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This book approaches two behavioral domains involved with human nature and actions related to dominance, an ancient animal, survival-linked, behavioral drive anchored in basal neural brain circuits. These domains result in latent or manifest conflicts among components of human animal nature and cultural profiles.
The first domain refers to evolutive animal behavioral inertias that affect the basic construction of our brain/mind and social behavioural spectrum, underneath cultural and political enclosures.
The second domain is considered a consequence of the previous one and involves the concept that the basic animal behavioural drive of dominance interferes with the expression of a truly human, cooperative social construction, and fosters conflicts (based on profit or comparative advantage). This drive tints or conditions our behaviour in all its expressions (parochial, social, political, financial, religious, and cognitive development). It also fosters social detachment of elite minorities – financially powerful and drivers of human evolutionary trends – from general concerns and collective needs of legions of subdued populations. Additionally, the latter promotes Star Wars factual chimaeras and expanding dominance/prevalence and power grip beyond earthbound objectives that promote spatial exploration and scientific objectives. The quest for knowledge is embedded in our behavioural construction but employed by opportunistic – political – strategies that seek dominance/prevalence.
Basic, ancestral, animal drives, here focused on dominance, lie underneath our sociocultural expressions, and feed the construction of survival, ideology, class prejudices, submissiveness, cooperativity, and technological development. On top of this basic drive, humans have construed additional relational levels (whether of cognitive or emotional nature) expressed as cultural constructions that provide means to attempt to approach a socially acceptable format and public support. Whenever these processes collide or collapse, individual and collective standings tend to generate social changes or individual or collective pathologies.
This book should be an exciting read for all those enthusiasts of the human mind, behaviour, and cultural evolution ranging from fields such as neuroscience and biology to political sciences and anthropology. Given the breadth of studies as well as the clear language used by the author, students will find this book as resourceful material for undergraduate and graduate studies.
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Eusociality
Chapter 3. Brain and social environment
Chapter 4. Socio-biological interactions
Chapter 5. Social Inequality
Chapter 6. Culture and evolution
Chapter 7. Means of social coercion
Chapter 8. Population growth and the collective brain
Chapter 9. Tooling and technology
Chapter 10. The Homo sapiens, evolution of the warmonger human
Chapter 11. Factors of our human future
Chapter 12. On the human dimension
Chapter 13. Our species' hypothetical alternatives
Dr Jorge Colombo is a neuroscientist and former CONICET Principal Investigator. He is the founder, former Director, and Director Emeritus of the Unit of Applied Neurobiology (CEMIC-CONICET) in Argentina. He did his postdoctoral studies at the Brain Research Institute at UCLA, USA and is a former full professor at the College of Medicine, University of South Florida, USA. Dr Colombo was a fellow of the Ford Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the A. von Humboldt Foundation, the British Royal Society, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the IBERDROLA Foundation. He is a former visiting professor at the Cecile and Oscar Vogt Brain Research Institute at the University of Dusseldorf, the Paul Flechsig Institute of Brain Research at Universitat Leipzig, the Autónoma Universidad de Madrid, the Universidad Complutense, the Lund University, the Department of Anatomy and Brain Research Institute at the University of Budapest, and at the University Pecs. He has several published articles in peer-reviewed international journals and books in the field of neuroendocrinology, brain evolution, cerebral cortex organization, and evolutionary social issues.
