Sublime

The founders of Heterodox Academy, in the BBS paper, specifically recognized Merton’s 1942 and 1973 papers, in which he established norms for the scientific community known by the acronym CUDOS: “An ideologically balanced science that routinely resorted to adversarial collaborations to resolve empirical disputes would bear a striking resemblance to

Different communities develop different sets of behaviors for this purpose. By demonstrating a willingness to sacrifice for the community’s well-being, and deference to its authorities and customs, members of a community convince others that they are good types who can be depended on to cooperate for the long term.

Prior to the modern Western paradigm, other world views (such as the African Ubuntu philosophy – ‘I am because we are’) focused on the co-operative, cohesive side of man, which nineteenth-century Russian evolutionist Peter Kropotkin and more recently genome expert Matt Ridley confirmed is just as deep-rooted a part of human nature as individualisti

If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you’re bound to misunderstand it. You’ll see those beliefs as foolish delusions, perhaps even as parasites that exploit our brains for their own benefit. But if you take a Durkheimian approach to religion (focusing on belonging) and a Darwinian approach to morality (involvin

‘The Hobbesian image of humans, judging from the most common evidence, is empirically wrong,’ Collins asserts. ‘Humans are hardwired for […] solidarity; and this is what makes violence so difficult.’29

Rather than opposing “cultural” with “evolutionary” or “biological” explanations, researchers have now developed a rich body of work showing how natural selection, acting on genes, has shaped our psychology in a manner that generates nongenetic evolutionary processes capable of producing complex cultural adaptations. Culture, and cultural evolution

I can summarize a thousand years of moral philosophy in a few sentences: pre–Hobbes and Bentham, human nature was viewed as a battle between our desire to be good and our temptations to behave badly, and the gist of moral philosophy and religious faith was that we should treat each other as we want to be treated ourselves—the golden rule—and we sho