Descent Of Man Revisited

Big Movies and Other Cultural Products Have Evolutionary Roots
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130612133317.htm
June 12, 2013 — From Brad Pitt fighting zombies to Superman falling for Lois Lane, summer blockbuster season is upon us. But while Hollywood keeps trotting out new movies for the masses, plotlines barely change.
Epic battles, whirlwind romances, family feuds, heroic attempts to save the lives of strangers: these are stories guaranteed to grace the silver screen. According to new research from Concordia University, that’s not lazy scriptwriting, that’s evolutionary consumerism.
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May 31, 2013 |

If Apes Could Talk to Atheists: How Religious Life Has More to Do With Animal Instinct Than You’d Think
Frans De Waal’s new book, “The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates” hits some hot button issues.
http://www.alternet.org/books/bonobo-and-atheist-review?paging=off

This article at Alternet is a good moment to challenge Franz de Waal’s bad science, and, since he takes on the New Atheists, the confusion of the secular humanists also.
De Waals, like so many in the field of biology, lives in a Darwinian cocoon, and never really encounters the critiques of that theory, a theory so entrenched that scholars in the dozens embark on research careers based on false premises. It is not a plus in his book that he takes on the New Atheists, as I do, because his own assumptions aren’t very different, and, as with Dawkins, his views of religion are based on Darwinism, a pseudo-science. Mr. De Waals, Darwinism is a pseudo-science.

We have pointed to the fallacy of thinking that ‘religion’ arose as some kind of evolutionary adaption, with a similar statement about the evolution of morality. It is entirely possible that ‘religion’ in some sense has genetic correlates, a different statement from any claim as to its Darwinian evolution. We don’t know how morality emerged in man, homo sapiens, and it’s unproven to say that it evolves ‘upward’ from below rather than ‘downward’ from above. The question is simply ambiguous, we don’t know how it happened. It is part of the immense disservice done to science, and secularists, by Dawkins, and not only he, by creating a kind of cultic belief system out of Darwin’s theory. As late as the forties, pace Gore Vidal’s classic, academic dissent of Darwinism didn’t cause an eyeblink, but then the synthesis took hold. The theory of natural selection, Act II. The whole legacy of (Neo-) Darwinism has been based on a series of confusions, ultimately stretching back to the beginnings of Wallace’s theory (not Darwin’s), a theory he later rejected because it failed on the issue of human evolution, and morality.
It is entirely apt to conduct research on ‘moral behavior’ in bonobos. But we cannot assume that anything we find in the primates shows direct continuity with the human reality, a moral reality so complex that noone has been able to describe it, as Kant made clear in his attempts to do that. The evolution of man, we suspect, was NOT a directly continuous result of primate givens. But even so, the line from the earliest predecessors of man (who were not the same as the parallel Chimps) is hardly a clear result of anything we see in the earliest apes. There might well be direct strains of primordial similarity, for sure. But the overall result in man’s moral behavior is not really clarified by evolutionary psychology. It simply isn’t. It is something new in evolution. Where is the proof of Darwinian claims? There is none. We do not have a continuous chain of evidence for the emergence of human morality, and, most important, we don’t really know what precedents there were in homo erectus, set aside the chimps for a moment. The step to homo erectus was decisive, but still primitive. The step to homo sapiens closed the case, as it were. How did it happen that such limited research with bonobos could enter the debates over religion, let alone the debates between theists and atheists. [Read more →]

Chimpanzees Have Five Universal Personality Dimensions
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130603135521.htm
June 3, 2013 — While psychologists have long debated the core personality dimensions that define humanity, primate researchers have been working to uncover the defining personality traits for humankind’s closest living relative, the chimpanzee. New research, published in the June 3 issue of American Journal of Primatology provides strong support for the universal existence of five personality dimensions in chimpanzees: reactivity/undependability, dominance, openness, extraversion and agreeableness with a possible sixth factor, methodical, needing further investigation.


“Understanding chimpanzee personality has important theoretical and practical implications,” explained lead author Hani Freeman, postdoctoral fellow with the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at Lincoln Park Zoo. “From an academic standpoint, the findings can inform investigations into the evolution of personality. From a practical standpoint, caretakers of chimpanzees living in zoos or elsewhere can now tailor individualized care based on each animal’s personality thereby improving animal welfare.”

The study of chimpanzee personality is not novel; however, according to the authors, previous instruments designed to measure personality left a number of vital questions unanswered.

“Some personality scales used for chimpanzees were originally designed for another species. These ‘top-down’ approaches are susceptible to including traits that are not relevant for chimps, or fail to include all the relevant aspects of chimpanzee personality,” explained Freeman. “Another tactic, called a ‘bottom-up’ approach, derives traits specifically for chimpanzees without taking into account information from previous scales. This approach also has limitations as it impedes comparisons with findings in other studies and other species, which is essential if you want to use research on chimpanzees to better understand the evolution of human personality traits.”
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http://descentofmanrevisited.com/DMR_pdf/DMR_Chap_2.pdf
The buddha phenomenon and the incomprehension of darwinism
The evolution of consciousness is simply beyond the capacity of Darwinism and current science. Instead of acknowledging what they don’t know the attempt is made to deny the existence of complex consciousness…

The Buddha Phenomenon That close observation of historical facts might uncover some surprising indications of what is left out of Darwinism can be seen in the history of Indian religion. That Wallace was righter than he knew is obvious to any student of world religion. Man in his ordinary state is unaware of the potential of his ‘self-consciousness’, let alone able to produce a theory of its evolution. History shows the extreme antiquity of explorations of self-consciousness in the discovery of the famous cylinder seal possibly showing a meditating yogi from the period ca. -2000 (denied by some scholars) in a possible hybrid with Shiva mythology. That what we find in later Buddhism should be discovered much earlier was to be expected, and makes us suspect still earlier forms of such explorations stretching backwards into the Neolithic, or before.

Why Early Human Ancestors Took to Two Feet
May 24, 2013 — A new study by archaeologists at the University of York challenges evolutionary theories behind the development of our earliest ancestors from tree dwelling quadrupeds to upright bipeds capable of walking and scrambling.

The researchers say our upright gait may have its origins in the rugged landscape of East and South Africa which was shaped during the Pliocene epoch by volcanoes and shifting tectonic plates.

Hominins, our early forebears, would have been attracted to the terrain of rocky outcrops and gorges because it offered shelter and opportunities to trap prey. But it also required more upright scrambling and climbing gaits, prompting the emergence of bipedalism.

The York research challenges traditional hypotheses which suggest our early forebears were forced out of the trees and onto two feet when climate change reduced tree cover.
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