Prior Conversations Leading Up to This One:
Journal: Get America Working–A Conversation Part II
Journal: Get America Working–A Conversation Part III
Journal: Get America Working-A Conversation Part IV Enter usfruct (husbandry of the planet) and Spiritual Ecology
Evolutionary psychology is a good thread upon which to base our social evolution. You can use it to clarify old thinking that doesn't work, suggest that new thinking can become organic as adaptation to reality, and can even associate religion. However, the trope about Pleistocene psychology being something that is stubbornly with us is rather flimsy. I've just been reading David Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature, and he pretty well dispenses with that idea. I can't reproduce the whole argument, but it seems that we are being driven by cultural evolution, and that has produced plenty of modifications to stone age cognition. That has given us opportunity and danger, and it happens quickly. He cites a study of 18 generations of guppies that produced some big changes. Humans have had 400 generations since Pleistocene, and much has changed, even physically.
