What is happening?
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Author: Helga Vierich
Friendship is Kinship from Another Mother
Friendship is kinship by another mother. (This was originally published on-line as a guest blog in the International Culture and Cognition Institute. ) Why is this so important…
Domestication and the new mythology of human “perfectibility”
In 2007, a psychiatrist, Martin Brüne, wrote an essay “On human self-domestication, psychiatry, and eugenics” published in the journal Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, in which he…
Ecological engineering illustrated in a painting
Check out this painting. Kungkarrangkalpa Tjukurrpa, 2015 by Australian indigenous artists Exhibition opens at The Box, Plymouth (and thanks to cousin Clair Drever for drawing my attention …
Humans = ecologicalengineers
Check out this painting. Kungkarrangkalpa Tjukurrpa, 2015 by Australian indigenous artists Exhibition opens at The Box, Plymouth * Did humans evolve in a cultural ecology that was successful…
The collective cognitive niche
Culture as a collective cognitive niche. I suspect that one of the problems is the idea that “science” – the method of testing causal hypotheses to establish models…
Manure and Animal rights
We humans, the compassionate predator, entered into a contract with a large number of species in the course of the past twenty thousand years (some think longer), and…
Reply to Singh
Jacqueline Solway: “… the article sensationalizes and sets up straw people at least at the outset. It is our problem, not ‘theirs’ that we see some others as…
Economies are Trophic Flows
In 1972, as I was just about to get married for the first time, I read the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth. I decided not to have…
The discovery that all human hunter-gatherers, throughout the at least the last 80,000 years, did ecological engineering, means that “wilderness” does not really exist.
THIS is what transformed humanity between 300,000 and 100,000 years ago – the development of a cultural system of environmental management that made the ecosystems of the world…
Addendum to Gardening in Eden
”Archaic” Homo sapiens subspecies were widespread across Africa and Eurasia. Not all looked like Neanderthals – many were clearly much more like anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens. …
ON SPIRITS AND GHOSTS:
While I was in the Kalahari with a group of hunter-gatherers called the Kua, a woman died. I did not witness this, I arrived at the camp after…
Tribal? Not so much…
Tribal? “Tribalism” as the term is frequently used by evolutionary biologists, means a human tendency to form groups larger than the personal network. What they are actually groping…
Biophilia is real and may have saved our species
“In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.…
On Human Mating Habits: considering also the evidence of “introgression” between anatomically modern and archaic people.
Recently two aspects of our understanding of humanity appear to be converging. One is the study of human reproductive – especially “sexual” – behaviour, which has resulted in…
Right and Left? Nope.
HELGA INGEBORG VIERICH·SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2018 “..The watchwords of the nineteenth century have been, struggle for existence, competition, class warfare, commercial antagonism between nations, mi…