Explain how humans evolved (morals,traditions,religions) etc.?

[Not of This World]

I want to read smart answers

please!

[alicia]

Get ahold of the ingenius BBC documentary "Walking With Cavemen", watch it. It breaks it all down for you.

[john_in_dc]

I'll just do morality.

Morality is a subset of strategy. The game is to maximize the quality and quantity of life. The strategy is morality, those actions which best acheive the goal of the game.

At base, the game is a result of evolution. The species that maximizes the best, survives selection.

Ultimately, we cannot know what would truly maximize, as the lines of causation are far too complex. However, there are certain actions that we know will most likely detract from it. Animals develop instinct for that. For example, tigers will drive out a female that kills cubs. Almost all pack animals exhibit morality.

With the evolution of the cerebral cortex, we were able to put these instincts, this strategy, into words. As I stated, we cannot know the best tactic for each situation, but we can make geralizations. This is where dogma comes from, a presumed correct tactic. The important thing to remember is that dogma is fallible and is not neccessarily the best tactic for every situation.

(sorry, trying to truncate something quite complex)

[Gandalf™]

Ya know they teach all this stuff in college. So...are you REALLY interested in finding out?

[Fire_Girl_2007]

Humans did not evolve from apes if you want to know that.

However we have evolved as in our brain power and physical powers. We have evolved, but not in the way that some people think.

[Clovis]

I want you to study for degrees in:

1. Anthropology
2. Biology
3. Psychology and/or Sociology

I want smart results.

please!!

[Rockin' Robin AM VT]

So, how did this all get started, again?

Of course we all remember that in 1620 a bunch of people, whom we call pilgrims, came from Europe to get a fresh start. They boarded an old trading vessel called the Mayflower and a couple months later they sighted the New World.

Now stop for a moment and consider this scenario. A big group of families – just more than 100 people – were all on the same ship for two months. Can you imagine, besides the real threat of disease, starvation and storms, the cries of the children as they ask their parents “are we there yet?”

According to www.holidays.net, there were two groups of people aboard. The first were “44 pilgrims, who called themselves the ‘saints,’ and 66 others, whom the pilgrims called the ‘strangers.’” There were many disagreements between the two factions, and soon it was clear that they differed to a very great extent.

When they sighted land, they had to make an arrangement as to how they would live in this new place because of their differing views. This agreement was known as the Mayflower Compact.

“The Pilgrims biggest concern was attack by the local Native American Indians,” the Web site reported. “But the Patuxets were a peaceful group and did not prove to be a threat.”
The next year, the pilgrims celebrated a bountiful harvest by having a “thanksgiving” commemoration, according to the Web site. They invited the natives to join with them and today we call it the first Thanksgiving.

Many cultures around the world have celebrated Thanksgiving traditions and harvest festivals over the centuries, and that seems to prove what a melting pot we are, and how all those traditions now form our American ones.

For the ancient Greeks, it was a harvest festival to worship the goddess of grain, Demeter.
“On the first day of the festival married women (possibly connecting childbearing and the raising of crops) would build leafy shelters and furnish them with couches made with plants,” the Web site reported. “It was hoped that Demeter's gratitude would grant them a good harvest.”

For the Romans, it was “a festival called Cerelia, which honored Ceres their goddess of corn (from which the word cereal comes). Their celebration included music, parades, games and sports and a thanksgiving feast,” the Web site reported.

The Chinese celebrated a harvest festival, called “Chung Ch'ui.” They considered this the moon’s birthday, and would bake little “moon cakes” that were “stamped with the picture of a rabbit - as it was a rabbit, not a man, which the Chinese saw on the face of the moon.”
Ancient civilizations around the world had different ways of celebrating the harvest and giving thanks to the gods they worshipped, and the same is true today, even in this country of multi-cultural background.

Our Thanksgiving traditions stem mostly from the beginnings of this nation, but many of our traditions come from more contemporary family practices that celebrate the gratitude of family and friends.

For instance, the tradition of a big turkey dinner has been widely accepted as a Thanksgiving practice. But it is up for debate among scholars as to whether or not the pilgrims feasted on turkey that first Thanksgiving.

There are other contemporarily traditional foods that were not available to pilgrims as well.
The first settlers probably did not have pigs, so ham was out of the question. Sweet potatoes, potatoes and yams had not been introduced to the eastern seaboard at that time. And the only kind of corn they had was maize from the Indians. It was really only good for making cornmeal, not for eating like we do today.

Cranberries were available, but not sugar, so cranberry sauce was not around yet.
And a contemporary favorite, pumpkin pie, was sadly not there, either.

“They probably made a pumpkin pudding of sorts,” the Web site reported, “sweetened by honey or syrup, which would be like the filling of a pumpkin pie, but there would be no crust or whipped topping.”

It seems we should all be thankful for these modern foods this year.

Other traditions have been instituted throughout the years. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, for example, has only been around since 1924, more than 300 years after that first Thanksgiving celebration.

Closer to home, there are other traditions that have shaped our current holiday throughout the years. The “Turkey Bowl” is a favorite that has been around for only a few decades.
This event involves a football, socks tucked in the participants’ belts as flags, too many players on each team, and usually some mud.

“I’ve seen a lot of people play it,” Stephanie Garvin, a Cedar City resident, said. “I think it’s pretty popular. I even participated once and it was a lot of fun.”

Another resident, Talisha Topham, recalled her family’s favorite.

“After we eat,” Topham said, “we do crafts. There are crafts for the kids and crafts for the adults. And they always have to do with Christmas or winter.”

From the first pilgrim leaving home and setting foot in a New World, to a desire to commemorate that fortitude by proclaiming a National Day of Thanksgiving by President Abraham Lincoln, to our modern traditions of football and family fun, Thanksgiving has been a tradition of many things, but always of “relative” plenty.

Different philosophies, atheism and religion may impose different ways of life or not, as there are intermediary shades, because in most cases, there is no perfectly homogeneous religiosity or atheism.

Faithful people can be from bigots to those who do not practice any rite or cult accessories, but they do believe in an impersonal divine abstraction (deists, pantheists and so on), as also amongst atheists there are various hues, from rationalist atheists, which is more profound, to sentimental atheists, which can be sincere, but without any logical or scientific argumentation.

These two philosophies shaped along the history the way we see the world and existence, and had a deep social and educative impact.

But a complete education cannot reject the study of a comparative history of the religions, nor experimental sciences or evolution.

The religious man is a person which feels he/she must believe in something supernatural, in a colossal power which is situated over himself/herself and which cannot be detected, nor defined, as it seems impersonal, even if he/she individualizes it in a specific form, sometimes personifiable, from stone (lithomorphism) to tree (dendromorphism), animal, (zoomorphism) and human shape (anthropomorphism), like ancient Greek gods.

In a certain philosophical state, this man is pushed towards the abstractness of the object of his/her faith (to God, Allah or Buddha).

The divinity type was fixed in parameters accessible to all religious people by theologists, and the believer accepts passively the dogma; he/she just needs the divinity as appeal instance, before death or after death, for injustices or failures to which he/she considers is subjected by people, phenomena or situations.

The religious person cannot be constant, as he/she may experience moments of doubt or revolt, but his/her general structure won’t allow it a total gate, the religion abandonment, unless in extremely rare cases.

The believer is an irrational; he/she may mimic ration, accidentally and a mystic stage, whose inner mechanism is a total loss of self in the ecstatic way.

According to the practiced religion and local traditions, the faith is the motivation and goal of each religious system and has an affective root, to which dogmas, holly books and mythological tradition become integrally accepted formulas, a spontaneous act of pure option without logical control.

Admitting without reserves and critics a mystical-mythological information, any believer will reject any other source of knowledge than divine revelation, sometimes completed (like in many fanatic sects) by illumination through grace.

Religion is a mystical refuge in a transcendent system that became a tool of explaining the unknown, the inexplicable at a given moment.

Even in inferior mytho-religious states (animatism, animism, demonology, fetishism and totemism), the cave men or those of the archaic civilizations tried to explain the environment, vegetation, animals, stars, light and heat or essential phenomena (life, death), their destiny and that of the world; religion became a report between human and Universe.

The administrative, clerical organization of the religion established a set of rewards and punishments, generally posthumously, becoming an instrument of population molding.

In this stage, religion is dominant in the society, not necessarily theocratic, like ancient Israel or Tibet, like medieval Catholic and Islamic states.

In those cases, religion settled a social inequality in the name of the equality of all people in the face of divine justice and a deep resignation with the life and faith, because of the post-death reward (the "virgins rewards in paradise" for the Muslim suicidals sounds familiar?).

The current religious people experience, facing the informational and technological boom, a feeling of resignation and alienation. Even in the oldest cultural forms, notions existed indicating a stage of disbelief. Protagoras, in the fifth century BC, is the first real atheist philosopher; he said gods do not exist, in existence or mind, and that ancient people turned in gods all useful things to life, like sun, moon or rivers. This idea has been around in some form for a long time and goes by a variety of different names, depending upon how it's nuanced: physicalism, scientism, anti-realism, nominalism, strict empiricism, naturalism, etc. I think it's safe to say that modern man thinks he believes this.

Want more??

[Lynn]

How much time do you have?