Sublime

Exhibit D: Evolution can be fast. Human evolution did not stop or slow down 50,000 years ago. It sped up. Gene-culture coevolution reached a fever pitch during the last 12,000 years. We can’t just examine modern-day hunter-gatherers and assume that they represent universal human nature as it was locked into place 50,000 years ago. Periods of massiv

The advantage she had of having roughly twelve concentrations across college made her into quite a pantomath, which was a word she learned when she’d flirted with concentrating in classics.

…a philosopher by training, I, too, am prone to regard reality as thin fodder for theorization. Yet as dull and distasteful as the facts may be, they make up the edifice on which principles are erected…

The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.

What did the dead Joan of Arc hear? Insight or delusion? Next week he’ll tell his undergrads about Durkheim, Foucault, crypto-normativity: How reason is just another weapon of control. How the invention of the reasonable, the acceptable, the sane, even the human, is greener and more recent than humans suspect.

Many neuroscientists are empiricists: together, with the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), they presume that the brain simply draws its