Humans seem to be evolutionarily predisposed towards interest in what other people are doing, since this has allowed for the social cohesion that’s been instrumental to our survival. There is also an element that, the more other people there are who care what a particular person says and does, the more people will care what that particular person says and does, creating a positive feedback loop. Social status in the form of notability must have developed as a way of attaining reproductive access.
evolutionary psychology
Human Meaning and Original Sin
What is the meaning of life? This question is profound, but has become so cliche that its profundity is often overlooked. The problem, though, is that to produce an answer to the question requires that we hold prerequisite suppositions: what is the nature of humanity? Where does meaning originate? Does meaning itself have some yet other transcendent meaning?
Poststructuralist Semiotics and Evolutionary Psychology
Poststructuralism is a theory of semiotics (language and signs) that, broadly speaking, says that meaning is an effect of language, rather than a cause. In other words, what things mean to us is formed by language as opposed to our language having a 1-to-1 correspondence with reality. This theory, of course, takes the blank slate theory axiomatically. But what if we combine it with evolutionary psychology?
A Primer on Evolution pt 3: Higher Concepts
What follows are more conceptual aspects of evolution that build on the ideas discussed in the part 1. It’s not absolutely necessary, but I would recommend checking out part 2 first as well. In this conclusion to my three-part primer on evolution, I will discuss things like reproductive isolation, the different ways that evolution occurs, sexual selection, ecology, chaos theory, and evolutionary equilibrium. That evolution by natural selection has occurred and is occurring is not controversial in biology, which means most biologists are not actively searching for evidence that evolution by natural selection is a true phenomenon – the evidence that it is occurring is in. This post, therefore, introduces you to some of the areas of active research in evolutionary theory.