Homo Sapiens Related Quotes

So, I keep thinking about the idea of secret identities. Do you ever feel locked into yourself? I'm not sure if I'm making sense here. I guess what I mean is that sometimes it seems like everyone knows who I am except me.

And then he grins back, and I’m giddy and breathless and kind of unraveled. And I didn’t sleep at all last night. Not even for a second. I’ve basically been picturing this moment for ten hours, and now that it’s here, I don’t have a clue what I’m supposed to say. Probably something awesome and witty and not school-related. Probably not: “Did you finish the chapter?

The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo Sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting, and fornicating?

An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth. All our relations. The process that brings anything to its current form—chemical, synthetic, technological, or otherwise—doesn’t make the product not a product of the living earth. Buildings, freeways, cars—are these not of the earth? Were they shipped in from Mars, the moon? Is it because they’re processed, manufactured, or that we handle them? Are we so different? Were we at one time not something else entirely, Homo sapiens, single-celled organisms, space dust, unidentifiable pre-bang quantum theory? Cities form in the same way as galaxies.

No existing form of anthropoid ape is even remotely related to the stock which has given rise to man.

Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism. First is the Copernican wound that removed Earth itself, man’s home world, from the center of the cosmos and indeed paved the way for that cosmos to burst open into a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces. Science made that decentering cut. The second wound is the Darwinian, which put Homo sapiens firmly in the world of other critters, all trying to make an earthly living and so evolving in relation to one another without the sureties of directional signposts that culminate in Man. Science inflicted that cruel cut too. The third wound is the Freudian, which posited an unconscious that undid the primacy of conscious processes, including the reason that comforted Man with his unique excellence, with dire consequences for teleology once again. Science seems to hold that blade too. I want to add a fourth wound, the informatic or cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that Great Divide as well.

If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8-or roughly 150. "The figure 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.

Relatively small changes in genes, hormones and neurons were enough to transform Homo erectus – who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives – into Homo sapiens, who produce spaceships and computers.

[D]umb evolutionary processes have dramatically amplified the intelligence in the human lineage even compared with our close relatives the great apes and our own humanoid ancestors; and there is no reason to suppose Homo sapiens to have reached the apex of cognitive effectiveness attainable in a biological system.

It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You

Since the biological distinctions between different groups of Homo sapiens are, in fact, negligible, biology can’t explain the intricacies of Indian society or American racial dynamics. We can only understand those phenomena by studying the events, circumstances, and power relations that transformed figments of imagination into cruel – and very real – social structures.

The gods, meanwhile, were given two related roles to play. Firstly, they explained what is so special about Sapiens and why humans should dominate and exploit all other organisms. [...] Secondly, the gods had to mediate between humans and the ecosystem.

From the ecological point of view an outbreak can be defined as an explosive increase in the abundance of a particular species that occurs over a relatively short period of time.” Then, in the same bland tone, he noted: “From this perspective, the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting.

Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal. And it is doubly important to remember our origins at a time when we seek to turn ourselves into gods. No investigation of our divine future can ignore our own animal past, or our relations with other animals – because the relationship between humans and animals is the best model we have for future relations between superhumans and humans.

These waves, predicted by Einstein, are ripples moving at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time, and are generated by severe gravitational disturbances, such as the collision of two black holes. And that’s exactly what was observed. The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

Homo sapiens, too, belongs to a family. This banal fact used to be one of history’s most closely guarded secrets. Homo sapiens long preferred to view itself as set apart from animals, an orphan bereft of family, lacking siblings or cousins, and, most importantly, without parents. But that’s just not the case. Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest.

One of the biggest shifts in the last decade of anthropology, one of the discoveries in the field that has changed everything, is the realization that we evolved as cooperative breeders. Bringing up kids in a nuclear family is a novelty, a blip on the screen of human family life. We never did child rearing alone, isolated and shut off from others, or with just one other person, the child’s father. It is arduous and anomalous and it’s not the way it “should” be. Indeed, for as long as we have been, we have relied on other females—kin and the kindly disposed—to help us raise our offspring. Mostly we lived as Nisa did—in rangy, multifamily bands that looked out for one another, took care of one another, and raised one another’s children. You still see it in parts of the Caribbean today, where any adult in a small town can tell any kid to toe the line, and does, and the kids listen. Or in Hawaii, where kids and parents alike depend on hanai relationships—aunties and uncles, indispensible honorary relations who take a real interest in an unrelated child’s well-being and education. No, it wasn’t fire or hunting or the heterosexual dyad that gave us a leg up, anthropologists now largely concur; it was our female Homo ancestors holding and handling and caring for and even nursing the babies of other females. That is in large part why Homo sapiens flourished and flourish still, while other early hominins and prehominins bit the dust. This shared history of interdependence, of tending and caring, might explain the unique capacity women have for deep friendship with other women. We have counted on one another for child care, sanity, and survival literally forever. The loss of your child weighs heavily on me in this web of connectedness, because he or she is a little bit my own.

And that’s exactly what was observed. The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

Even more importantly, there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twenty-somethings are much stronger than their elders. The typical plantation owner in Alabama in the mid-nineteenth century could have been wrestled to the ground in seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton fields. Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organized crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him. A guy who thinks that the way to take over the syndicate is to beat up the don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labor. This may reflect homo sapiens position in the food chain. If all that counted were raw physical abilities, sapiens would have found themselves on a middle rung of the ladder. But their mental and social skills placed them at the top. It is therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force. It is therefore hard to believe that the most influential and most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men's ability to physically coerce women.

It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating?

It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating? But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories. The

Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths. That is one good reason to study history. If the division into blacks and whites or Brahmins and Shudras was grounded in biological realities – that is, if Brahmins really had better brains than Shudras – biology would be sufficient for understanding human society. Since the biological distinctions between different groups of Homo sapiens are, in fact, negligible, biology can’t explain the intricacies of Indian society or American racial dynamics. We can only understand those phenomena by studying the events, circumstances, and power relations that transformed figments of imagination into cruel – and very real – social structures.

A modern example of this stunning knowledge of nature that Einstein has gifted us, comes from 2016, when gravitational waves were discovered by a specially designed observatory tuned for just this purpose.† These waves, predicted by Einstein, are ripples moving at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time, and are generated by severe gravitational disturbances, such as the collision of two black holes. And that’s exactly what was observed. The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating? However, fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans. Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, the large sea animals suffered relatively little from the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions. But many of them are on the brink of extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources. If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark.

Men cooperate with one another. The totality of interhuman relations engendered by such cooperation is called society. Society is not an entity in itself. It is an aspect of human action. It does not exist or live outside of the conduct of people. It is an orientation of human action. Society neither thinks nor acts. Individuais in thinking and acting constitute a complex of relations and facts that are called social relations and facts. The issue has been confused by an arithmetical metaphor. Is society, people asked, merely a sum of individuals or is it more than this and thereby an entity endowed with independent reality? The question is nonsensical. Society is neither the sum of individuais nor more nor less. Arithmetical concepts cannot be applied to the matter. Another confusion arises from the no less empty question whether society is—in logic and in time—anterior to individuais or not. The evolution of society and that of civilization were not two distinct processes but one and the same process. The biological passing of a species of primates beyond the levei of a mere animal existence and their transformation into primitive men implied already the development of the first rudiments of social cooperation. Homo sapiens appeared on the stage of earthly events neither as a solitary foodseeker nor as a member of a gregarious flock, but as a being consciously cooperating with other beings of his own kind. Only in cooperation with his fellows could he develop language, the indispensable tool of thinking. We cannot even imagine a reasonable being living in perfect isolation and not cooperating at least with members of his family, clan, or tribe. Man as man is necessarily a social animal. Some sort of cooperation is an essential characteristic of his nature. But awareness of this fact does not justify dealing with social relations as if they were something else than relations or with society as if it were an independent entity outside or above the actions of individual men. Finally there are the misconstructions caused by the organismic metaphor. We may compare society to a biological organism. The tertium comparationis is the fact that division of labor and cooperation exist among the various parts of a biological body as among the various members of society. But the biological evolution that resulted in the emergence of the structurefunction systems of plant and animal bodies was a purely physiological process in which no trace of a conscious activity on the part of the cells can be discovered. On the other hand, human society is an intellectual and spiritual phenomenon. In cooperating with their fellows, individuais do not divest themselves of their individuality. They retain the power to act antisocially, and often make use of it. Its place in the structure of the body is invariably assigned to each cell. But individuais spontaneously choose the way in which they integrate themselves into social cooperation. Men have ideas and seek chosen ends, while the cells and organs of the body lack such autonomy.

People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twentysomethings are much stronger than their elders. The typical plantation owner in Alabama in the mid-nineteenth century could have been wrestled to the ground in seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton fields. Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organised crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him. A guy who thinks that the way to take over the syndicate is to beat up the don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labour. This may reflect Homo sapiens’ position in the food chain. If all that counted were raw physical abilities, Sapiens would have found themselves on a middle rung of the ladder. But their mental and social skills placed them at the top. It is therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force. It is therefore hard to believe that the most influential and most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men’s ability physically to coerce women.

In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles and law books to keep order. 3A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline. A well-respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department. But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust. How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins. States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

The Tale of Human Evolution The subject most often brought up by advocates of the theory of evolution is the subject of the origin of man. The Darwinist claim holds that modern man evolved from ape-like creatures. During this alleged evolutionary process, which is supposed to have started 4-5 million years ago, some "transitional forms" between modern man and his ancestors are supposed to have existed. According to this completely imaginary scenario, four basic "categories" are listed: 1. Australopithecus 2. Homo habilis 3. Homo erectus 4. Homo sapiens Evolutionists call man's so-called first ape-like ancestors Australopithecus, which means "South African ape." These living beings are actually nothing but an old ape species that has become extinct. Extensive research done on various Australopithecus specimens by two world famous anatomists from England and the USA, namely, Lord Solly Zuckerman and Prof. Charles Oxnard, shows that these apes belonged to an ordinary ape species that became extinct and bore no resemblance to humans. Evolutionists classify the next stage of human evolution as "homo," that is "man." According to their claim, the living beings in the Homo series are more developed than Australopithecus. Evolutionists devise a fanciful evolution scheme by arranging different fossils of these creatures in a particular order. This scheme is imaginary because it has never been proved that there is an evolutionary relation between these different classes. Ernst Mayr, one of the twentieth century's most important evolutionists, contends in his book One Long Argument that "particularly historical [puzzles] such as the origin of life or of Homo sapiens, are extremely difficult and may even resist a final, satisfying explanation." By outlining the link chain as Australopithecus > Homo habilis > Homo erectus > Homo sapiens, evolutionists imply that each of these species is one another's ancestor. However, recent findings of paleoanthropologists have revealed that Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus lived at different parts of the world at the same time. Moreover, a certain segment of humans classified as Homo erectus have lived up until very modern times. Homo sapiens neandarthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) co-existed in the same region. This situation apparently indicates the invalidity of the claim that they are ancestors of one another. Stephen Jay Gould explained this deadlock of the theory of evolution although he was himself one of the leading advocates of evolution in the twentieth century: What has become of our ladder if there are three coexisting lineages of hominids (A. africanus, the robust australopithecines, and H. habilis), none clearly derived from another? Moreover, none of the three display any evolutionary trends during their tenure on earth. Put briefly, the scenario of human evolution, which is "upheld" with the help of various drawings of some "half ape, half human" creatures appearing in the media and course books, that is, frankly, by means of propaganda, is nothing but a tale with no scientific foundation. Lord Solly Zuckerman, one of the most famous and respected scientists in the U.K., who carried out research on this subject for years and studied Australopithecus fossils for 15 years, finally concluded, despite being an evolutionist himself, that there is, in fact, no such family tree branching out from ape-like creatures to man.

Homo sapiens, too, belongs to a family. This banal fact used to be one of history’s most closely guarded secrets. Homo sapiens long preferred to view itself as set apart from animals, an orphan bereft of family, lacking siblings or cousins, and most importantly, without parents. But that’s just not the case. Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labour. This may reflect Homo sapiens’ position in the food chain. If all that counted were raw physical abilities, Sapiens would have found themselves on a middle rung of the ladder. But their mental and social skills placed them at the top. It is therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force. It is therefore hard to believe that the most influential and most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men’s ability physically to coerce women.

Homo sapiens exhibits traits consistent with a long history of polygyny or monogamy, and a relative absence of sperm competition.

It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast.

The deepening chill that had started when mud buried the redwoods continues to the modern day. Like the Eocene’s climate, the temperature of the intervening years has staggered up and down. We owe the origin of our own species to this cooling trend. When Africa’s forests retreated in a particularly cold and dry spell, our prehumen ancestors strode into the emerging savannah and grasslands. Homo sapiens evolved from these apes of the open country, and all our species’ history has unfolded in relatively cold times. The calm that I feel as I survey the scenery around the Big Stump- open vistas of grasslands and tree copses, created by cool aridity- is perhaps a judgment of the landscape wired deep in my human mind. An affinity for savanna-like grasslands is one of the neurological quirks that we humans carried with us as we spread across the world. Another is the desire to collect curios, especially pieces of the past. We’re a storytelling species, so perhaps these artifacts are anchors and touchstones for the tales from which we find our reality.

We can now say this: the capacities that homo erectus and homo sapiens generically have in common - such that they may both be generically characterized as 'walking', 'eating', 'drinking', and 'playing' - must formally differ in the manner in which they are done in order for these respective pairs of sets of activities to belong to the very different forms of life that they do. The philosophical obstacles that stand in the way of such a vision of the human animal are considerable. If the wish to transpose Wittgenstein's point here into Boyle's Kantian idiom, then it may be put as follows: walking, eating, and drinking are not just parts of our material animal nature that can be brought into view apart from their relation to a form. If we seek to understand what is involved in learning to walk, eat, and drink as we do, this will require conceiving those activities under the aspect of their human form. Such forms of learning characterize 'initiation' into our form of life no less deeply than learning how to give orders, ask questions, tell stories, and chat. In relation to the concept of our form of life, not only do these capacities all stand at the same level, but more importantly: those in the one set would not be of the sort that characterize our form of life unless they were part and parcel of a single form of life that also involved those in the other. Our manner of walking, eating, drinking, and playing and our manner of giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, and chatting all partake of a single form. The form here in question figures in Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy as a very abstract logical (or, as he later prefers to say, grammatical) category - the category of a form of life.

It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

It could be expected that further investigations of Plastocyanin dimorphism would reveal new secrets related to photosynthesis – the most significant process, forming the biosphere as it appears, hence ensuring the existence of the animal world, as it also includes the highest form of the matter – the Homo sapiens.

both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language. It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating? However, fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

Homo sapiens, too, belongs to a family. This banal fact used to be one of history’s most closely guarded secrets. Homo sapiens long preferred to view itself as set apart from animals, an orphan who has no family, no cousins, and – most importantly – no parents. But that’s just not the case. Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our nearest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

[M]orality is not ‘‘something altogether new on the face of the Earth.’’ It is not an invention de novo. Homo sapiens, presumably like their extinct social ancestors, as well as certain closely related species, such as chimps and bonobos, possess instincts and emotions that are ‘‘protomoral,’’ by which I simply mean that we possess the germs, at least, of the virtues of sympathy, compassion, fidelity, and courage. There is no ‘‘skyhook" being imputed here. We didn’t create the relevant instincts and emotions. Natural selection did. We are endowed with these instincts and feelings thanks to a craning operation that began with unicellular organisms.

Hardin, G. (1982). "Discriminating Altruisms". Zygon. 17 (2): 163–186. "Universalism" is altruism practiced "without discrimination" of kinship, acquaintanceship, shared values, or propinquity in time or space… To people who accept the idea of biological evolution from amoeba to man, the vision of social evolution from egoism to universalism may seem plausible. In fact, however, the last step is impossible… Let us see why. In imagination, picture a world in which social evolution has gone no further than egoism or individualism. When familialism appears on the scene, what accounts for its persistence? It must be that the costs of the sacrifices individuals make for their relatives are more than paid for by the gains realized through family solidarity... The argument that accounts for the step to familialism serves equally well for each succeeding step--except for the last. Why the difference? Because the One World created by universalism has--by definition--no competitive base to support it… [Universalism] cannot survive in competition with discrimination." … "[W]e must not forget that for three billion years; biological evolution has been powered by discrimination. Even mere survival in the absence of evolutionary change depends on discrimination. If universalists now have their way, discrimination will be abandoned. Even the most modest impulse toward conservatism should cause us to question the wisdom of abandoning a principle that has worked so well for billions of years. It is a tragic irony that discrimination has produced a species (homo sapiens) that now proposes to abandon the principle responsible for its rise to greatness." It is to the advantage of non-Europeans, virtually all of whom retain their cohesion as distinctive, discriminating groups, to exploit the economic wealth and social order of the West, benefits many demonstrably cannot create for themselves. When this cohesive drive is placed in competition with self-sacrificing Western altruism, there can be only one outcome. In the near term, Europeans will be displaced by groups acting in their own self-interest. In the long run, biological destruction awaits us. Since those who displace us do not, by definition, maintain our moral standards -- for if they did, they would not be replacing us -- our flawed moral system will vanish with us.

The end product of all that evolution is that we are big-brained, moderately fat bipeds who reproduce relatively rapidly but take a long time to mature. We are also adapted to be physically active endurance athletes who regularly walk and run long distances and who frequently climb, dig, and carry things. We evolved to eat a diverse diet that includes fruits, tubers, wild game, seeds, nuts, and other foods that tend to be low in sugar, simple carbohydrates, and salt but high in protein, complex carbohydrates, fiber, and vitamins. Humans are also marvelously adapted to make and use tools, to communicate effectively, to cooperate intensively, to innovate, and to use culture to cope with a wide range of challenges. These extraordinary cultural capacities enabled Homo sapiens to spread rapidly across the planet and then, paradoxically, cease being hunter-gatherers.

Sewing is an enjoyable hobby that allows you to be creative and make a variety of items for yourself and others. At Clothingus.com, we offer a range of resources to help you learn how to sew, including easy projects and information about different sewing tools and their uses. Here are some interesting facts about sewing and related materials that may inspire you to try this useful craft: Cotton fabric can last for up to 100 years with proper care. In fact, cotton fabric has been found in many archaeological sites, indicating its longevity. Women's buttons are typically sewn onto the left side of a garment due to historical reasons. In the past, buttons were expensive, and only wealthy women with domestic help could afford them. To make it easier for the help to button up the garments, they were placed on the left side. Zippers were invented in 1893 and were initially used only on shoes and boots to make them easier to put on. Over time, they gained popularity and were used on other garments as well. The term "calico" refers to a type of cotton print that originated in the city of Calcutta, India. These hand-woven printed fabrics were made in the late 18th century and were named after the city. Buttons on sleeves were introduced by Napoleon Bonaparte. He wanted to prevent his soldiers from wiping their noses on their sleeves, so he ordered buttons to be sewn onto the ends of the sleeves. Sewing is believed to be one of the first skills that Homo sapiens learned. Archaeologists have found evidence of people sewing together fur, hide, skin, and bark for clothing dating back to 25,000 years ago. Early sewing needles were made of bone and ivory, with metal needles being developed later in human history. By the 20th century, more than 4000 different types of sewing machines had been invented. However, only those that made sewing simple, fun, and easy survived over time. If you're interested in learning more about sewing, visit Clothingus.com for lessons and projects that can help you build a solid foundation in this skill. Whether you're a beginner or have some experience, we have something for you. Visit Clothingus.com now.

The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

To avoid a misconception, it must be clarified that a world of steadily increasing wealth by no means ends human competition, and certainly does not bring about ‘brotherly love’ on earth. It is true that, when the most pressing human needs, the basic levels of what one author has described as the ‘pyramid of needs’, are met at a comfortable enough level -even more of less guaranteed- the impulse to use aggression to satisfy them weakens considerably. Studies indicate that people become more risk averse. Yet, as already explained in this book, human desires are open-ended, because people struggle to improve their relative position vis-à-vis others even in a situation of growing plenty.

if you tidied up a Homo sapiens woman or man from 200,000 years ago, gave them a haircut and dressed them in twenty-first-century clothes, they would not look out of place in any city in the world today. There’s a conundrum in that stasis. Though we may not look different, humans did change, and profoundly. There’s debate about when this transition occurred, but by 45,000 years ago, something had happened. Many scientists think that it was a sudden change – sudden in evolutionary terms means hundreds of generations and dozens of centuries, rather than a thunderbolt. We don’t quite have the language to relate to the timescales involved in such transitions. But what we can observe from the archaeological record is that we see the emergence and accumulation of a number of behaviours that are associated with modern humans, and there was a time before that where we see fewer or none of them. Given how long life has existed on Earth, this switch happened relatively in a heartbeat.

Remember that for millions of years natural selection favored women who devoted whatever extra energy they had toward reproduction, partly through the action of reproductive hormones such as estrogen. Natural selection, however, never geared women's bodies for coping with long-term surfeits of energy, estrogen, and other related hormones. As a result, women today are very different and vastly more at risk of developing cancer than mothers from long ago because their bodies are still functioning as they evolved to have as many surviving children as possible.

In many ways, our consciousness is a trainer. A large part of its function is to train the unconscious to do things that would be impossible if the unconscious were directed purely by instinct. Animals can never change their basic instinctual repertoire, which is why all animals belong to narrow evolutionary niches. Humans, by contrast, can train themselves to do almost anything. That’s because they are conscious. With consciousness, they can plan new activities entirely unknown to instinct. That’s why humans escaped from their original niche and became the masters of the earth, able to dominate the niches of all other species. Consciousness overcomes instinct. That’s the point of consciousness. If we couldn’t break from instinct, we would still be living in the trees, or in caves, and scarcely be any different from apes. Consciousness is the greatest power in the animal universe, because it can allow any animal that becomes conscious to transform its destiny. Only humans have. Why did Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) go extinct and Homo sapiens didn’t? Was it because the latter became conscious and the former didn’t? The latter were able to solve problems that the former could not. Leibniz said, “… it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God.” You cannot do systematic reasoning unless you have a mind space in which to conduct it. You need a space where you can deal with relations of ideas, truths of reason, universals, holism, coherence, pure logic, and so on.

What could be more apt for enlightenment than to return to our earlier evolutionary home in the trees? Perhaps at the dawn of Homo sapiens and even before, with our ancestral relatives, some beings looked around at teeming life and upwards, above the canopy – to the silvery stars – with a sense of wonder, full of longing for the shining universe and a feeling of belonging on Earth.

Cizek had used art as the point of entry of his thinking into a whole new world of education—an avenue that had never occurred to me. He realized that children by nature are capable of real, indeed often great, art; that artistic activity is natural for them; and that adult interference in the natural development of children as artists was detrimental to that development. From that starting point, he made a leap into the entire realm of education and child development, concluding that the natural, unhindered growth of children enables them to reach their full potential as human beings, and that adult interference in general is more of a liability than an asset in this process of growth. That leap, from art to all domains of maturation, was an intuitive one for Cizek and his followers. It was not until I read the article referred to in the opening paragraph of this section that I not only gained an understanding of the real basis for Cizek’s intuitive leap, but I also achieved a new and enriching perspective on the nature of education, one that I had hitherto hardly noticed. The key is the observation that certain activities are universal, transcultural, and therefore related to the very essence of being a human. Even more significant and telling—and here once again Cizek hit upon the truth, albeit not consciously—is the fact that these same activities are engaged in by children from the earliest age, and therefore are not, indeed cannot be, the products of sociocultural influences. This places these activities in the realm of biological evolution rather than the realm of cultural history.50 And because these three activities—making music, decorating things, and talking—are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, they must represent in and of themselves an important aspect of the exalted place humans occupy in the natural world. In other words, these activities not only represent the outcome of evolution, but they also represent important features that account for the specific place that the Homo sapiens species occupies in the natural order. To allow children—and indeed adults—to engage in these three activities to their heart’s desire is to allow them to realize their fullest potential as human beings. External interference in their exercise, although perhaps sometimes justifiable for social reasons (man is, after all, a social animal too, another aspect of evolution), always involves some diminishing of their ability to become what they by nature are inclined to be. Once this is realized, it is almost impossible to comprehend the enthusiasm with which educators and child development specialists advocate systems for coercing children, against their clear inclination and will, to curtail these activities in favor of an externally imposed adult agenda. Although there might have been some economic justification for such curtailment in the industrial age, there is no longer the slightest pretext of an advantage gained through the suppression of the natural, evolved behavior of children. In

La primauté de l’intention divine — donc du message — dans l’ordre des apparences, implique une conséquence fort paradoxale, mais néanmoins pertinente, à savoir l’existence d’une « double réalité » qui fait penser à la « double vérité » des scolastiques. C’est-à-dire qu'il faut distinguer, dans certains cas, entre une « réalité de fait » et une « réalité d’apparence » : que la terre soit ronde et qu’elle tourne autour du soleil, c’est un fait, mais qu’elle soit plate et que le soleil voyage d'un horizon à l’autre, n’en est pas moins, dans l’intention divine, une réalité pour nous ; sans quoi l’expérience de l’homme — créature centrale et partant « omnisciente » — ne se bornerait pas, a priori et « naturellement », à ces constatations physiquement illusoires mais symboliquement pleines de sens. Encore que l’illusion physique soit relative, à un certain point de vue, car la terre, pour l’homme, est incontestablement faite de régions plates dont seulement la somme — imperceptible aux créatures terrestres — constitue une sphère ; si bien qu’on devrait dire que la terre est plate et ronde à la fois. Quant au symbolisme traditionnel, il implique une portée morale, ce qui nous permet de conclure que l’homme n’a droit, en principe et a priori, qu’à une connaissance qu’il supporte, c’est-à-dire qu’il est capable d’assimiler ; donc d’intégrer dans la connaissance totale et spirituelle qu’il est censé posséder en sa qualité d’homo sapiens (19)". 19. Incontestablement, la science moderne regorge de connaissances, mais la preuve est faite que l’homme ne les supporte pas, ni intellectuellement ni moralement. Ce n’est pas pour rien que les Écritures sacrées sont volontiers aussi naïves que possible, ce qui excite sans doute la moquerie des sceptiques mais n’empêche ni les simples ni les sages de dormir tranquilles.

And why is it that Homo sapiens was descended from hairy apes but wound up naked—as Wallace had gone to some pains to point out? Even in hottest horrid-torrid Africa, animals such as antelopes had fur to protect them from the wind and rain. So did man…way back in that invisible past, where Evolution lives. Starting out, said Darwin, man was as hairy as the hairiest ape. Why no longer? Blind, aren’t you, Wallace? You didn’t get the second half of my title, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, did you. Evolution, said Darwin, had turned Homo sapiens into a more sensitive animal, which in turn gave him something approaching aesthetic feelings. The male began to admire females who had the least apelike hides because he could see more of their lovely soft skin, which excited him sexually. The more skin he saw, the more he wanted to see. Obviously valued by the males because their hides were much less hairy, the most sought-after females began to look down their noses at the old-fashioned hairy males, one crude step away from the apes themselves. Generation after generation went by, thousands of them, until, thanks to natural selection, males and females became as naked as they are today, with but two clumps of hair, one on the head and the other in the pubic area, plus wispy, scarcely visible little remnants of their formerly hirsute selves on the forearms and lower legs and, in the case of some males, the chest and shoulders.b Yes, their backs got cold, terribly cold, as Wallace had argued. But what poor Wallace didn’t know was that the heat of passion conquered all…and that was “How Man Lost His Hair Over Love.” (Got that, Wallace?)

These researchers do not employ the ‘absence of evidence’ argument. That said, these studies appear to be based on an unusual conception of language as largely grammar and words, failing to consider the overall role and origins of symbols from abstract culture. They examine the growing complexity of tool use and relate this to a purported increase in language complexity, based on the assumption that the syntax of modern languages will always include complex syntactic devices for combining symbols such as hierarchy and recursion. In addition, these researchers discuss the absence of symbols among earlier Homo species, contrasting this with the widespread use of symbols among sapiens.

Debates about the existence of God or the gods were raging in Plato's time, twenty-five hundred years ago. Remarkably, they still rage on today, as a recent spate of books rehearsing the routine arguments for and against the existence of God demonstrates. By their nature these quarrels are about beliefs and can never be finally settled. But faith, which is more closely related to awe, love, and wonder, arose long before Plato, among our most primitive Homo sapiens forebears. Plato engaged in disputes about beliefs, not about faith.

As a species, she reflected, Homo Sapiens had never truly gotten beyond the bounds of the tribe. The history of the last hundred thousand years had shown how cleverly they could adapt to larger demands. Under pressure of necessity they formed villages, towns, cities, nations. Yet, they saved their true warmth and fervent emotion for a close circle of friends and relatives. They would die to preserve the tribe, the family, the neighborhood. Appeals to larger issues worked only by tapping the subtle, deeper well-springs.