Download or read book The Primate Origins of Human Nature written by Carel P. Van Schaik and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Primate Origins of Human Nature (Volume 3 in The Foundations of Human Biology series) blends several elements from evolutionary biology as applied to primate behavioral ecology and primate psychology, classical physical anthropology and evolutionary psychology of humans. However, unlike similar books, it strives to define the human species relative to our living and extinct relatives, and thus highlights uniquely derived human features. The book features a truly multi-disciplinary, multi-theory, and comparative species approach to subjects not usually presented in textbooks focused on humans, such as the evolution of culture, life history, parenting, and social organization.
Download or read book The Origins of Human Nature written by David F. Bjorklund and published by Amer Psychological Assn. This book was released on 2002 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins of human nature offers readers the first book-length attempt to define the field of evolutionary developmental psychology -- the application of the principle of natural selection to explain contemporary human development. The authors point out that an evolutionary -- developmental perspective allows one to view gene -- environment interactions, the significance of individual differences, and the role of behavior and development in evolution in much greater depth. The authors also focus on how an evolutionary perspective can foster a better understanding of human development and how developmental processes may have influenced the course of human evolution. Of particular interest are chapters that explore factors influencing parenting and other aspects of family life; the role of play; and the interacting roles of an extended juvenile period, a big brain, and a complex social structure in human cognitive evolution. The authors present a hybrid approach to evolution and development, pointing out that though underlying assumptions held by evolutionary and developmental psychologists have been at odds, each field has much to offer the other.
Download or read book Biology Evolution and Human Nature written by Timothy H. Goldsmith and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2000-11-16 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses evolution as the unifying theme to trace the connections between levels of biological complexity from genes through nervous systems, animal societies, and human cultures. It examines the history of evolutionary theory from Darwin to the present, including: the impact of molecular biology and the emergence of evolutionary social theory.
Download or read book The Origin of Human Nature written by Albert Low and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an original way to integrate spiritual and scientific views of human evolution. This work offers an alternative to the way we think about our origins: random mutation (mechanistic neo-Darwinism), Genesis (God did it all personally), and Intelligent Design (God personally does what we can't otherwise account for).
Download or read book Beyond Evolution written by Anthony O'Hear and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1997-10-09 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthony O'Hear takes a stand against the fashion for explaining human behaviour in terms of evolution. He maintains, controversially, that while the theory of evolution is successful in explaining the development of the natural world in general, it is of limited value when applied to the human world. Because of our reflectiveness and our rationality we take on goals and ideals which cannot be justified in terms of survival-promotion or reproductive advantage. O'Hear examines the nature of human self-consciousness, and argues that evolutionary theory cannot give a satisfactory account of such distinctive facets of human life as the quest for knowledge, moral sense, and the appreciation of beauty; in these we transcend our biological origins. It is our rationality that allows each of us to go beyond not only our biological but also our cultural inheritance: as the author says in the Preface, 'we are prisoners neither of our genes nor of the ideas we encounter as we each make our personal and individual way through life'.
Download or read book Human Nature and the Evolution of Society written by Stephen Sanderson and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and human behavioral ecology, this introduction to human behavior and the organization of social life explores the evolutionary dynamics underlying social life.
Download or read book The Social Evolution of Human Nature written by Harry Smit and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harry Smit examines the elements of current evolutionary theory and how they bear on the evolution of the human mind.
Download or read book Essential Building Blocks of Human Nature written by Ulrich J. Frey and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-11-08 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand why we humans are as we are, it is necessary to look at the essential building blocks that comprise our nature. The foundations of this structure are our evolutionary origins as primates and our social roots. Upon these rest features such as our emotions, language and aesthetic preferences, with our self-perceptions, self-deceptions and thirst for knowledge right at the top. The unifying force holding these blocks together is evolutionary theory. Evolution provides a deeper understanding of human nature and, in particular, of the common roots of these different perspectives. To build a reliable and coherent model of man, leading authors from fields as diverse as primatology, anthropology, neurobiology and philosophy have joined forces to present essays each describing their own expert perspective. Together they provide a convincing and complete picture of our own human nature.
Download or read book The Good Book of Human Nature written by Carel van Schaik and published by . This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In The Good Book of Human Nature, evolutionary anthropologist Carel van Schaik and historian Kai Michel advance a new view of Homo sapiens' cultural evolution. The Bible, they argue, was written to make sense of the single greatest change in history: the transition from egalitarian hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. Religion arose as a strategy to cope with the unprecedented levels of epidemic disease, violence, inequality, and injustice that confronted us when we abandoned the bush--and which still confront us today, "--Amazon.com.
Download or read book Beyond Human Nature written by Jesse J. Prinz and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative, revelatory tour de force, Jesse Prinz reveals how the cultures we live in - not biology - determine how we think and feel. He examines all aspects of our behaviour, looking at everything from our intellects and emotions, to love and sex, morality and even madness. This book seeks to go beyond traditional debates of nature and nurture. He is not interested in finding universal laws but, rather, in understanding, explaining and celebrating our differences. Why do people raised in Western countries tend to see the trees before the forest, while people from East Asia see the forest before the trees? Why, in South East Asia, is there a common form of mental illness, unheard of in the West, in which people go into a trancelike state after being startled? Compared to Northerners, why are people in the American South more than twice as likely to kill someone over an argument? And, above all, just how malleable are we? Prinz shows that the vast diversity of our behaviour is not engrained. He picks up where biological explanations leave off. He tells us the human story.
Download or read book Hierarchy History and Human Nature written by Donald E. Brown and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Here is a book that I can strongly recommend for a variety of reasons. It is well written, it is scholarly, but its greatest appeal lies in the posing of an important question and in the offering of a satisfying (to this reviewer, at least) answer."ÑJournal of Historical Geography "This is an intriguing and stimulating study of historical differences in the indigenous historiography of parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe."ÑAmerican Anthropologist."
Download or read book War Peace and Human Nature written by Douglas P. Fry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-02 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The chapters in this book [posit] that humans clearly have the capacity to make war, but since war is absent in some cultures, it cannot be viewed as a human universal. And counter to frequent presumption, the actual archaeological record reveals the recent emergence of war. It does not typify the ancestral type of human society, the nomadic forager band, and contrary to widespread assumptions, there is little support for the idea that war is ancient or an evolved adaptation. Views of human nature as inherently warlike stem not from the facts but from cultural views embedded in Western thinking"--Amazon.com.
Download or read book The Chosen Primate written by Adam Kuper and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chosen Primate ends by looking forward to the next millennium, noting that our future depends on our response to another fundamental question: Will our culture, which has given us the means to adapt successfully to nature, ultimately destroy nature? In raising this question, Kuper shows that debates in anthropology are more than just academic disputes - they engage the major issues of our time.
Download or read book Conversations on Human Nature written by Agustín Fuentes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent empirical and philosophical research into the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, the origins of the mind/brain, and the development of human culture has sparked heated debates about what it means to be human and how knowledge about humans from the sciences and humanities should be understood. Conversations on Human Nature, featuring 20 interviews with leading scholars in biology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and theology, brings these debates to life for teachers, students, and general readers. The book-outlines the basic scientific, philosophical and theological issues involved in understanding human nature;-organizes material from the various disciplines under four broad headings: (1) evolution, brains and human nature; (2) biocultural human nature; (3) persons, minds and human nature, (4) religion, theology and human nature; -concludes with Fuentes and Visala's discussion of what researchers into human nature agree on, what they disagree on, and what we need to learn to resolve those differences.
Download or read book Adapting Minds written by David J. Buller and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006-02-17 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was human nature designed by natural selection in the Pleistocene epoch? The dominant view in evolutionary psychology holds that it was—that our psychological adaptations were designed tens of thousands of years ago to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this provocative and lively book, David Buller examines in detail the major claims of evolutionary psychology—the paradigm popularized by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate and by David Buss in The Evolution of Desire—and rejects them all. This does not mean that we cannot apply evolutionary theory to human psychology, says Buller, but that the conventional wisdom in evolutionary psychology is misguided. Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the mind, figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve them. In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinizes several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicized "discoveries," including "discriminative parental solicitude" (the idea that stepparents abuse their stepchildren at a higher rate than genetic parents abuse their biological children). Drawing on a wide range of empirical research, including his own large-scale study of child abuse, he shows that none is actually supported by the evidence. Buller argues that our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene, but, like the immune system, are continually adapting, over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. We must move beyond the reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology to reach an accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution. When we do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself.
Download or read book The Biological Roots of Human Nature written by Timothy H. Goldsmith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-10-20 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stimulating book, Goldsmith argues that biology has a great deal to say that should be of interest to social scientists, historians, philosophers, and humanists in general. He believes that anyone studying the social behavior of humans must take into consideration both proximate cause--the physiology, biochemistry, and social mechanisms of behavior--and ultimate cause--how the behavior came to exist in evolutionary time. Goldsmith, a neurobiologist, draws examples from neurobiology, psychology, and ethology (behavioral evolution). The result is a work that overcomes many of the misconceptions that have hindered the rich contributions the biological sciences have to offer concerning the evolution of human society, behavior, and sense of identity. Among the key topics addressed are the nature of biological explanation, the relationship between genes and behavior, those aspects of behavior most likely to respond to natural selection, the relationship between evolution and learning, and some probable modes of interaction between cultural and biological evolution. By re-examining the role of biological explanation in the domain of social development, the author has significantly advanced a more well-rounded view of human evolution and shed new light on the perennial question of what it means to be human. His book will appeal to biologists, social scientists, traditional humanists, and interested general readers.
Download or read book Ultrasocial written by John M. Gowdy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Society is an ultrasocial superorganism whose requirements take precedence over individuals. What does this mean for humanity's future?
