind of society: a society of near equals in which participation is voluntary. Anarchy—society founded on organic and direct relations with others, unmediated by artificial systems of power and authority—is the natural and preferred social state for human beings. Anarchist by Design promotes the intentional dismantling of technological society, not merely to provide relief from the corrosive effects it has on individual freedom, and not to be replaced by something else, but in order to allow natural modes of social organization—underwritten by evolved psychological systems that continue to limp along beneath the surface, deformed, repressed, and misdirected—to have healthy and unfettered expression.

Adapting Minds

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Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 0262524600
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Adapting Minds by : David J. Buller

Download or read book Adapting Minds written by David J. Buller and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2006-02-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was human nature designed by natural selection in the Pleistocene epoch? The dominant view in evolutionary psychology holds that it was—that our psychological adaptations were designed tens of thousands of years ago to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this provocative and lively book, David Buller examines in detail the major claims of evolutionary psychology—the paradigm popularized by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate and by David Buss in The Evolution of Desire—and rejects them all. This does not mean that we cannot apply evolutionary theory to human psychology, says Buller, but that the conventional wisdom in evolutionary psychology is misguided. Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the mind, figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve them. In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinizes several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicized "discoveries," including "discriminative parental solicitude" (the idea that stepparents abuse their stepchildren at a higher rate than genetic parents abuse their biological children). Drawing on a wide range of empirical research, including his own large-scale study of child abuse, he shows that none is actually supported by the evidence. Buller argues that our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene, but, like the immune system, are continually adapting, over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. We must move beyond the reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology to reach an accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution. When we do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself.

Civilization and Its Discontents

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 70 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (115 download)

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Book Synopsis Civilization and Its Discontents by : Sigmund Freud

Download or read book Civilization and Its Discontents written by Sigmund Freud and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

The Recursive Mind

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Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400851491
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis The Recursive Mind by : Michael C. Corballis

Download or read book The Recursive Mind written by Michael C. Corballis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-27 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking theory of what makes the human mind unique The Recursive Mind challenges the commonly held notion that language is what makes us uniquely human. In this compelling book, Michael Corballis argues that what distinguishes us in the animal kingdom is our capacity for recursion: the ability to embed our thoughts within other thoughts. "I think, therefore I am," is an example of recursive thought, because the thinker has inserted himself into his thought. Recursion enables us to conceive of our own minds and the minds of others. It also gives us the power of mental "time travel"—the ability to insert past experiences, or imagined future ones, into present consciousness. Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, animal behavior, anthropology, and archaeology, Corballis demonstrates how these recursive structures led to the emergence of language and speech, which ultimately enabled us to share our thoughts, plan with others, and reshape our environment to better reflect our creative imaginations. He shows how the recursive mind was critical to survival in the harsh conditions of the Pleistocene epoch, and how it evolved to foster social cohesion. He traces how language itself adapted to recursive thinking, first through manual gestures, then later, with the emergence of Homo sapiens, vocally. Toolmaking and manufacture arose, and the application of recursive principles to these activities in turn led to the complexities of human civilization, the extinction of fellow large-brained hominins like the Neandertals, and our species' supremacy over the physical world.

America Before

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Publisher : St. Martin's Press
ISBN 13 : 1250153743
Total Pages : 486 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis America Before by : Graham Hancock

Download or read book America Before written by Graham Hancock and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Instant New York Times Bestseller! Was an advanced civilization lost to history in the global cataclysm that ended the last Ice Age? Graham Hancock, the internationally bestselling author, has made it his life's work to find out--and in America Before, he draws on the latest archaeological and DNA evidence to bring his quest to a stunning conclusion. We’ve been taught that North and South America were empty of humans until around 13,000 years ago – amongst the last great landmasses on earth to have been settled by our ancestors. But new discoveries have radically reshaped this long-established picture and we know now that the Americas were first peopled more than 130,000 years ago – many tens of thousands of years before human settlements became established elsewhere. Hancock's research takes us on a series of journeys and encounters with the scientists responsible for the recent extraordinary breakthroughs. In the process, from the Mississippi Valley to the Amazon rainforest, he reveals that ancient "New World" cultures share a legacy of advanced scientific knowledge and sophisticated spiritual beliefs with supposedly unconnected "Old World" cultures. Have archaeologists focused for too long only on the "Old World" in their search for the origins of civilization while failing to consider the revolutionary possibility that those origins might in fact be found in the "New World"? America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization is the culmination of everything that millions of readers have loved in Hancock's body of work over the past decades, namely a mind-dilating exploration of the mysteries of the past, amazing archaeological discoveries and profound implications for how we lead our lives today.

The Collapse of Complex Societies

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521386739
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (867 download)

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Book Synopsis The Collapse of Complex Societies by : Joseph Tainter

Download or read book The Collapse of Complex Societies written by Joseph Tainter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory.

Spent

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 9780670020621
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (26 download)

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Book Synopsis Spent by : Geoffrey Miller

Download or read book Spent written by Geoffrey Miller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how evolutionary psychology has begun to identify the prehistoric origins of human behavior and discusses how those discoveries have influenced the way consumer spending is viewed and controlled by companies, retailers, and marketers.

Blindsight

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Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 1429955198
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis Blindsight by : Peter Watts

Download or read book Blindsight written by Peter Watts and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The Primate Origins of Human Nature

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Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0470147636
Total Pages : 546 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Primate Origins of Human Nature by : Carel P. Van Schaik

Download or read book The Primate Origins of Human Nature written by Carel P. Van Schaik and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Primate Origins of Human Nature (Volume 3 in The Foundations of Human Biology series) blends several elements from evolutionary biology as applied to primate behavioral ecology and primate psychology, classical physical anthropology and evolutionary psychology of humans. However, unlike similar books, it strives to define the human species relative to our living and extinct relatives, and thus highlights uniquely derived human features. The book features a truly multi-disciplinary, multi-theory, and comparative species approach to subjects not usually presented in textbooks focused on humans, such as the evolution of culture, life history, parenting, and social organization.

Against Civilization

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780966775808
Total Pages : 215 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (758 download)

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Book Synopsis Against Civilization by : John Zerzan

Download or read book Against Civilization written by John Zerzan and published by . This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

The 10,000 Year Explosion

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Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 0786727500
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (867 download)

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Book Synopsis The 10,000 Year Explosion by : Gregory Cochran

Download or read book The 10,000 Year Explosion written by Gregory Cochran and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2009-01-27 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Resistance to malaria. Blue eyes. Lactose tolerance. What do all of these traits have in common? Every one of them has emerged in the last 10,000 years. Scientists have long believed that the "great leap forward" that occurred some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago in Europe marked end of significant biological evolution in humans. In this stunningly original account of our evolutionary history, top scholars Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending reject this conventional wisdom and reveal that the human species has undergone a storm of genetic change much more recently. Human evolution in fact accelerated after civilization arose, they contend, and these ongoing changes have played a pivotal role in human history. They argue that biology explains the expansion of the Indo-Europeans, the European conquest of the Americas, and European Jews' rise to intellectual prominence. In each of these cases, the key was recent genetic change: adult milk tolerance in the early Indo-Europeans that allowed for a new way of life, increased disease resistance among the Europeans settling America, and new versions of neurological genes among European Jews. Ranging across subjects as diverse as human domestication, Neanderthal hybridization, and IQ tests, Cochran and Harpending's analysis demonstrates convincingly that human genetics have changed and can continue to change much more rapidly than scientists have previously believed. A provocative and fascinating new look at human evolution that turns conventional wisdom on its head, The 10,000 Year Explosion reveals the ongoing interplay between culture and biology in the making of the human race.

A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief

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Publisher : University of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520303415
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief by : Patrick Vinton Kirch

Download or read book A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief written by Patrick Vinton Kirch and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the origins of the Hawaiians and other Polynesians back to the shores of the South China Sea, archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch follows their voyages of discovery across the Pacific in this fascinating history of Hawaiian culture from about one thousand years ago. Combining more than four decades of his own research with Native Hawaiian oral traditions and the evidence of archaeology, Kirch puts a human face on the gradual rise to power of the Hawaiian god-kings, who by the late eighteenth century were locked in a series of wars for ultimate control of the entire archipelago. This lively, accessible chronicle works back from Captain James Cook’s encounter with the pristine kingdom in 1778, when the British explorers encountered an island civilization governed by rulers who could not be gazed upon by common people. Interweaving anecdotes from his own widespread travel and extensive archaeological investigations into the broader historical narrative, Kirch shows how the early Polynesian settlers of Hawai'i adapted to this new island landscape and created highly productive agricultural systems.

The Moth Snowstorm

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Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1681370417
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (813 download)

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Book Synopsis The Moth Snowstorm by : Michael McCarthy

Download or read book The Moth Snowstorm written by Michael McCarthy and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The moth snowstorm, a phenomenon Michael McCarthy remembers from his boyhood when moths “would pack a car’s headlight beams like snowflakes in a blizzard,” is a distant memory. Wildlife is being lost, not only in the wholesale extinctions of species but also in the dwindling of those species that still exist. The Moth Snowstorm is unlike any other book about climate change today; combining the personal with the polemical, it is a manifesto rooted in experience, a poignant memoir of the author’s first love: nature. McCarthy traces his adoration of the natural world to when he was seven, when the discovery of butterflies and birds brought sudden joy to a boy whose mother had just been hospitalized and whose family life was deteriorating. He goes on to record in painful detail the rapid dissolution of nature’s abundance in the intervening decades, and he proposes a radical solution to our current problem: that we each recognize in ourselves the capacity to love the natural world. Arguing that neither sustainable development nor ecosystem services have provided adequate defense against pollution, habitat destruction, species degradation, and climate change, McCarthy asks us to consider nature as an intrinsic good and an emotional and spiritual resource, capable of inspiring joy, wonder, and even love. An award-winning environmental journalist, McCarthy presents a clear, well-documented picture of what he calls “the great thinning” around the world, while interweaving the story of his own early discovery of the wilderness and a childhood saved by nature. Drawing on the truths of poets, the studies of scientists, and the author’s long experience in the field, The Moth Snowstorm is part elegy, part ode, and part argument, resulting in a passionate call to action.

Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0192840983
Total Pages : 161 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction by : Steven Elliott Grosby

Download or read book Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction written by Steven Elliott Grosby and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005-09-08 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, humanity has borne witness to the political and moral challenges that arise when people place national identity above allegiance to geo-political states or international communities. This book discusses the concept of nations and nationalism from social, philosophical, geological, theological and anthropological perspectives. It examines the subject through conflicts past and present, including recent conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East, rather than exclusively focusing on theory. Above all, this fascinating and comprehensive work clearly shows how feelings of nationalism are an inescapable part of being human.

The Human Instinct

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1476790280
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (767 download)

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Book Synopsis The Human Instinct by : Kenneth R. Miller

Download or read book The Human Instinct written by Kenneth R. Miller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of America’s best-known biologists, a revolutionary new way of thinking about evolution that shows “why, in light of our origins, humans are still special” (Edward J. Larson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evolution). Once we had a special place in the hierarchy of life on Earth—a place confirmed by the literature and traditions of every human tribe. But then the theory of evolution arrived to shake the tree of human understanding to its roots. To many of the most passionate advocates for Darwin’s theory, we are just one species among multitudes, no more significant than any other. Even our minds are not our own, they tell us, but living machines programmed for nothing but survival and reproduction. In The Human Instinct, Brown University biologist Kenneth R. Miller “confronts both lay and professional misconceptions about evolution” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), showing that while evolution explains how our bodies and brains were shaped, that heritage does not limit or predetermine human behavior. In fact, Miller argues in this “highly recommended” (Forbes) work that it is only thanks to evolution that we have the power to shape our destiny. Equal parts natural science and philosophy, The Human Instinct makes an “absorbing, lucid, and engaging…case that it was evolution that gave us our humanity” (Ursula Goodenough, professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis).

Civilized to Death

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Publisher : Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1451659113
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (516 download)

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Book Synopsis Civilized to Death by : Christopher Ryan

Download or read book Civilized to Death written by Christopher Ryan and published by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling coauthor of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which “progress” has perverted the way we live—how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die—in this “engaging, extensively documented, well-organized, and thought-provoking” (Booklist) book. Most of us have instinctive evidence the world is ending—balmy December days, face-to-face conversation replaced with heads-to-screens zomboidism, a world at constant war, a political system in disarray. We hear some myths and lies so frequently that they feel like truths: Civilization is humankind’s greatest accomplishment. Progress is undeniable. Count your blessings. You’re lucky to be alive here and now. Well, maybe we are and maybe we aren’t. Civilized to Death counters the idea that progress is inherently good, arguing that the “progress” defining our age is analogous to an advancing disease. Prehistoric life, of course, was not without serious dangers and disadvantages. Many babies died in infancy. A broken bone, infected wound, snakebite, or difficult pregnancy could be life-threatening. But ultimately, Christopher Ryan questions, were these pre-civilized dangers more murderous than modern scourges, such as car accidents, cancers, cardiovascular disease, and a technologically prolonged dying process? Civilized to Death “will make you see our so-called progress in a whole new light” (Book Riot) and adds to the timely conversation that “the way we have been living is no longer sustainable, at least as long as we want to the earth to outlive us” (Psychology Today). Ryan makes the claim that we should start looking backwards to find our way into a better future.