Sublime

The Ape Inside Us, by Rubin M. Rabinowski.

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

Ideas do more than merely bond a group together. They justify that group’s expansion. Like the hungry amoeba, the superorganism is anxious to grow. It is anxious to feast on the flesh of its neighbors.

ape leaders developed the tendency to help the poor, the needy, and the fatherless millions of years before the Bible instructed ancient Israelites that they should not “mistreat any widow or fatherless child”

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The Sanctity/degradation foundation evolved initially in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivore’s dilemma, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. It includes the behavioral immune system, which can make us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people

What seems to be happening is that as species are forced to increase the size of their groups to cope with the particular demands of their environment, they create larger groups by, in effect, combining groups.

In a few remarkable pages of The Descent of Man, Darwin made the case for group selection, raised the principal objection to it, and then proposed a way around the objection: When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, s

If our actions are geared to increasing the odds that our personal genes or those of our near relatives will make it into the next generation, what is the reason for suicide’s existence? And what about the other bits of death-in-life built into the human psyche? Why do humans get depressed? Why do they sometimes feel like crawling off into a corner