Tag: mythology
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2025 Research Plan – The Mythology of Violence
As mentioned in the last post, my 2025 reading list is mostly going to be mythology. Challenge: If liberals are right and violence is “learned” (as per Montagu and the Seville Statement) then there should be myths of the origins of the learning of this violence. If conservatives are right and violence gradually evolved from…
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2025 – The Year of the Myth
I’ve never been one to enjoy myth, but I’m on a quest to find a myth of the origin of human violence, or ROBA. I actually don’t believe there is one. I believe it’s been with us since the beginning. So there’s no myth. ROBA is simply who we are. Or, I should say, humans…
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From Violence to Sacrifice to Cooking
Richard Wrangham wrote in Catching Fire that the use of fire is what made us more human, or perhaps “transitioned” us to becoming human. Its ability to shrink the overall size of food and increase calorie density supposedly aided in brain growth. James George Frazer’s compilation of myths of the origins of fire is more…
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The Anti-Social Religion
I’m just now finishing Deacon’s The Symbolic Species and have to comment on what he says near the end. First, note that Deacon’s theory of language rests on a set of hypotheses: 1. Humans evolved symbolic language due to some limited set of external, ecological stimuli, such as better group coordination for resources, assisting in…