>> Andf then - quite recently - we found a way through. We embraced
>> technology, permitted knowledge and established freedom in many
>> places. So now what? Do we still just respond to circumstances  - as
>> we have always done - or do we take a deeper view of ourselves?
>
> If the basic premise of the book, The Paleolithic Prescription, is to
> look at the foods man's body evolved on, what has man been eating for
> the last 50,000 years, and asks pivital the question; how is this
> different from todays diet? How can this paleolithic diet be
> approximated with modern foods? What would the heath benefits be? How
> does the modern diet differ in salt content, fat content, carbohydrate
> content? What diseases are more prevalent with todays diet? Then maybe
> we need a wider Paleolthic Prescription for many other problems that
> arise from ancient human biases.
>
>
http://www.amazon.com/Paleolithic-Prescription-Program-Exercise-Desig...
>
> The Savanna Principle is a theory about the evolutionary roots of the
> human brain. ...it asserts that the environment that molded the human
> brain through natural selection is drastically different than the
> world humans currently live in. This disparity between what man was
> designed to do and what he currently can do leads to a host of
> societal difficulties
>
> The human brain, and all of its psychological mechanisms, are adapted
> to the environment of evolutionary adaptedness and are therefore
> biased in favor of viewing and responding to the world as if it were
> still the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. The psychological
> mechanisms we possess in our brain today are still the same
> psychological mechanisms that we possessed in the environment of
> evolutionary adaptedness, just as our hand and pancreas are still the
> same as they were 10 000 years ago. The human brain may have
> difficulty comprehending entities and situations that did not exist in
> the ancestral environment;
>
> For example, ancestors who craved sugary and fatty foods lived longer
> and were healthier than those who didn't, in a time that such things
> were relatively scarce. Today, the abundance of such temptations leads
> to obesity and heart disease. ...It is not impossible to overcome this
> bias through conscious effort, but it is often difficult. This is why
> we still respond to sweets and fats today as if we still lived in the
> environment that molded the human brain through natural selection
> where such high-calorie foods were rare and malnutrition was an
> imminent problem for survival, and we have the strong urge to consume
> a large quantity of sweets and fats (even though many of us can
> consciously overcome the urge. ...the human brain [probably] has
> unconscious difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and
> situations that did not exist in the EEA.
>
> For instance, one of the entities that we know for sure did not exist
> in the environment that molded the human brain through natural
> selection is television. ...humans [probably] have difficulty
> recognizing and dealing with TV. This indeed appears to be the case.
> People who watch certain types of TV shows are more satisfied with
> their friendships, just like they are if they have more friends or
> spend more time socializing with them in real life. It appears that
> the human brain has difficulty distinguishing between real friends and
> imaginary ones they see on TV, because it did not exist in the
> environment that molded the human brain through natural selection. It
> is this fundamental observation, that our brain and its psychological
> mechanisms are strongly biased to view and respond to the environment
> as if it were still the environment that molded the human brain
> through natural selection, which leads to the Savanna Principle.
>
> ...general intelligence evolved in order to handle evolutionarily-
> novel problems. The logical convergence of these two separate lines of
> research leads to the prediction that the human difficulty in dealing
> with evolutionarily-novel stimuli interacts with general intelligence,
> such that the Savanna Principle holds stronger among the less
> intelligent than among the more intelligent. Further analyses of the
> U.S. General Social Survey demonstrate that less intelligent men and
> women may have greater difficulty separating TV characters from their
> real friends than more intelligent men and women.
>
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savanna_principlehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savanna_principlehttp...
>
> ...by appealing to the core principles of neurobiology, evolutionary
> theory, and cognitive science, practitioners of a new human science
> can reach a deeper understanding of why we feel certain courses of
> action to be intrinsically correct. They can help us to understand why
> we have moral feelings. For now, though, the scientists can offer no
> guidance on whether we are really correct in making certain decisions,
> because no way is known to define what is correct without total
> reference to the moral feelings under scrutiny. Perhaps this is the
> ultimate burden of the free will bequeathed to us by our genes: in the
> final analysis, even when we know what we are likely to do and why,
> each of us must still choose.
>
> The challenge to science and philosophy to solve this dilemma is very
> great—in our opinion, there is none greater. Society, through its laws
> and institutions, already regulates behavior. But it does so in
> virtual blind ignorance of the deep reaches of human nature. By
> relying on moral intuition, on those satisfying visceral feelings of
> right and wrong, people remain enslaved by their genes and culture.
> Their minds develop along the channels set by the hereditary
> epigenetic rules, and while they exercise free will in moment-by-
> moment choices, this faculty remains superficial and its value to the
> individual is largely illusory. Only by penetrating to the physical
> basis of moral thought and considering its evolutionary meaning will
> people have the power to control their own lives. They will then be in
> a better position to choose ethical precepts and the forms of social
> regulation needed to maintain the precepts.
>
> Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
> Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson -
1983http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/
>
> ...innate censors and motivators exist in the brain that deeply and
> unconsciously affect our ethical premises; from these roots, morality
> evolved as instinct. If that perception is correct, science may soon
> be in a position to investigate the very origin and meaning of human
> values, from which all ethical pronouncements and much of political
> practice flow.
>
> Philosophers themselves, most of whom lack an evolutionary
> perspective, have not devoted much time to the problem. They examine
> the precepts of ethical systems with reference to their consequences
> and not their origins. Thus John Rawls opens his influential A Theory
> of Justice (1971) with a proposition he regards as beyond dispute: "In
> a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as
> settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political
> bargaining or to the calculus of social interests." Robert Nozick
> begins Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) with an equally firm
> proposition: "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person
> or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong
> and far-reaching are these rights they raise the question of what, if
> anything, the state and its omcials.may do." These two premises are
> somewhat different in content, and they lead to radically different
> prescriptions. Rawls would allow rigid social control to secure as
> close an approach as possible to the equal distribution of society's
> rewards. Nozick sees the ideal society as one governed by a minimal
> state, empowered only to protect its citizens from force and fraud,
> and with unequal distribution of rewards wholly permissible. Rawls
> rejects the meritocracy; Nozick accepts it as desirable except in
> those cases where local communities voluntarily decide to experiment
> with egalitarianism. Like everyone else, philosophers measure their
> personal emotional responses to various alternatives as though
> consulting a hidden oracle.
>
> That oracle resides in the deep emotional centers of the brain, most
> probably within the limbic system, a complex array of neurons and
> hormone-secreting cells located just beneath the "thinking" portion of
> the cerebral cortex. Human emotional responses and the more general
> ethical practices based on them have been programmed to a substantial
> degree by natural selection over thousands of generations. The
> challenge to science is to measure the tightness of the constraints
> caused by the programming, to find their source in the brain, and to
> decode their significance through the reconstruction of the
> evolutionary history of the mind. This enterprise will be the logical
> complement of the continued study of cultural evolution.
>
> Success will generate the second dilemma, which can be stated as
> follows: Which of the censors and motivators should be obeyed and
> which ones might better be curtailed or sublimated? These guides are
> the very core of our humanity. They and not the belief in spiritual
> apartness distinguish us from electronic computers. At some time in
> the future we will have to decide how human we wish to remain-in this
> ultimate, biological sense-because we must consciously choose among
> the alternative emotional guides we have inherited. To chart our
> destiny means that we must shift from automatic control based on our
> biological properties to precise steering based on biological
> knowledge.
>
> Because the guides of human nature must be examined with a complicated
> arrangement of mirrors, they are a deceptive subject, always the
> philosopher's deadfall. The only way forward is to study human nature
> as part of the natural sciences, in an attempt to integrate the
> natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities. I can
> conceive of no ideological or formalisric shortcut. Neurobiology
> cannot be learned at the feer of a guru. The consequences of genetic
> history cannot be chosen by legislatures. Above all, for our own
> physical well-being if nothing else, ethical philosophy must not be
> left in the hands of the merely wise. Although human progress can be
> achieved by intuition and force of will, only hard-won empirical
> knowledge of our biological nature will allow us to make optimum
> choices among the competing criteria of progress.
>
> On Human Nature - Edward O. Wilson
1978http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/qid=1036537594/
>
> Sorry about the length of this post am trying to shrink this down to a
> few paragraphs...
