just discovered this channel, keep up the good work.

I'm a big fan of your channel. I think your interactive interview style is engaging in the best way, and elicits some thoughtful responses from your guests. I don't know why your channel hasn't grown more, but KZread does eventually reward intelligence and quality with a similar audience. So, I will content myself to confess that I was a fan before your channel got huge.

@TheBiggerPicturePodcast

3 ай бұрын

This really made my day, thank you! ♥️ It means a lot to know that the style and ideas are resonating 🙏🏻 Would love to hear if there are any particular topics you would like me to explore.

@jdwalz

3 ай бұрын

I like the topics you are choosing, they have connection to each other and form an intelligent thread Keep looking into what others are afraid to see, and you will continue to find answers that help make sense of this brief time we call human existence.

Blackwell chose to highlight balance and cooperation rather than struggle and savage rivalry. By Charlie Brown Antoinette Blackwell was both an Evolutionist and a Creationist ! She was the first woman ordained as a Christian minister in the US , and she wrote a General Science textbook agreeing with Charles Darwin's theory of the evolution of species by natural selection. What an interesting historical character in light of today's debates between Creationists and Evolutionists ! Mother Blackwell was also a suffragette. In 1920, at age 95, she was the only participant of the 1850 Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts who lived long enough to vote when at last women had the vote, dammit. Reverend Blackwell was also an abolitionist against slavery. She was one of the few white feminists to support the 15th Amendment giving the vote to Black men, even as no women had the vote. She supported the famous African American leader, Frederick Douglass, in this debate within American feminism in the mid-1900's. A regular Force of Nature was she. I came across Blackwell in reading about Charles Darwin's book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Antoinette Blackwell wrote The Sexes Throughout Nature. I haven't actually read those books yet, but I have them on order. Future blogs will explore the issues in those books more. Meanwhile, Wikipedia's items explains how Blackwell argued that there was natural selection for "cooperation and balance" among humans, all of us members of the same species. Survival of the fittest does not mean survival of competition between humans, survival of the toughest individual "men". The fittest are those who successfully reproduce ! Reproduction requires , in the first place, cooperation (smiles). On the primacy of cooperation in natural origins , See Labor Power's Is Human Nature Social or Selfish ? blog take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish-i.html Antoinette Blackwell's book, The Sexes Throughout Nature, critiques Charles Darwin four years after he published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871,[1] and Herbert Spencer, whom the author thought were the most influential men of her day.[2] Darwin had written a letter to her in 1869, thanking her for a copy of her book, Studies in General Science.[3] She also answers Dr. E. H. Clarke and his book Sex and Education which she deplored.[4] Blackwell's book was republished by Hyperion Press in 1976, 1985 and 1992.[5] Parts of the book were first published in Woman's Journal and Popular Science Monthly.[6] Blackwell chose to highlight balance and cooperation rather than struggle and savage rivalry. She criticized Darwin for basing his theory of evolution on "time-honored assumption that the male is the normal type of his species".[7] She wrote that Spencer scientifically subtracts from the female and Darwin as scientifically adds to the male.[6] Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection were used to show women's place in society was the result of nature.[14] One of the first women to critique Darwin, Antoinette Brown Blackwell published The Sexes Throughout Nature in 1875.[15] She was aware she would be considered presumptuous for criticising evolutionary theory but wrote that "disadvantages under which we [women] are placed...will never be lessened by waiting".[16] Blackwell's book answered Darwin and Herbert Spencer, who she thought were the two most influential living men.[17] She wrote of "defrauded womanhood" and her fears that "the human race, forever retarding its own advancement...could not recognize and promote a genuine, broad, and healthful equilibrium of the sexes".[18] It was not until one century later[8] that feminists were working from inside the natural sciences, and could address Darwin's androcentricity.[1] Sarah Blaffer Hrdy wrote in her book Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection (quoting from an excerpt of pages 12-25 in AnthroNotes for educators published by the National Museum of Natural History), "For a handful of nineteenth-century women intellectuals, however, evolutionary theory was just too important to ignore. Instead of turning away, they stepped forward to tap Darwin and Spencer on the shoulder to express their support for this revolutionary view of human nature, and also to politely remind them that they had left out half the species."[9] Hrdy added, "Evolutionary biology did eventually respond to these criticisms, yet in their lifetimes, the effect that these early Darwinian feminists-Eliot, Blackwell, Royer, and a few others-had on mainstream evolutionary theory can be summed up with one phrase: the road not taken."[10] In the Descent of Man, Darwin wrote that by choosing tools and weapons over the years, "man has ultimately become superior to woman"[19] but Blackwell's argument for women's equality went largely ignored until the 1970s when feminist scientists and historians began to explore Darwin.[20] As recently as 2004, Griet Vandermassen, aligned with other Darwinian feminists of the 1990s and early 2000s (decade), wrote that a unifying theory of human nature should include sexual selection.[15] But then the "opposite ongoing integration" was promoted by another faction as an alternative in 2007.[21] Nonetheless, Darwin's explanation of sexual selection continues to receive support from both social and biological scientists as "the best explanation to date".[22]v

Thank you for your beautifully presented podcasts which l find to be most fascinating. I personally have my doubts about Ayn Rand's "Objectivism' which l believe has led to self interest avove all else, neo-liberalism, the fragmentation of tje collective and ever increasing levels of inequality.

So-called first law of nature is that individual organisms have an instinct, genetically based, of Self-Preservation - to get enough to eat , sleep, drink, breathe , etc. However, Humans are the species with the highest level of individual dependence on other individuals, society, to meet those needs. Humans are the super-social animal species. We even rely on knowledge from dead generations of our species; soulfully social we are . Sociopathic individualism is more of a danger to humans than pathological altruism.

Is Human Nature Social or Selfish ? by Charles D. Brown One student asked "what does anthropology matter ? what difference does it make ?". Good , mature questions for a high school student. One way that anthropology might help us in the here and now is to bring scientific and biological paleontological evidence, from the Stone Age 100,000's of years ago, to bear on the question of what is human nature today ? Is it human nature to be greedy and selfish like Wall Street billionaires ? Or is it human nature to share and "love thy neighbor as thyself" ? _Sapiens_" means "wise" In Latin. Homo sapiens (Latin: "wise human” ) is the scientific name for the human species. Homo is the human genus, which also includes Neanderthals and many other extinct species of hominin; H. sapiens is the only surviving species of the genus Homo. Modern humans are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens , which differentiates us as a sub-species from our closely related sub-species Homo sapiens Neanderthal. Some living humans have Neanderthal genes; this means that we are the same species as Neanderthals , who you have probably heard of. What is humans' unique nature ? What is culture ? For anthropology, culture is the unique species characteristic of_homo sapiens_. In a sense, "culture" is another word for "wisdom", from the notion that humans are the species _homo wise_. It ishumans socially learned practices, customs, language, traditions, beliefs, religion, spirituality that make us "wise" in so many ways, certainly clever and winners _as a species_ ( not just as a few "fit" Individuals) in the struggles and snuggles to survive as a species. Since the advent of civilization, sometimes it's not so clear how wise our culture makes us. Therein lies the central drama of the history ofthe human species. Nonetheless, clearly in the Stone Age, our having culture was a highly adaptive advantage over species that did not have culture , stone tools made through culture, etc, raising our species fitness. This is evidenced by _homo sapiens_ expanding in population and therefore migrating to an expanded area of living space across the earth , out of what is now Africa to the other continents. Stone Age foraging and kinship organized societies were the mode of life forthe vast majority of time of human species 'existence, 99 % or more. The first human societies had an extraordinarily high survival need to be able to rely on each other at levels of solidarity that we cannot even imagine. The intensity of the network of social connections of a band of 25 to 50 people living in the ecological food chain location would almost constitute a new level of organic organization and integrity above individual bodies; ancient kinship/culture systems as super-organic bodies; the human social group as harmonious multi-individual Body, organism. The Individual human bodies, all of the Some Bodies , were very frail and weak relative to the field of predators they were escaping. Up-right posture made them slower runners, too ! The dominance of the food chain that humans ultimately reached even in the Stone Age could be reached only by super-social , super internally-cooperative, super-intra-species harmony, because they had relatively frail _ individual_ bodies, and needed each other's support. It is clear to me that natural selection picked hominid groups with policies of "love thy neighbor as thyself " and "charity" over those that might have derived principles of "selfishness and greed", if there were any in the Stone Age before Civilization. Institutionalized war would have been selected against through the whole Stone Age. Importantly, to the question “ is human nature social or selfish, this is when humans became “hardwired” genetically, establishing our NATURE !