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////////////rd inner fish bk


//////////........humans, the trajectory that took us from bacteria to fish to reptiles to mammals including primates has left an indelible mark. An interesting and fun read on our unique evolutionary pathway is Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. Shubin suggests that when we take a look at how our bodies are put together, an intelligent designer becomes ever more implausible -- there are too many flaws, too many 'patches' that don't quite work right, but good enough to squeak by. The mind is no different: we are a product of millions of tiny adaptations -- and with no one in charge to make certain they all run smoothly and correctly in conjunction -- we end up with all sorts of psychological hiccups. RelGN is one of them.



////////////////////........Early in our hominid past, Homo hablis -- 'handy man' -- developed the ability to make tools



///////////////......Picking up a piece of flint, your ancestor would have needed the skill to determine if it possessed the qualities necessary to produce a cutting tool or spear head -- and that skill is the direct result of a purpose driven mind.



///////////////........A significant adaptation that guided the course of human evolution has been our capacity to view the world through the eyes of another -- known as 'theory of mind'




///////////////KINSHIP-.....Hamilton proposed that, while passing on our genes directly to our offspring is one way of ensuring our reproductive success, helping those individuals who are closely related to us, even at our own expense, could also ensure the survival of our genes -- more specifically the genes for helping.

.....This is probably why you are more likely to donate a kidney to your sister than to your third cousin.



/////////////////FICTIVE KINSHIP-FOSTER CARE


///////////////////.......But highly developed frontal lobes came late into the game, and they have to compete with the archaic brain that was the engine behind our evolutionary success.



///////////////,..........Just as Shubin argues that our bodies are more like bits and bobs from a rummage sale that have been shoe-horned together and sort of work...the brain too is made up of parts that are often in conflict because they have different jobs and priorities.



//////////////....... call our frontal lobes the 'smart-self' and the more archaic part of our brain the 'primal-self'



///////////////E CORNWELL....Let's call our frontal lobes the 'smart-self' and the more archaic part of our brain the 'primal-self'. Our smart-selves know that over-eating and under-exercising is bad for us, leading to heart disease, diabetes, and a shorter life-span. But our primal-selves are still primed for the risk of starvation, thus it simply cannot understand why the smart-self would deny you a nice Big Mac with a large order of fries and a chocolate shake. It throws fits as you drive by those Golden Arches, and causes your brain to send messages that scream 'STOP or we could die!’. The smart-brain is just not designed to prevent the primal brain from taking over because the abundance of food most of us are surrounded by is a fairly new development in human history. Perhaps given another few thousand years, those individuals with the will-power to resist all that tasty fat, protein, sugar and salt will out-reproduce those that don't.



/////////////RELGN ....PRIMAL BRAIN HIJACKS SMART BRAIN....KINSHIP....GD THE FTHR


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