art, darwin and evolutionary psychology in the new republic
“Art, then, can be defined as the calisthenics of pattern-finding…(Boyd) is proposing a direct link between art and fitness: the more art we experience, the more likely we are to survive and to reproduce. Art, in this model, is like a gym in which ‘we incrementally fine-tune our neural wiring through our repeated and focused engagement in each of the arts.’”
Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water, 2002
distortion and feelings in the atlantic
“…an evolutionary biologist who specializes in animal communication, says that jarring rock music shares aural characteristics with the arousing vocalizations of troubled animals and may capture human attention in the same way. Crying animals sound distorted because they force a large amount of air rapidly through their voice box to communicate alarm and fear.”
harvard psychologist steven pinker’s hopeful new book the better angels of our nature: why violence has declined debuts tomorrow
from slate:“… a monumental achievement. His book should make it much harder for pessimists to cling to their gloomy vision of the future. Whether war is an ancient adaptation or a pernicious cultural infection, we are learning how to overcome it.”
“If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred million of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Every step in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, History (1841)
the flip side of the coin and evolution
“ I felt no sense that I carried a handicap that would render my efforts futile should I again face deep trouble. In fact, I felt a heightened sense of agency. Anything and everything I did to improve my own environment and experience—every intervention I ran on myself, as it were—would have a magnified effect. In that light, my short/short allele now seems to me less like a trapdoor through which I might fall than like a springboard—slippery and somewhat fragile, perhaps, but a springboard all the same.”
-David Dobbs in The Atlantic on the “orchid hypothesis” in which a genetic vulnerability for depression under stress also encompasses an exceptionally positive response to environmental nurturing.
The world is almost mind-numbingly dynamic. Out of the Big Bang came the stars. Out of stardust came the Earth. Out of Earth came single-celled creatures. Out of the evolutionary life and death of these creatures came human beings with consciousness and freedom that concentrates the self-transcendence of matter itself. Human beings are the universe become conscious of itself.
Elizabeth Johnson, theologian
Just as the Urnanâbhi, a species of spider, creates a thread out of his own body and takes it back, just as the plants grow by their own nature, and all these things are yet separate and apparently different (the heart is, as it were, different from the other parts of a man’s body; the plants are different from the earth; the thread is different from the spider — yet they [the earth, the spider and so on] were the causes, and in them these things act), so from this Unchangeable One has come this universe.
Vivekananda on the Mundaka Upanishads
Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”
Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself, able to understand something of its past history and its possible future. This cosmic self-awareness is being realized in one tiny fragment of the Universe-in a few of us as human beings.
Julian Huxley, Religion without Revelation