Earlier this year I read a book, The Cave and the Light, and excellent book about how the civilised Western world has cycled between Plato and Aristotle since the days of the Ancient Greeks. It kindled an interest in my overstuffed brain--why are humans so obssessed with moral character, the right to happines, the good life... I have always thought of virtues and morals to be constructs of the human mind-- a part of culture not a part of nature. I am doing my best to read all sides of this story--even if I already know that science based evidence will ultimately win the day.
This a book that looks human behavior and habits through the eyes of an alien scientist and is definitely on the side of science and Darwinism. It explores the growing mass of evidence that morals and ethics might not be all culture driven tools for "crowd control" they might indeed have some Darwinian roots in our genes.
Readers are very opinated about this kind of "talk" but to me a lot of critics are takine a weird kind of roll... their critiques often both "miss" the point that the author is trying to make but they also "make" his point for him as well.
Example from Amazon: How can you trivialize Bach that way...calling such a beautiful musical compostion, a masterpiece of creativity an earworm--a meme. The author is not trivializing the brilliance of Bach just making the point that beautiful pieces of music worm their way into the brains of humans and get perpetuated for generations because of their creative beauty.
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