However Much We Might Deplore The Profit

In The Past Two Decades Anthropologists Have Gathered Data On Life And Death In Pre-state Societies Rather Than Accepting The Warm And Fuzzy Stereotypes. What Did They Find? In A Nutshell: Hobbes Was Right, Rousseau Was Wrong.

Some People Think That Evolutionary Psychology Claims To Have Discovered That Human Nature Is Selfish And Wicked. But They Are Flattering The Researchers And Anyone Who Would Claim To Have Discovered The Opposite. No One Needs A Scientist To Measure Whether Humans Are Prone To Knavery. The Question Has Been Answered In The History Books, The Newspapers, The Ethnographic Record, And The Letters To Ann Landers. But People Treat It Like An Open Question, As If Someday Science Might Discover That It's All A Bad Dream And We Will Wake Up To Find That It Is Human Nature To Love One Another.

Cognitive Psychology Has Shown That The Mind Best Understands Facts When They Are Woven Into A Conceptual Fabric, Such As A Narrative, Mental Map, Or Intuitive Theory. Disconnected Facts In The Mind Are Like Unlinked Pages On The Web: They Might As Well Not Exist.

However Much We Might Deplore The Profit Motive, Or Consumerist Values, If Everyone Just Wants I-pods We Would Probably Be Better Off Than If They Wanted Class Revolution.

It's The Old Idea That The Process Of Evolution Is Some Push In The Direction Of Greater Complexity--in Particular Greater Intellectual Complexity. In One Twig Of The Tree Of Life, Namely Ours, Having A Big Brain Happened To Have Advantages. But That's Just What Worked For A Particular Species Of Primate 5 To 7 Million Years Ago.