Month: March 2019

NYTimes: No Hate Left Behind

No Hate Left Behind nyti.ms/2CjfVTZ

Leda Cosmides expressed some of her ideas about the connection between us-and-them thinking and evil, the topic with which I began this column, in an interview that was originally published in a Chilean newspaper in 2001 and still resonates:

The world has many people with evil motives, who will twist whatever ideas are around them to their own ends. Hitler, for example, was more influenced by folk notions about “blood” (found everywhere) than by any real biological knowledge.

She went on:

Since the Enlightenment, people have been trying to build bridges between disciplines, and when they do, new insights are achieved and humanity benefits. Should the healing arts have been kept separate from biology? If they had, we would not have antibiotics and modern medicine. Should psychology be kept separate from biology? If it is, we will never understand how the mind works. As a result, we will never understand how to make war less likely, how to cure autism, how to help people understand risk, or how to prevent racism, to name just a few problems on which evolutionary psychologists are making progress. Indeed, if we keep psychology separate from biology, people will continue to believe that “race” is a sensible concept; in contrast, human population biology tells us that humanity is not divided into distinct “races.”

This work is far from done.

Sent from my U.S. Cellular® Smartphone