On Human Nature: The Biology and Sociology of What Made Us Human – eBook PDF

On Human Nature: The Biology and Sociology of What Made Us Human – eBook PDF

In the ebook, On Human Nature, (PDF), author Jonathan H. Turner integrates evolutionary biology, sociology, cladistic analysis from biology, and comparative neuroanatomy to explore human nature as inherited from common ancestors shared by humans and existing great apes. Selection pressures changed this inherited legacy for the ancestors of humans—labeled hominins for being bipedal—and forced greater organization than present great apes when the hominins moved into open-country terrestrial habitats. The impacts of these selection pressures increased hominin ancestors’ emotional capacities via greater social and group orientation. This change, in turn, allowed further selection for a larger brain, articulated speech, and culture down the human line. Turner explains human nature as a series of overlapping complexes that are the result of the inherited legacy of great apes being fed through the changing effects of a larger brain, culture, and speech. These developments, he shows, can be understood as the cognitive complexity, the psychological complex, the interaction complex, the emotions complex, and the community complex.

Reviews

“This remarkable ebook, On Human Nature: The Biology and Sociology of What Made Us Human, is both unusually inclusive and at the same time highly readable. After a slow start, sociology is now being combined with the findings of evolutionary biology, with Jonathan Turner in the lead. This handling of human nature and its evolution is strongly eclectic, using theories and data ranging from primate ethology to theories of emotion to brain science, and contains some pleasant surprises in the form of American Pragmatism and the work of Mead and Cooley. A challenging synthesis.” — Christopher Boehm, Professor of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California

“This is the best ebook yet written on social evolution. Jonathan Turner creates his life-work, from cladistics of human great ape ancestors, rebuilding the biological steps that made humans much more emotionally responsive, at the same time allowing greater brain size and more adaptable social arrangements with strangers. Blending interaction ritual and symbolic interaction, self-control, early humans developed internalized symbols, and group references. These let humans build larger, stratified, more complex, and impersonal organization―turning in contrast to original individualistic, freedom-loving human nature and submitting it to the social cage. The author traces the conflict of biological human nature and social organization into postmodern societies and looks at our future.” — Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania

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