Lives on Earth

social animal

  • Time and Again

    Time goes by. The future comes towards us—or, to some, we move towards it. The future arrives in the present and then both settle into the past, gone but not forgotten. Or so it seems. Here’s another possibility: there is… Continue reading

  • The Brain Speaks Out

    Good Morning. I’m pleased to see so many members here today. I’ll be speaking about the basic functions of my department, Head Quarters. It’s my belief that many current descriptions of the so-called “mind”—expressions such a “self-aware,” “highly intelligent,” “imaginative”—point to… Continue reading

  • The Limits of Happiness

    If our expectations of happiness sometimes fall short. it may be because we often misunderstnad the nature of emotions in general. We tend to think that emotions come in pairs, that each pleasant emotion has its distressing counterpart, that happiness… Continue reading

  • Spirituality and Evolution

    My wrestling with various late-life questions that might be called “spiritual” has taken me to a fuller appreciation of evolution and our biological history. The sequence here, the process—or so it has seemed to me—is that I’ve been looking for… Continue reading

  • The Fading Individual

    I used to see people, including myself, as individuals first and as social creatures after that. Emotions and words, my own and others’, seemed the prime movers; groups, society as a whole, seemed a context, a setting, not an essence.… Continue reading

  • Police Brutality and the Brain

    The brutality against Michael Brown, Eric Garner, the prisoners tortured by the CIA, the inmates on Riker’s Island in New York, the noncombatants executed by the Islamic State—I find myself asking the old, naive question, how can people be this… Continue reading

  • Darwin and the Roots of Morality

    Wikipedia’s entry on “Evolution of Morality” points to the issue: “In everyday life, morality is typically associated with human behavior rather than animal behavior.our impression may ve that animals are drien soley by the drive and .. to survive and… Continue reading