Author : Stephen Sanderson
Publisher : Westview Press
Page : 466 pages
File Size : 38,96 MB
Release : 2014-02-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0813349362
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.
Author : Alexandra Maryanski
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 11,85 MB
Release : 1992
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780804720021
The authors assert that traditional sociological theories of human nature and society do not pay sufficient attention to the evolution of "big-brained hominoids," resulting in assumptions about humans' propensity for "groupness" that go against the record of primate evolution. When this record is analyzed in detail, and is supplemented by a review of the social structures of contemporary apes and the basic types of human societies (hunter-gathering, horticultural, agrarian, and industrial), commonplace criticisms about the de-humanizing effects of industrial society appear overdrawn, if not downright incorrect. The book concludes that the mistakes in contemporary social theory - as well as much of general social commentary - stem from a failure to analyze humans as "big-brained" apes with certain phylogenetic tendencies. This failure is usually coupled with a willingness to romanticize societies of the past, notably horticultural and agrarian systems
Author : Harry Smit
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 16,66 MB
Release : 2014-04-03
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1107055199
Harry Smit examines the elements of current evolutionary theory and how they bear on the evolution of the human mind.
Author : Carel van Schaik
Publisher :
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 43,57 MB
Release : 2016-05-24
Category : Science
ISBN : 0465074707
"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.
Author : Ron Vannelli
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 26,18 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1461515459
Evolutionary Theory and Human Nature is an original, highly theoretical work dealing with the transition from genes to behavior using general principles of evolution, especially those of sexual selection. It seeks to develop a seamless transition from genes to human motivations as bio-electric brain processes (emotional-cognitive processes), to human nature propensities (various constellations of emotional-cognitive forces, desires and fears) to species typical patterns of behavior. This work covers two often antagonistic fields: biology and the social sciences. It should be of strong interest to anthropologists, sociologists, sociobiologists, psychobiologists and psychologists who are interested in the question of human nature influences on social behavior.
Author : Jonathan H. Turner
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 16,71 MB
Release : 2020-11-24
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1000213757
In this book, Jonathan H. Turner combines sociology, evolutionary biology, cladistic analysis from biology, and comparative neuroanatomy to examine human nature as inherited from common ancestors shared by humans and present-day great apes. Selection pressures altered this inherited legacy for the ancestors of humans—termed hominins for being bipedal—and forced greater organization than extant great apes when the hominins moved into open-country terrestrial habitats. The effects of these selection pressures increased hominin ancestors’ emotional capacities through greater social and group orientation. This shift, in turn, enabled further selection for a larger brain, articulated speech, and culture along the human line. Turner elaborates human nature as a series of overlapping complexes that are the outcome of the inherited legacy of great apes being fed through the transforming effects of a larger brain, speech, and culture. These complexes, he shows, can be understood as the cognitive complex, the psychological complex, the emotions complex, the interaction complex, and the community complex.
Author : Adrian Bejan
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 27,98 MB
Release : 2019-12-06
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 3030340090
The book begins with familiar designs found all around and inside us (such as the ‘trees’ of river basins, human lungs, blood and city traffic). It then shows how all flow systems are driven by power from natural engines everywhere, and how they are endlessly shaped because of freedom. Finally, Professor Bejan explains how people, like everything else that moves on earth, are driven by power derived from our “engines” that consume fuel and food, and that our movement dissipates the power completely and changes constantly for greater access, economies of scale, efficiency, innovation and life. Written for wide audiences of all ages, including readers interested in science, patterns in nature, similarity and non-uniformity, history and the future, and those just interested in having fun with ideas, the book shows how many “design change” concepts acquire a solid scientific footing and how they exist with the evolution of nature, society, technology and science.
Author : Peter Corning
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 46,21 MB
Release : 2011-04
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0226116271
We've been told, again and again, that life is unfair. But what if we're wrong simply to resign ourselves to this situation? Drawing on the evidence from our evolutionary history and the emergent science of human nature, this title shows that we have an innate sense of fairness.
Author : Paul R. Ehrlich
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 545 pages
File Size : 14,17 MB
Release : 2001-12-31
Category : Science
ISBN : 0142000531
Why do we behave the way we do? Biologist Paul Ehrlich suggests that although people share a common genetic code, these genes "do not shout commands at us...at the very most, they whisper suggestions." He argues that human nature is not so much result of genetic coding; rather, it is heavily influenced by cultural conditioning and environmental factors. With personal anecdotes, a well-written narrative, and clear examples, Human Natures is a major work of synthesis and scholarship as well as a valuable primer on genetics and evolution that makes complex scientific concepts accessible to lay readers.
Author : Douglas P. Fry
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 583 pages
File Size : 23,4 MB
Release : 2015-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0190232463
"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.
