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Tallis informs 60 people gathered in a Kent lecture hall that his talk will demolish two "pillars of unwisdom." The first, "neuromania," is the notion that to understand people you must peer into the "intracranial darkness" of their skulls with brain-scanning technology. The second, "Darwinitis," is the idea that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory can explain not just the origin of the human species—a claim Tallis enthusiastically accepts—but also the nature of human behavior and institutions.

Aping Mankind argues that neuroscientific approaches to things like love, wisdom, and beauty are flawed because you can't reduce the mind to brain activity alone.

Stephen Cave, a Berlin-based philosopher and writer who has called Aping Mankind "an important work," points out that most philosophers and scientists do in fact believe "that mind is just the product of certain brain activity, even if we do not currently know quite how." Tallis "does both the reader and these thinkers an injustice" by declaring that view "obviously" wrong,

Being around strangers can cause people stress and, in turn, make them less able to feel others' pain, new research suggests.

The study suggests that people's default response is to be empathetic toward others but that stress inhibits their ability to feel others' pain. The findings also underscore how deeply hardwired the fear of stranger danger is, in both mice and humans.

From an evolutionary standpoint, that makes sense, as every meeting with a stranger has a higher risk of resulting in violence

I imagine that physicists are similarly deluged with revelations about how to build a perpetual-motion machine or about the hitherto secret truth behind relativity. And so I didn’t view the arrival of “A New History of Life” with great enthusiasm.

subtitle breathlessly promises “radical new discoveries about the origins and evolution of life on earth,” while the jacket copy avers that “our current paradigm for understanding the history of life on Earth dates back to Charles Darwin’s time, yet scientific advances of the last few decades have radically reshaped that aging picture.”

authors Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink are genuine scientists—paleontologists, to be exact. And they can write.

there is a darker side to adolescence that, until now, was poorly understood: a surge during teenage years in anxiety and fearfulness. Largely because of a quirk of brain development, adolescents, on average, experience more anxiety and fear and have a harder time learning how not to be afraid than either children or adults.

the brain circuit for processing fear — the amygdala — is precocious and develops way ahead of the prefrontal cortex, the seat of reasoning and executive control. This means that adolescents have a brain that is wired with an enhanced capacity for fear and anxiety, but is relatively underdeveloped when it comes to calm reasoning.

the brain’s reward center, just like its fear circuit, matures earlier than the prefrontal cortex. That reward center drives much of teenagers’ risky behavior. This behavioral paradox also helps explain why adolescents are particularly prone to injury and trauma. The top three killers of teenagers are accidents, homicide and suicide.

What would a good theory of the brain actually look like?

Different kinds of sciences call for different kinds of theories. Physicists, for example, are searching for a “grand unified theory” that integrates gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces into a neat package of equations.

The living world is bursting with variety and unpredictable complexity, because biology is the product of historical accidents, with species solving problems based on happenstance that leads them down one evolutionary road rather than another.

the country’s two main political parties have “fundamental philosophical differences.” But what exactly does that mean?

In a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding.

Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Self-described libertarians generally also pride themselves on their high valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion.

At 44, I am old enough to remember when reconstruction was something you read about in history class, when a muffin top was something delicious you ate at the bakery, a six-pack was how you bought your beer, camel toe was something one might glimpse at the zoo, a Brazilian was someone from the largest country in South America and terms like thigh gap and bikini bridge would be met with blank looks.

Now, each year brings a new term for an unruly bit of body that women are expected to subdue through diet and exercise.

Girls’ and women’s lives matter. Their safety and health and their rights matter. Whether every inch of them looks like a magazine cover?That, my sisters, does not matter at all.

as Darwin himself often confessed, natural selection cannot work without prior variations in the organisms that will be selected or not for survival.

whatever “Darwinism” is, this is not a book about Darwinism. Nor is it a book about contemporary evolutionary theory or the “new synthesis” or the “extended synthesis.” It is rather a book about “chance” in Darwin’s writing. To that extent it must confront “Darwinism” more broadly, even in its recent and contemporary incarnations, if only to situate the problems it deals with in a proper context.

My view is that “Darwinism” had a single meaning to Darwin from beginning to end. Yes, changes were made in exposition, over and over again, and in one sense, as a philosophical platitude, one cannot change one’s way of saying something without changing what one says, and therefore what one is taken to mean.

We have clear directives about what is really worth our fear. Participants in the real parade of horrors include radical changes in the carbon cycle, the rate of species extinction, extreme weather, genetically modified food, institutional financial misconduct that puts our security at risk. The archive of very real menaces threatening us now is so full, it would seem we hardly know how to choose what to be scared of.

Except that we do choose, and what we choose are generally the ordinary fears such as heights, public speaking, insects, reptiles. They are all things that have about as much chance of harming us as the characters behind some of this season’s top trending scary costumes: zombies, werewolves and cast members from “Duck Dynasty.”

while we fear snakes, spiders, darkness, open spaces and closed spaces, we do not fear the more likely instruments of danger — knives, guns, cars, electrical sockets — because, he says, “our species has not been exposed to these lethal agents long enough in evolutionary time to have acquired the predisposing genes that ensure automatic avoidance.” Which is to say, fear, real fear, deep fear, the kind that changes our habits and actions, is not something on which we are likely to follow sensible instruction.

Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind.

Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability.

the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms:

specifically, why such beliefs even exist in the first place.

how early humans interacted with their natural environment

All of a sudden, you see the grasses in front of you rustling. What do you do? Do you stop and think about what might be causing the rustling (the wind or a lion, for example), or do you immediately take some kind of action?

Robert Wright sketches an answer early in “Why Buddhism Is True.” He settles on a credible blend that one might call Western Buddhism, a largely secular approach to life and its problems but not devoid of a spiritual dimension. The centerpiece of the approach is the practice of mindful meditation.

The goal of “Why Buddhism Is True” is ambitious: to demonstrate “that Buddhism’s diagnosis of the human predicament is fundamentally correct, and that its prescription is deeply valid and urgently important.”

It is reasonable to claim that Buddhism, with its focus on suffering, addresses critical aspects of the human predicament. It is also reasonable to suggest that the prescription it offers may be applicable and useful to resolve that predicament.

They’re finding that religion may, in fact, be a byproduct of the way our brains work, growing from cognitive tendencies to seek order from chaos, to anthropomorphize our environment and to believe the world around us was created for our use.

“Religion is one of the big ways that human societies have hit on as a solution to induce unrelated individuals to be nice to each other,” says Norenzayan.

“The problem is, the more you look inward toward your religious group and its claims of virtue, the less you look outward and the more distrustful you are of others,” he says.

Speaking of ideology versus reality, there is, it seems to me, a parallel on the left. That is the current attempt to deny the profound natural differences between men and women, and to assert, with a straight and usually angry face, that gender is in no way rooted in sex, and that sex is in no way rooted in biology.

This unscientific product of misandrist feminism and confused transgenderism is striding through the culture, and close to no one in the elite is prepared to resist it.

And so we have the establishment of gender-neutral birth certificates in Canada; and, in England, that lovely old phrase, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” is being removed from announcements on the Tube

Not only have Buddhist thinkers for millenniums been making very much the kinds of claims that Western philosophers and psychologists make — many of these claims are looking good in light of modern Western thought.

In fact, in some cases Buddhist thought anticipated Western thought, grasping things about the human mind, and its habitual misperception of reality, that modern psychology is only now coming to appreciate.

“Things exist but they are not real.” I agree with Gopnik that this sentence seems a bit hard to unpack. But if you go look at the book it is taken from, you’ll find that the author himself, Mu Soeng, does a good job of unpacking it.

A new report from the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health found that one in three teen girls and one in five teen boys have experienced new or worsening anxiety since March 2020.

You might be feeling tense about where things stand with your friends or perhaps you’re on edge about something else altogether: your family, your schoolwork, your future, the health of the planet.

But the discomfort of anxiety has a basic evolutionary function: to get us to tune into the fact that something’s not right.

Human decision-making shows systematic simplifications and deviations from the tenets of rationality (‘heuristics’) that may lead to suboptimal decisional outcomes (‘cognitive biases’). There are currently three prevailing theoretical perspectives on the origin of heuristics and cognitive biases: a cognitive-psychological, an ecological and an evolutionary perspective. However, these perspectives are mainly descriptive and none of them provides an overall explanatory framework for

the underlying mechanisms of cognitive biases. To enhance our understanding of cognitive heuristics and biases we propose a neural network framework for cognitive biases, which explains why our brain systematically tends to default to heuristic (‘Type 1’) decision making. We argue that many cognitive biases arise from intrinsic brain mechanisms that are fundamental for the working of biological neural networks. To substantiate our viewpoint, we discern and explain four basic neural network principles: (1) Association, (2) Compatibility, (3) Retainment, and (4) Focus. These principles are inherent to (all) neural networks which were originally optimized to perform concrete biological, perceptual, and motor functions. They form the basis for our inclinations to associate and combine (unrelated) information, to prioritize information that is compatible with our present state (such as knowledge, opinions, and expectations), to retain given information that sometimes could better be ignored, and to focus on dominant information while ignoring relevant information that is not directly activated. The supposed mechanisms are complementary and not mutually exclusive. For different cognitive biases they may all contribute in varying degrees to distortion of information. The present viewpoint not only complements the earlier three viewpoints, but also provides a unifying and binding framework for many cognitive bias phenomena.

The cognitive-psychological (or heuristics and biases) perspective (Evans, 2008; Kahneman and Klein, 2009) attributes cognitive biases to limitations in the available data and in the human information processing capacity (Simon, 1955; Broadbent, 1958; Kahneman, 1973, 2003; Norman and Bobrow, 1975)

In this book, Rosenberg elaborates further such arguments to take issue with historical narratives and, more generally, with the way in which we most pervasively make sense of people's actions and motivations through narratives.

His main contention is that such narratives are always wrong or, to put it differently, that they can't possibly be right.

Rosenberg argues that neuroscience itself, our only reliable method to study psychological capacities, shows that theory of mind's posits do not exist

This new activity of hunting started an evolutionary arms race. Over millions of years, both predators and prey evolved more complex bodies that could sense and move more effectively to catch or elude other creatures.

Eventually, some creatures evolved a command center to run those complex bodies. We call it a brain.

Your brain’s most important job isn’t thinking; it’s running the systems of your body to keep you alive and well. According to recent findings in neuroscience, even when your brain does produce conscious thoughts and feelings, they are more in service to the needs of managing your body than you realize.

Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality.

Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality.

the cerebral cortex constantly generates predictions on what will happen next, and that neurons in charge of sensory processing only encode the difference between our predictions and the actual reality.