Monday, April 23, 2012

TED Talks - Jonathan Haidt: Religion, Evolution, and the Ecstasy of Self-transcendence

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt asks a simple, but difficult question: why do we search for self-transcendence? Why do we attempt to lose ourselves? In a tour through the science of evolution by group selection, he proposes a provocative answer.

His new and equally provocative book is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.


1 comment:

gberke said...

Very simple life forms still extant operate as single entities and also spontaneously come together to form a cooperating colony or act as a coordinated, single minded structure... slime mold is one, I think.
We will find, like Kermit says, there is a little bit of Frog in all of us. Likely that the same mechanism in the slime mold is our connection to transcendence. The cells contain Wolfram rules, and those rules run and run and run forever...

Every phenomena of life will be found, ever if not readily demonstrated or recognized, in every life form: fruit fly males perform cunilingus on the female... that pretty much is a must do if sex is to follow.