Saturday, November 30, 2024
Monday, November 25, 2024
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Is Human Nature Social or Selfish ?
Is Human Nature Social or Selfish ?
by Charles D. Brown
I recently had a chance to teach anthropology for the first time, after a school career with two anthropology degrees. One student asked "what does anthropology matter ? what difference does it make ?". Good , mature questions for a high school student.
One way that anthropology might help us in the here and now is to bring scientific and biological paleontological evidence, from the Stone Age 100,000's of years ago, to bear on the question of what is human nature today ? Is it human nature to be greedy and selfish like Wall Street billionaires ? Or is it human nature to share and "love thy neighbor as thyself" ?
_Sapiens_" means "wise" In Latin.
Homo sapiens (Latin: "wise man"(sic) ) is the scientific name for the human species. Homo is the human genus, which also includes Homo habilis, Homo Erectus, Homo sapiens Neanderthals and many other extinct species of hominin ; H. sapiens is the only surviving species of the Genus Homo. Modern humans are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, which differentiates us from Homo sapiens Neanderthal.
What is humans' unique nature ? What is culture-custom ?
For anthropology, culture-custom is the unique species characteristic of _homo sapiens_. In a sense, "culture-custom " is another word for "wisdom", from the notion that humans are the species _homo wise_. It is humans socially learned practices or behavior in the form of customs, language, traditions, beliefs, religion, spirituality that make us "wise" in so many ways, certainly clever and winners _as a species_ ( not just as a few "fit" Individuals) in the struggles and snuggles to survive as a species.
Since the advent of civilization, sometimes it's not so clear how wise our culture makes us. Therein lies the central drama of the history of the human species. Nonetheless, clearly in the Stone Age, our having culture-customs was a highly adaptive advantage over species that did not have culture-tradition-history . Stone tools made by design through culture-custom , etc, raising our species fitness. This is evidenced by _homo sapiens_ expanding in population and therefore migrating to an expanded area of living space across the earth , out of what is now Africa ( but not vacating Africa) to the other continents. Stone Age foraging and kinship organized societies were the mode of life for the vast majority of time of human species 'existence, 99% or more.
The first human societies had an extraordinarily high survival need to be able to rely on each other at levels of solidarity that we cannot even imagine. The intensity of the network of social connections of a band of 25 to 50 people living in that ecological food chain location would almost constitute a new level of organic organization and integrity above individual bodies; ancient kinship/culture systems were almost super-organic bodies; the human social group was an harmonious multi-individual Body, organism. The Individual human bodies, all of the Some Bodies , were very frail and weak relative to the field of predators they were escaping. Up-right posture made them slower runners, too , in sprints !
The dominance of the food chain that humans ultimately reached even in the Stone Age could be reached only by super-social , super internally-cooperative, super-intra-species harmony, because they had relatively_frail_ individual bodies, and needed each other's support. It is clear to me that natural selection picked hominin groups with policies of "love thy neighbor as thyself " and "charity" over those that might have derived principles of "selfishness and greed", if there were any in the Stone Age before Civilization. Institutionalized war would have 10172691_553935591381979_7829888138251878225_n.jpg been selected against through the whole Stone Age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq0XJCJ1Srw
Nat king cole, Nature Boy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq0XJCJ1Srw&feature=kp
Homo Communis
as an anthropologist I have proposed that our species name be changed to homo communis . Communism was the original human revolution 2.5 million years ago at the beginning of the Stone Age . Marx and Engels refer to it as “primitive communism.” Communism is our species nature .
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm .
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/05/culturally-inherited-adaptations-give.html
The first human societies had an extraordinarily high survival need to be able to rely on each other at levels of solidarity that we cannot even imagine. The intensity of the network of social connections of a band of 25 to 50 people living in the ecological food chain location would almost constitute a new level of organic organization and integrity above individual bodies; ancient kinship/culture systems as super-organic bodies; the human social group as harmonious multi-individual Body, organism. The Individual human bodies, all of the Some Bodies , were very frail and weak relative to the field of predators they were escaping. Up-right posture made them slower runners, too ! The dominance of the food chain that humans ultimately reached even in the Stone Age could be reached only by super-social , super internally-cooperative, super-intra-species harmony, because they had relatively_frail_ individual bodies, and needed each other's support. It is clear to me that natural selection picked hominid groups with policies of "love thy neighbor as thyself " and "charity" over those that might have derived principles of "selfishness and greed", if there were any in the Stone Age before Civilization. Institutionalized war would have been selected against .
https://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish-i.html
by Charles D. Brown
I recently had a chance to teach anthropology for the first time, after a school career with two anthropology degrees. One student asked "what does anthropology matter ? what difference does it make ?". Good , mature questions for a high school student.
One way that anthropology might help us in the here and now is to bring scientific and biological paleontological evidence, from the Stone Age 100,000's of years ago, to bear on the question of what is human nature today ? Is it human nature to be greedy and selfish like Wall Street billionaires ? Or is it human nature to share and "love thy neighbor as thyself" ?
_Sapiens_" means "wise" In Latin.
Homo sapiens (Latin: "wise man"(sic) ) is the scientific name for the human species. Homo is the human genus, which also includes Homo habilis, Homo Erectus, Homo sapiens Neanderthals and many other extinct species of hominin ; H. sapiens is the only surviving species of the Genus Homo. Modern humans are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, which differentiates us from Homo sapiens Neanderthal.
What is humans' unique nature ? What is culture-custom ?
For anthropology, culture-custom is the unique species characteristic of _homo sapiens_. In a sense, "culture-custom " is another word for "wisdom", from the notion that humans are the species _homo wise_. It is humans socially learned practices or behavior in the form of customs, language, traditions, beliefs, religion, spirituality that make us "wise" in so many ways, certainly clever and winners _as a species_ ( not just as a few "fit" Individuals) in the struggles and snuggles to survive as a species.
Since the advent of civilization, sometimes it's not so clear how wise our culture makes us. Therein lies the central drama of the history of the human species. Nonetheless, clearly in the Stone Age, our having culture-customs was a highly adaptive advantage over species that did not have culture-tradition-history . Stone tools made by design through culture-custom , etc, raising our species fitness. This is evidenced by _homo sapiens_ expanding in population and therefore migrating to an expanded area of living space across the earth , out of what is now Africa ( but not vacating Africa) to the other continents. Stone Age foraging and kinship organized societies were the mode of life for the vast majority of time of human species 'existence, 99% or more.
The first human societies had an extraordinarily high survival need to be able to rely on each other at levels of solidarity that we cannot even imagine. The intensity of the network of social connections of a band of 25 to 50 people living in that ecological food chain location would almost constitute a new level of organic organization and integrity above individual bodies; ancient kinship/culture systems were almost super-organic bodies; the human social group was an harmonious multi-individual Body, organism. The Individual human bodies, all of the Some Bodies , were very frail and weak relative to the field of predators they were escaping. Up-right posture made them slower runners, too , in sprints !
The dominance of the food chain that humans ultimately reached even in the Stone Age could be reached only by super-social , super internally-cooperative, super-intra-species harmony, because they had relatively_frail_ individual bodies, and needed each other's support. It is clear to me that natural selection picked hominin groups with policies of "love thy neighbor as thyself " and "charity" over those that might have derived principles of "selfishness and greed", if there were any in the Stone Age before Civilization. Institutionalized war would have 10172691_553935591381979_7829888138251878225_n.jpg been selected against through the whole Stone Age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq0XJCJ1Srw
as an anthropologist I have proposed that our species name be changed to homo communis . Communism was the original human revolution 2.5 million years ago at the beginning of the Stone Age . Marx and Engels refer to it as “primitive communism.” Communism is our species nature .
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm .
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/05/culturally-inherited-adaptations-give.html
The first human societies had an extraordinarily high survival need to be able to rely on each other at levels of solidarity that we cannot even imagine. The intensity of the network of social connections of a band of 25 to 50 people living in the ecological food chain location would almost constitute a new level of organic organization and integrity above individual bodies; ancient kinship/culture systems as super-organic bodies; the human social group as harmonious multi-individual Body, organism. The Individual human bodies, all of the Some Bodies , were very frail and weak relative to the field of predators they were escaping. Up-right posture made them slower runners, too ! The dominance of the food chain that humans ultimately reached even in the Stone Age could be reached only by super-social , super internally-cooperative, super-intra-species harmony, because they had relatively_frail_ individual bodies, and needed each other's support. It is clear to me that natural selection picked hominid groups with policies of "love thy neighbor as thyself " and "charity" over those that might have derived principles of "selfishness and greed", if there were any in the Stone Age before Civilization. Institutionalized war would have been selected against .
https://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish-i.html
Thursday, August 8, 2024
Lecture 17 – Anthropology 152 – 11/21/22-Charles Brown
My hypothesis is that several parables at the beginning of the Jewish-Christian Bible and Muslim Koran in the Book of Genesis are ancient discoveries of several truths concerning the origin of human beings ; truths which have been discovered by anthropological science in both ethnology (cultural anthropology among living Stone Age Peoples) and paleo-anthropology (study of human evolution from ancient hominin fossils and artifacts from the Stone Age and the pre-Stone Age periods)
Essentially , the hypothesis concerns the story that the Garden of Eden has two trees: The Tree of Life and The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. “ Knowledge of Good and Evil” is reasonably interpreted as a system of Morals, Ethics, “Do’s and Don’ts”, Custom of Behavior , Rules of Peoples” Conduct or CULTURE. I infer from this that the human origin described _is_ the origin of Culture , in the same way that anthropology has found that Genus Homo’s origin is specifically in the origin of Culture ( and Language). So, anthropological evolutionists and Biblical Creationists might be seen to agree in a way.
The Tree of Life is the very same term that Charles Darwin used as a metaphor or parable for the portrayal of his theory that all life is related to all other life through common ancestor species out of which they evolved by way of Natural Selection . A Tree’s typical branching form is a way to portray the logic of Darwinian evolutionary phylogeny. _Furthermore_, I hypothesize, that the ancient authors of the Tree of Life parable , had discovered Darwin’s principles of evolutionary phylogeny ! They used the parable to express the same scientific truth that Darwin did !
Not only that: Tree logic is exactly category-classification logic of increasingly inclusive categories . This is a fundamental property of LANGUAGE. So , this part of the story or parables of human origin expresses that same idea as modern anthropological science’s discovery that Genus Homo ( the Stone Age) begins with LANGUAGE. Elsewhere in the Bible is expressed that idea that “In the Beginning was the Word,” which I would interpret as that same idea as human origin is in language.
A larger hypothesis I have is that the_ Alphabetically Written_ Bible is a recording of what at the time were Memorized and Orally presented Stories-Myths from the Stone Age of 100’s of thousands of years ( we have studied the Stone Age extensively in this class). Alphabetic Writing originates with so-called Civilization , approximately 6, 000 year ago simultaneously with origin of Male Supremacism, Private Property -Slavery and the State-Hierarchy-Military capturers and controllers of slaves.
And, hypothetically, this newly founded priesthood of alphabetic writers make some changes to the ancient stories. They found what I term Religion which is different than Stone Age Ancestor Veneration in order to have a culture -ideology that controls that slaves. Religion’s signal characteristic is GODS, defined as _immortal INDIVIDUALS_. Stone Age Ancestor Veneration recognized that Ancestor Generations were in fact DEAD, MORTAL. But , the Dead Generations attained a certain type of immortality by leaving the legacy of Culture and Language to future generations. This is Culture and Language as _Natural_ Soul or Spirit , Material Soul, _not_ super-natural or mystical soul. Language is a material thing or process in the form of spoken words and vibrations of air molecules or ink on paper. This material is what is” immortal” , able to be passed down through the generations because of DISPLACEMENT capacity of symbolic signs ; immortal in the sense that it survives that deaths of many people over the many generations.
Getting back to God in Genesis, I am hypothesizing that the originators of Religion transform/distort the Ancestors of Many Generations , _many _ Individual People who pass on Wisdom in Stories and Myths into one imaginary Individual , GOD. And the priests are the only one’s of knowledge of God’s Word.
The Ancestors in Dead Generations wanted their children and grandchildren to “eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” , learn their culture-moral system. The Religious Priests turned this into a disobedience of God as a basis for claiming that all “men” are born in sin ( and Eve, a woman, committed the first sin), and so must earn their living by the sweat of their brow. IN OTHER WORDS, WORK , LABOR, TOIL IN THEIR MASTERS’ FIELDS, in the newly originated large scale agriculture and animal husbandry of the newly arising so-called civilization. As opposed to the less toilsome foraging , hunting and gathering of wild food that was the way of making a living in the Stone Age ( in the Garden of Eden).
“God” as Dead Ancestors, as a father wanting children Adam and Eve to gain knowledge of Good and Evil, and become “GodS “ (plural) like the Dead Ancestors had been when they were alive with all the accumulated knowledge, wisdom, they had from earlier Dead Ancestors. In a later , Chapter of Genesis, Cain kills his brother Abel. However, God tells people not to take revenge on Cain. This is the same advice Darwin would give a species. Don’t start a revenge cycle as this would lower your species Darwinian fitness.
My hypothesis is that several parables at the beginning of the Jewish-Christian Bible and Muslim Koran in the Book of Genesis are ancient discoveries of several truths concerning the origin of human beings ; truths which have been discovered by anthropological science in both ethnology (cultural anthropology among living Stone Age Peoples) and paleo-anthropology (study of human evolution from ancient hominin fossils and artifacts from the Stone Age and the pre-Stone Age periods)
Essentially , the hypothesis concerns the story that the Garden of Eden has two trees: The Tree of Life and The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. “ Knowledge of Good and Evil” is reasonably interpreted as a system of Morals, Ethics, “Do’s and Don’ts”, Custom of Behavior , Rules of Peoples” Conduct or CULTURE. I infer from this that the human origin described _is_ the origin of Culture , in the same way that anthropology has found that Genus Homo’s origin is specifically in the origin of Culture ( and Language). So, anthropological evolutionists and Biblical Creationists might be seen to agree in a way.
The Tree of Life is the very same term that Charles Darwin used as a metaphor or parable for the portrayal of his theory that all life is related to all other life through common ancestor species out of which they evolved by way of Natural Selection . A Tree’s typical branching form is a way to portray the logic of Darwinian evolutionary phylogeny. _Furthermore_, I hypothesize, that the ancient authors of the Tree of Life parable , had discovered Darwin’s principles of evolutionary phylogeny ! They used the parable to express the same scientific truth that Darwin did !
Not only that: Tree logic is exactly category-classification logic of increasingly inclusive categories . This is a fundamental property of LANGUAGE. So , this part of the story or parables of human origin expresses that same idea as modern anthropological science’s discovery that Genus Homo ( the Stone Age) begins with LANGUAGE. Elsewhere in the Bible is expressed that idea that “In the Beginning was the Word,” which I would interpret as that same idea as human origin is in language.
A larger hypothesis I have is that the_ Alphabetically Written_ Bible is a recording of what at the time were Memorized and Orally presented Stories-Myths from the Stone Age of 100’s of thousands of years ( we have studied the Stone Age extensively in this class). Alphabetic Writing originates with so-called Civilization , approximately 6, 000 year ago simultaneously with origin of Male Supremacism, Private Property -Slavery and the State-Hierarchy-Military capturers and controllers of slaves.
And, hypothetically, this newly founded priesthood of alphabetic writers make some changes to the ancient stories. They found what I term Religion which is different than Stone Age Ancestor Veneration in order to have a culture -ideology that controls that slaves. Religion’s signal characteristic is GODS, defined as _immortal INDIVIDUALS_. Stone Age Ancestor Veneration recognized that Ancestor Generations were in fact DEAD, MORTAL. But , the Dead Generations attained a certain type of immortality by leaving the legacy of Culture and Language to future generations. This is Culture and Language as _Natural_ Soul or Spirit , Material Soul, _not_ super-natural or mystical soul. Language is a material thing or process in the form of spoken words and vibrations of air molecules or ink on paper. This material is what is” immortal” , able to be passed down through the generations because of DISPLACEMENT capacity of symbolic signs ; immortal in the sense that it survives that deaths of many people over the many generations.
Getting back to God in Genesis, I am hypothesizing that the originators of Religion transform/distort the Ancestors of Many Generations , _many _ Individual People who pass on Wisdom in Stories and Myths into one imaginary Individual , GOD. And the priests are the only one’s of knowledge of God’s Word.
The Ancestors in Dead Generations wanted their children and grandchildren to “eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” , learn their culture-moral system. The Religious Priests turned this into a disobedience of God as a basis for claiming that all “men” are born in sin ( and Eve, a woman, committed the first sin), and so must earn their living by the sweat of their brow. IN OTHER WORDS, WORK , LABOR, TOIL IN THEIR MASTERS’ FIELDS, in the newly originated large scale agriculture and animal husbandry of the newly arising so-called civilization. As opposed to the less toilsome foraging , hunting and gathering of wild food that was the way of making a living in the Stone Age ( in the Garden of Eden).
“God” as Dead Ancestors, as a father wanting children Adam and Eve to gain knowledge of Good and Evil, and become “GodS “ (plural) like the Dead Ancestors had been when they were alive with all the accumulated knowledge, wisdom, they had from earlier Dead Ancestors. In a later , Chapter of Genesis, Cain kills his brother Abel. However, God tells people not to take revenge on Cain. This is the same advice Darwin would give a species. Don’t start a revenge cycle as this would lower your species Darwinian fitness.
