On Human Nature

<p>In this book Jonathan H. Turner combines sociology evolutionary biology cladistic analysis from biology and comparative neuroanatomy to examine human nature as inherited from common ancestors shared by humans and present-day great apes. Selection pressures altered this inherited legacy for the ancestors of humans—termed <em>hominins</em> for being bipedal—and forced greater organization than extant great apes when the <i>hominins </i>moved into open-country terrestrial habitats. The effects of these selection pressures increased hominin ancestors’ emotional capacities through greater social and group orientation. This shift in turn enabled further selection for a larger brain articulated speech and culture along the human line. Turner elaborates human nature as a series of overlapping complexes that are the outcome of the inherited legacy of great apes being fed through the transforming effects of a larger brain speech and culture. These complexes he shows can be understood as the cognitive complex the psychological complex the emotions complex the interaction complex and the community complex.</p>