The Passions of Mankind

Download (PDF, 3.74MB)

INTRODUCTION

Human emotions: An evolutionary paradox?

This book consists mainly of book chapters and articles that I have previously published, although some new material has been added. The book deals with human emotions, seen from an evolutionary perspective.

Today, our emotions seem to be driving us towards disaster. At first this seems to be a paradox. Our emotions have been produced by evolution, and Darwinian natural selection is supposed to produce traits that lead to survival, rather than to destruction. Examining the question more closely, we can notice that in our species, evolution is divided into two parts, genetic evolution, which proceeds very slowly, and cultural evolution, which moves with lightning-like speed, and is constantly-accelerating.

On the time-scale of genetic evolution, it only took a moment for our ancestors to move from making cave-paintings to speculating on the existence of atoms in ancient Greece. In another moment, we had unleashed the terrible power of the atom. During this time our emotions did not change. We face the global problems created by today’s science and technology, and by the exponential growth of population and industry, with our poor cave-man’s brains and our anachronistic stone-age emotions.

Read the entire book above or download it here.

We thank John Scales Avery, a renowned intellectual, EACPE board member, and theoretical chemist at the University of Copenhagen, for giving us permission to reproduce his latest book for EACPE.