How changing our environments may have changed us. I started this project by asking how humans may have changed over the past 10,000 years, but satisfying answers proved elusive. Partly because, to know how we changed, we would have to know who we were before to compare with who we…
Tag: society
The 10,000 Year Problem Podcast Episode – Ways of Knowing
In this first installment of my ‘I’m Just Sayin” series I discuss the risks of putting all of our learning eggs in the single basket of science. In other words, I think it is dangerous to think we can only know things if we follow science. How did we know…
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The 10,000 Year Problem – Dr. Andrew Schmookler Podcast Interview
On Hierarchy, cooperation, and power “I have this idea . . . it blows me away. It changes the course of my life. And I think that if people saw it that way, it would change the way we operate on this planet.” – Dr. Andrew Schmookler The 10,000 Year…
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How Assholes Stay in Charge
The locking-in mechanisms The Honeymoon is Over Despite a paucity of evidence, I believe cooperation, reciprocal altruism, or some capacity for mutually beneficial social interactions got us through the bulk of human evolution. Many think these behaviors led to massive neurological advances, language, and the arts. Other interactions, including competition…
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Ancestral Ways of Knowing
How did we used to know things? Why We Need to Know Despite scarce evidence, many people speculate about what human life was like before recorded history. Archaeologists study bones and fragments of human worlds that came before. Anthropologists investigate groups, like villages or early civilizations. Geneticists examine DNA to…
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We Have It All Wrong
Humans will never outsmart nature The Shift Ten thousand years ago, humans experienced a significant shift. Something – some things – happened that drastically altered our evolutionary path. Many believe that a shift toward lootable wealth, generated by increased proficiency in agriculture, storage of surplus, and larger community size, marked…
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Reductionism, Individualism, and the Fall of the Human Species
Fellow humans, your shortsightedness is showing One of the downsides to human evolution is that we’re not very good at seeing things from outside our perspective. Simultaneously, we struggle to live in the moment, spending most of our time worrying about the past or the future. We are in our…
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A Codependency Manifesto
What loving yourself really means. We’ve all heard it. To love someone else, you have to love yourself first. I can’t tell you how many times this has been said to me in therapy. I even conducted a lengthy podcast interview series, and nearly every guest said the same thing. …
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Inventions Other Mother
Playfulness and curiosity in Natural Selection “Necessity is the mother of invention” While we don’t know who first said it, many people have. Surely you have heard this phrase, if not used it. This quote means that urgency induces creativity. When humans need something, we search harder for solutions. It…
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How Did I Get Here?
In the bottom of this hole Has it been that long? Have you ever gotten a glimpse of reality that disagreed with whatever truth you thought was real? I feel like I have been surrounded by darkness, gaslighting myself into believing it was the weather. The climate. Where I lived….