The Institute of Art and Ideas Sep 13, 2019 What is panpsychism? Does it finally offer an explanation of consciousness? From the problems with materialism to the tradition of dualism, we asked the world’s leading thinkers to explain all.

Rupert Sheldrake ep 16, 2022 A talk given on September 2nd, 2022 at the Hollyhock retreat center on Cortes Island, BC Canada. Hollyhock exists to inspire, nourish and support people who are making the world better. Their not-for-profit learning centre offers extraordinary leadership programs to advance consciousness, connection & cultural transformation. https://www.hollyhock.ca/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKun… Dr Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biology as a Fellow of Clare College. He was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics and From 2005 to 2010 was Director of the Perrott-Warrick project, Cambridge. Rupert’s latest book Ways to Go Beyond And Why They Work https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-ru…

Happiness is our nature and lies at the heart of ourself. It cannot be acquired; it can only be revealed.

–Rupert Spira

Rupert Spira (born March 13, 1960) is an English spiritual teacher, philosopher and author of the Direct Path based in Oxford, UK. Wikipedia

“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.” Antisthenses (445-365 BC) Greek philosopher

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Photo by Ernst Haas/Getty

Nick Youngis an adjunct coordinator at the Centre for Philosophy of Time at the University of Milan in Italy.

Edited by Cameron Allan McKean

As you read this article, time will seem to pass. Right now, you are reading these words, but now you are reading these ones. What was present just an instant ago seems to have already slipped into the past. You will carry this feeling with you – as objects change and move, as thoughts run through your head, as feelings ebb and flow – until you fall asleep tonight. Heraclitus thought that time was like a river: ‘Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.’ Our experience of the world seems to back this up. It certainly feels as if time is sweeping us along. Yet, physicists and philosophers will tell you that Heraclitus was wrong. Time, they say, does not actually pass. In his book The Order of Time (2018), the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli writes:

What could be more universal and obvious than this flowing?

And yet things are somewhat more complicated than this. Reality is often very different from what it seems. The Earth appears to be flat but is in fact spherical. The Sun seems to revolve in the sky when it is really we who are spinning. Neither is the structure of time what it seems to be: it is different from this uniform, universal flowing.

So, what is the real structure of time? Well, it’s complicated. Some think that time is like space: the past, present and future are all equally real locations. Some, like Rovelli, think time emerges directly from the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. Physicists and philosophers may have different approaches to the structure of time, but what unites them is a rejection of the notion that that there is a ‘now’, a present moment, that moves from the past toward the future. If that is true, and time does not really move, we are left with a question: why does it seem to pass? We would never mistake a frozen river for a running one, so, if nothing flows and everything abides, why does it feel as if time is rushing by?

Perhaps it’s just an illusion. Our senses tell us that time is passing, but we are perceiving something that isn’t really there. To see an illusion is to see a way the world could be, but isn’t: the Earth looks flat when it is actually round; optical illusions can make identical lines appear to be different lengths. These illusions present real possibilities – it’s easy to find places in the world where you could experience something flat that wasn’t an illusion, or experience one line that really was longer than another. But if Rovelli and others are right, there is nowhere you could go to truly experience the flowing time that Heraclitus talked about. It is not a real possibility. Just as the world is not set up for someone to hallucinate a square circle, the world is not set up for the illusion of time passing. So if the flow of time is not an illusion, what is it?

Thinking a thought is not like watching an ice cream melt, or a chameleon change colour

Some philosophers say that time seems to pass due to the way we perceive change. They argue that moving objects appear ‘dynamic’, and that we mistake this dynamism for time passing. To see what they mean, imagine watching a movie where each frame was shown for two full seconds. You would see a series of static scenes with people and objects in slightly different positions. First Jackie Chan’s fist is here, then there, then it is in contact with someone’s face. Although it would be clear that each image shows the actor in a slightly different position, you would not see him moving. Now, imagine seeing those frames at the speed they would be played in a cinema: 24 frames per second. Suddenly, the sense that you are looking at a series of static scenes disappears, and you can’t see where one frame ends and the next begins. Chan’s fist is no longer simply there, then there, then there; he now appears to be punching someone. You are looking at the very same series of static frames in both the slow case and the fast case. But the flowing ‘dynamism’ you see in a cinema is a quality added by your perceptual system.

What does this have to do with time seeming to pass? Our perceptual systems do not just add a dynamic look to things we see in movies, but also to the things we see in the real world. Change in the world appears to flow smoothly because our perceptual systems transform moving objects in the same way they do static frames of Jackie Chan: they superimpose a dynamism on to them that they do not possess. Because we fail to recognise that this is a product of our minds rather than a feature of reality, we have come to believe that the world is dynamic, and that time really flows. That’s one theory, anyway.

But what about those moments when we are not perceiving change? The room you are currently in might be entirely still, yet time seems to continually flow. In such cases, we might be tempted to say that time still passes – that the world seems dynamic – because we continue to experience our thoughts changing just like we experience objects changing in the world. However, though thoughts rush through our heads from the moment we wake up to the moment we sleep, we don’t experience individual thoughts changing in the same way that we perceive changes in objects. Thinking a thought is not like watching an ice cream melt, or a chameleon change colour. As an experiment, try to think a single thought – make sure you don’t accidentally think two thoughts. Keep it in your mind, and observe whether it changes. I suspect that you found this exercise difficult. Thoughts jump around, and it is hard to know where one ends and the next begins. The experience of thinking is nothing like seeing objects change. Our inner thoughts don’t explain why time still seems to pass even when we are not perceiving differences in the world. Appealing to our perceptions of change to explain the feeling of flowing time might not be such a promising approach after all. Something else is going on here.

The arguments above – that flowing time is an illusion or a result of how we experience changing objects – appeal to our perception of the world to explain why time seems to pass. We see, smell, hear or feel things moving and changing, but perhaps the feeling of time passing is not related to our experience of sensing the world. We also feel pain in our bodies; feel emotions, intuitions and yearnings. The important word here is ‘feel’. In these cases, we are not perceiving the outside world. These non-perceptual experiences include the feeling of doing things, of making changes in the world: we feel ourselves walking and running, opening doors and tapping screens, talking and listening. I think time passing is a result of how we experience the changes that we make in our daily lives.

The possibility of performing no bodily or mental action whatsoever is never an option

When you reach for your coffee cup or stand up from your desk, you have a sense that you are causing your body to move. In a similar way, you experience yourself as the author of most of the bodily movements that you make. You can also experience yourself performing mental actions: you can deliberately shift your attention away from these words to the sound of the traffic outside or consciously try to remember the last place you saw your house keys. The sense that we are causing our bodily or mental actions can be thought of as a unique type of change experience. However, this kind of change is not one we perceive out there in the world (like watching Jackie Chan punch someone or hearing a plane fly through the air). It’s a kind of change we feel ourselves causing.

When you move your body, you feel yourself making changes in the world around you; when you refocus your thoughts, you experience yourself changing the landscape of your mind. We could call this ‘agentive change’ – change that an agent (like you, for example) experiences themselves as causing – and it is pervasive in a way that perceptual experiences of change in our external environment are not. As long as you are awake, you won’t stop thinking, meaning that the feeling of making mental changes persists (even in a sensory deprivation tank).

Tied up with our sense that we are the cause of our actions is the feeling that we can stop doing whatever it is we are doing and start doing something different. If you wanted, you could close this browser tab right now and get up from where you are sitting. But, though we can change our behaviour, the possibility of performing no bodily or mental action whatsoever is never an option. As long as you are awake, you will never feel as if you can stop causing change. Jean-Paul Sartre declared that mankind was ‘condemned to be free’; similarly, we find ourselves at every waking moment condemned to act. Of course, we stop acting when we fall asleep but, as any insomniac will tell you, sleep is something you must wait for, not something you do. You can hasten sleep’s arrival, but you cannot switch yourself off like a laptop.

I believe that this leads us to mistake the feeling of doing – moving, thinking, focusing – for the feeling of time passing. We experience ourselves as perpetually, helplessly active. This is likely a product of our neurophysiology. Brains don’t stop: information is continually being received, recalled, processed and responded to, so it is not surprising that we always find ourselves doing something. But we are not consciously aware of this fact. In fact, consciousness does not provide any explanation as to why we find ourselves in such a state. We are driven to keep making changes. And it is here that we make a mistake. Rather than blaming our neurophysiology for the feeling that we must constantly act, we blame the world outside: we mistakenly think that some outside force (like a flowing river of time) is responsible for the ever-present feeling that we are being ‘pushed along’.

We are condemned to act. It is not, as Heraclitus imagined, that ‘everything flows and nothing abides.’ Instead, the feeling of being swept along is the result of our brains’ constant churning. We mistake our own momentum for that of the world. Time does not flow. We do.

Attaining and maintaining power lies at the heart of almost all animal societies. And it’s as devious as human politicking

The common loon. Photo by Lawrence Sawyer/Getty

Lee Alan Dugatkin

is professor of biology at the University of Louisville. His books include Power in the Wild: The Subtle and Not-So-Subtle Ways Animals Strive for Control over Others (2022) and, along with Lyudmila Trut, of How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) (2017).

Edited by Sally Davies

30 September 2022 (aeon.co)

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The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power … We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end … The object of power is power.
– from Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell

Animals don’t relinquish power once they get it either. But for nonhumans, power is always a means to an end. Many ends, in fact, including food, mates and shelter. Attaining and then maintaining power – defined as the ability to direct, control, or influence the behaviour of other creatures or resources – lies at the heart of almost all animal societies.

The quest for power in nonhumans has been of interest since the days of Charles Darwin. Thomas Henry Huxley, whom Darwin called ‘my good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel, ie the Devil’s gospel’ didn’t mince words when it came to power in the animal kingdom. In Huxley’s essay The Struggle for Existence: A Programme (1888), Darwin’s prolocutor said that the animal world was equivalent to a ‘gladiator’s show’, at least as far as a moralist would be concerned:

The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given … the weakest and the stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and the shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their circumstances, but not the best in any other sense, survived.

Fast-forward to the 1970s, when the theoretical framework for the modern study of animal behaviour started coming into view. No more gladiators; instead, biologists and theorists talk of ‘resource-holding potential’ or ‘resource-holding power’ (RHP), a measure of ability to acquire and defend resources. Still, when animal behaviourists applied the idea, the assumption was usually that larger, stronger animals had greater RHP. There was some discussion about the fact that fighting skills weren’t the same thing as sheer size but, then again, those skills were rarely thought to involve nuanced techniques for gaining ascendancy, such as gathering reconnaissance, assessing the field, and networking with others to acquire power.

More recently, animal behaviourists have come to recognise these more subtle ways that animals seek power over those around them. Being the ‘toughest’ is only a part of the picture – ‘shrewdest’ matters a lot too. Animals spy on rivals for power, display power in different ways depending on their audience, form coalitions to rise in rank, and camouflage themselves to climb the power ladder. All of this is completely reshaping how we think about nonhuman power struggles. New research provides a fresh window into the emergence of sociality, and takes us a step closer to an integrated and conceptually powerful model of the evolution of power.

The mist fades and the water shimmers on the lakes in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. The white and blackish birds known as common loons (Gavia immer), orange eyes aglow, swim on the surface. An occasional male sings a ‘tremolo’ call that echoes across the shore and seems to please the female swimming by his side. But that peaceful façade masks intense rounds of combat.

Even when being tough, common loons are also shrewd, and their many battles play out more like operas than prize fights. A large number of common loons in the United States spend their winters in Florida or the Carolinas, and then head north to their territories on many of Wisconsin’s 15,000 lakes. These birds are monogamous, and pairs often stay together for years, returning to their home lake each spring. During the breeding season, a male finds a spot for his and his mate’s nest, often on a small ‘island’ that rises a metre or so above the water, so as to reduce the chance of raids from raccoons and skunks.

A loon’s territory is a valuable commodity – only territorial individuals have the opportunity to mate – and power is all about controlling it. Because territories are so precious, loons in possession of them are sometimes challenged by birds called floaters who lack their own territory and sometimes attempt a violent overthrow. If a male floater’s coup works, the territorial male is deposed, but his mate remains, pairing with the victor.

Naturally, resident males do their best to thwart such power grabs. When a male spots a floater, he produces a ‘yodel’ call: the frequency of a yodel is correlated with body mass, which means a floater can get a rough gauge of the condition of the territorial male. Yodels also appear to signal motivation: when the two short notes that are part of the call are repeated often, floaters act in a more cautious manner, suggesting they take this to mean a territory-holder is primed to fight.

Within a week of losing power and being turfed out, many evicted males were found dead

Floaters are omnipresent, and the majority of visits they make to a territorial male’s home are fairly mundane. Once a floater male lands on the water, the territorial male yodels, swims over to the floater, and performs a series of movements such as head bows and circle dances. Usually, a floater flies off shortly thereafter, with the power structure remaining as it was. But that’s not always how it plays out. About 25 per cent of floater incursions lead to low-level aggression, and 5 per cent lead to more intense escalations, with loons lunging at the beak of an opponent, or birds simultaneously grasping each other’s heads, beating their wings against each other or even dunking an opponent’s head under water for long stretches. All in all, 10 per cent of all intrusions result in the power structure being overturned, with the resident male evicted and replaced by the floater.

Sometimes, evicted males stick around on the periphery of their (former) territory, but new owners don’t take well to that and tend to search them out, making it clear who is now in charge. Within a week of losing power and being turfed out, many evicted males were found dead by the biologist Walter Piper and his colleague who study loons. Those that survived eviction ended up on subpar territories nearby.

Fatal fighting like this is rare in animals. When it happens, it is often in short-lived species that reproduce once: if everything depends on that one bout of reproduction, it might be worth fighting to the death for. But loons live for 25 or even 30 years, and have many clutches of chicks. Why are they the exception to the rule?

Victims of deadly encounters are usually older males holding high-quality territories. Young floaters target such territories, and the problem for older males with nests is that they lose body mass as they age. That process is sped up when their territories are especially productive, because of all the energy expended on rearing chicks over the years. What’s more, older territory-holders yodel more due to all the intrusions. Because yodels provide information not only on aggressive motivation, but also on body mass, they can inform floaters that a resident male is a prime target for a takeover.

Is it really worth it for an older resident male to be willing to fight to the death when matched up against a younger, stronger floater? That depends on his options. Young floaters will fight hard to land a territory but, if they’re losing, they will leave rather than chance serious injury or death. They live to fight another day. For an older male already in place on a productive territory, the stakes are different. If he’s evicted, he’s unlikely to have the wherewithal to usurp another productive territory; as Piper put it in a newspaper interview, ‘the wheels start to come off’ late in life, which means that a desperado fight-to-the-death-if-necessary strategy becomes a viable option. Power, in the form of territories, provides a male loon with riches – but, in so doing, it may also lock him into a do-or-die contest with a young upstart.

The assessments involved in loon fights are shrewd and complex, but little blue penguins (Eudyptula minor) take it to another level. If power were only about fighting, there would be a limit to how much it can reveal about sociality, since animals are not fighting the vast majority of the time. By contrast, if you are a little blue penguin, it seems that a fair chunk of time is spent spying on your rivals.

Living in the caves and burrows on the eastern side of Banks Peninsula in New Zealand, as well as areas of Australia, little blue penguins stand at only about a foot tall and are the smallest of all their kin. Both male and female little blues incubate eggs, and they are as cute as can be – but they’re loud. Really loud. ‘There would be these periods of time,’ says Joseph Waas, who studies these birds, ‘when all the calling would die down and then one bird or maybe two birds would call, and then you would get this incredible contagious effect until everyone started calling.’

In cave colonies, penguins nest about 2-3 metres apart, usually up against the wall of the cave. The main cave Waas works in is at Ōtanerito Bay; when inside, he must lie on his belly and crawl through a mix of dried guano and feathers to study his subjects. There he sees penguins fighting, interlocking bills and flipping one another ‘almost like a judo throw’, as he describes it. Fights are often followed by a ‘triumph call’, emitted by the victor. This is a high-pitched inhalation paired with a bray-sounding exhalation, repeated time and again. Winners often stand up with their flippers as they belt this call, turning it into a triumph display while the losing penguin slinks away.

Waas was certainly impressed by the triumph calls, and soon realised that he was not the only one. Aside from the losing male, it seemed to him that other penguins were also paying attention – even spying on – the displays of power. Waas wanted to understand what was going on, but the cave was far too chaotic to do any controlled experiments. Fortunately, there was another colony of little blues nearby, living outdoors in burrows that a local couple (Shireen and Francis Helps), who are interested in conservation, had built for them.

These spying little blue males were clearly shaken when those in power were nearby

All the birds in that colony were marked, so that the Helps, and then Wass, knew their age and sex. The artificial burrows were all the same dimensions, a penguin-comfortable 300 mm x 350 mm x 200 mm. Instead of the chaos of the cave, where any experiment on triumph displays and penguin espionage was impossible, Waas had a colony with marked birds living in identical homes. He decided to run a playback experiment, placing speakers near certain burrows, which allowed him and his colleagues to control which penguins heard what.

Waas and his team studied 27 males and 16 females who were incubating eggs alone at their burrows while their partners were off foraging in the ocean. They gently removed an egg and placed it into an incubator. In its stead, they placed an artificial egg with sensors that recorded the bird’s pulse, and so indirectly its heart rate. Speakers were placed at varying distances away from that burrow and broadcast the sounds of a fight, followed by either the triumph call made by the winner of the fight, or the calls made by the loser. A microphone near the nest recorded the vocalisations of the penguin after he or she heard what was coming from the speaker.

When males heard the triumph call of the victor in a fight, their heart rate jumped to around 30 beats per second above normal. Yet no such surge was found when they heard the sounds of losers. These spying little blue males were clearly shaken when those in power were nearby. And they acted the part as well, vocalising more in response to the sounds of a loser, who is presumably a weaker potential opponent, than of a winner. Females showed increased heart rates when they heard the triumph call of winners, but also when they heard the call made by losers, and they never vocalised after hearing the sounds played back. They appeared to want no part of any male power struggles.

Sometimes, though, maintaining power means not only spying on your rivals, but performing a role. And all good actors need to know their audience, as the case of chimpanzees shows.

While studying two troops in the Budongo Forest in Uganda, Klaus Zuberbühler and his colleagues discovered that chimpanzees engaged in power struggles care not only about whom they should be paying attention to, but also who’s paying attention to them. Both aggressor and victim chimpanzees scream during a power struggle, but Zuberbühler was struck by the fact that, depending on who is listening, chimpanzees on the losing side appeared to use their cries to exaggerate their unfortunate circumstances. He began to think that the nature of the audience was the key to all of this. ‘If you are being attacked … [often] the only way to get out of it is to get someone else to join, and that may turn the tide,’ Zuberbühler says. ‘If the [victim’s] scream recruits help, then it really matters who is nearby. Especially if it is the alpha [top-ranked] male, who does not tolerate violence among others.’

When Zuberbühler and his colleague Katie Slocombe analysed 84 chimp power struggles, they discovered that participants in mildly aggressive encounters didn’t pay attention to who was in the audience, or even if there was an audience. But when contests got more violent, the victims’ screams were longer and more intense when listeners were nearby, at least sometimes. If one or more of the chimpanzees in the audience held a rank in the dominance hierarchy that was equal to or above the rank of the aggressor, chimps on the losing end of the fight emitted longer and more intense screams. This, in turn, led the victim to receive support from the high-ranking observers around 20 per cent of the time, with the more senior chimpanzee intervening to break up fights.

Nonhuman power dynamics exist not only between individuals, but between groups too. These are a fact of life for white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus capucinus), who live in tight-knit cohorts on Barro Colorado Island in Panama and elsewhere in Central America. Fortunately for Margaret Crofoot, whose 2008 dissertation included research on such power struggles, one capuchin in each cadre wears a radio collar linked to an automated radio telemetry system (ARTS).

ARTS sent Crofoot location data on collared individuals every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day. This informed Crofoot about the group’s movements, but it didn’t say anything about what the group members were doing. For that, she and her assistants used more traditional sampling methods, going out early each day, rotating between capuchin groups for three-hour stints, to see who was feeding, grooming, displaying aggression and so forth.

Capuchin groups have fairly well-defined boundaries, but there’s often a 20 per cent zone of overlap between neighbouring groups. That overlap zone is where most intergroup interactions happen: every three days or so, conflict breaks out. Many times, one collective just turns tail and leaves. Other times, capuchins from both groups rush at one another up in the trees. If neither group leaves, then individuals from each group ‘line up on the ground like American football teams’, Crofoot says, ‘lunging and screaming … and chasing each other.’ Eventually, one group backs down and departs. Knock-down, drag-out fights are rare, but they do happen. Losing these conflicts comes at a cost. For one, individuals in groups that lost had to spend more time travelling around looking for things to eat, and were more likely to end up foraging in low-quality food patches.

In another study, Crofoot and her colleagues found that, generally speaking, larger groups won conflicts, unless a larger group invaded deep into the territories of its smaller neighbours, where they were much more likely to lose. Every additional group member increased the chances of winning a group contest by 10 per cent. Still, smaller groups at the centre of their territory were a force to be reckoned with: every 100 metres that a neighbouring larger group moved from the centre of its home range, its chances of winning an interaction with a neighbouring group decreased by a whopping 31 per cent.

Large groups venturing from their heartlands were especially susceptible to free-riding

Crofoot wondered why small groups defeated large groups who intruded too deeply into their territories. Maybe, she hypothesised, large groups weren’t really as large in practice as they appeared on a head count. Perhaps not everyone in those larger groups was contributing their fair share in combat? Maybe some capuchins in larger groups were ‘free-riders’, relying on their groupmates to pay the cost when contests broke out?

To test these hypotheses, Crofoot and her colleagues created a series of 60-second audio files from four capuchin groups they were studying. Those recordings had noises associated with foraging, including food calls, falling fruit, and monkeys on the move. Halfway through each audio recording, screams associated with power struggles were inserted. Sounds made by all group members were spliced into the file, providing a rough estimate of the group size for those listening. Capuchins in a group were then played audio files made from a neighbouring group, simulating a territorial intrusion. Playbacks came from a speaker placed either in the centre of a group’s territory or at the edge. If a capuchin left the tree it was in and moved at least five metres in the direction of a speaker, Crofoot assumed it was ready to participate in an encounter with another group; if it left the tree and moved five metres in the opposite direction to the speaker, she assumed it was retreating and so free-riding, relying on its groupmates to defend the collective from the neighbouring band of monkeys.

Capuchins were nearly seven times as likely to approach a speaker if that speaker was placed in the centre of their territory rather than on the edge of it. Intrusion deep into their territory seemed to really rile them up. Free-riding was strongly tied to location as well: the chances that a capuchin retreated – that is, acted as a free-rider – was much lower when the incursion was at the centre of its territory. All of which means that large groups venturing from their heartlands were especially susceptible to free-riding; that in turn helps explain why smaller groups could defeat larger groups, when the big-group incursions were deep in the smaller group’s territory.

All around the planet, animal behaviourists continue to peel back the layers of complexity around how creatures of all kinds acquire, retain, lose and claw back power. But there’s much more work to be done before we have a wide-reaching, integrated model of power in nonhumans. It’s hard to say exactly what this will look like, but I can hazard some guesses. The theory, if and when it arrives, will almost certainly be informed by new technological advances associated with gathering behavioural data. GPS tracking is just the tip of the iceberg: in many species, animals have been fitted with small devices that ‘talk’ to one another, so that when two animals are within some set distance, the collars collect data on both of them. While observing animals in the field (or lab) is irreplaceable, how that data is collected is changing at a breakneck pace.

The model will also likely be informed by what is going on inside animals as power dynamics play out. New advances in endocrinology and neurobiology will allow us to better understand not only how power-related behaviours affect hormone levels and neurobiological activity, but how such physiological processes affect the dynamics of power. Likewise, work on gene expression will help us gauge how genes ‘turning off’ and ‘turning on’ affects creatures’ place in a hierarchy.

Finally, any truly effective model must take account of evolutionary forces and focus on the costs and benefits of power in a particular ecological context, over long periods of time. This means that, as we continue to amass more and more data on power dynamics, we might be able to employ this model to search for broader patterns. Consider the case of power and spying. Do we see spying mostly in animals with a certain level of cognitive sophistication? If so, what level? Is spying primarily done via visual cues? Or does it work just as well using other senses? Does espionage function especially well in certain kinds of habitats? Which ones, and why? We can easily replace ‘spying’ with ‘audience effects’ or ‘complex assessments of individuals and groups’. In time, I’m confident we will be able to answer those and many more power-related questions in order to deepen our understanding of the evolution of sociality in nonhumans – and perhaps, even, in ourselves.

Biology Evolution Animals and humans

YaleCourses Sep 2, 2009 Introduction to New Testament (RLST 152) We have known of the existence of the Gospel of Thomas from ancient writers, but it was only after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices that the actual text became available. The Gospel of Thomas is basically a collection of sayings, or logia, that sometimes seem similar, perhaps more primitive than sayings found in the canonical Gospels. Sometimes, however, the sayings seem better explained as reflecting a “Gnostic” understanding of the world. This involves a rejection of the material world and a desire for gnosis, a secret knowledge, in order to escape the world and return to the divine being. 00:00 – Chapter 1. The Nag Hammadi Codices and Thomasine Literature 10:35 – Chapter 2. The Sayings of the Gospel of Thomas 28:15 – Chapter 3. Proto-orthodoxy and “Gnosticism” Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses This course was recorded in Spring 2009.

University of California Television (UCTV) Sep 30, 2022 On March 4th, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address. He considered it his “greatest speech” and his “best effort.” Join Academy Award-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss and best-selling Lincoln biographer Dr. Ronald C. White for a fascinating look at the Second Inaugural Address. Through a powerful, fascinating voyage of discovery, one comes away with a better understanding of where the country was in 1865 and Lincoln’s feeling towards the Civil War, the defeated Confederacy and, perhaps most importantly, American slavery.A century and a half later, as the U.S. faces a similar struggle over who we are as a people and a nation, Lincoln’s speech still resonates. [10/2022] [Show ID: 38385] Explore More Public Affairs & Politics on UCTV (https://www.uctv.tv/public-affairs) Public Affairs UCTV goes beyond the headlines to explore economics, public policy, race, immigration, health policy and more. Hear directly from the researchers so you can be informed to make important decisions. Explore More Humanities on UCTV (https://www.uctv.tv/humanities) The humanities encourage us to think creatively and explore questions about our world. UCTV explores human culture through literature, history, ethics, philosophy, cinema and religion so we can better understand the human experience. UCTV is the broadcast and online media platform of the University of California, featuring programming from its ten campuses, three national labs and affiliated research institutions. UCTV explores a broad spectrum of subjects for a general audience, including science, health and medicine, public affairs, humanities, arts and music, business, education, and agriculture. Launched in January 2000, UCTV embraces the core missions of the University of California — teaching, research, and public service – by providing quality, in-depth television far beyond the campus borders to inquisitive viewers around the world. (https://www.uctv.tv)