Apologies for cross-posting.
Colleagues might be interested in this book, which is now available via Amazon.
As this book is very trans-disciplinary, I'd grateful if you could forward this note to anyone in any disciplinary area you think might be interested.
many thanks
Colin
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The Paradoxical Primate, by Colin Talbot. Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK. 2005
January 2005, 104 pages
ISBN 0 907845 851 (paperback), £8.95/$17.90
Available via Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com or imprint.co.uk
From the Introduction......
"This is a little book about a big subject - why humans are weird. We act
in often apparently bizarre and inexplicable ways. Our behaviour seems
sometimes to be utterly unpredictable at the individual level and almost
as difficult to forecast at the group level. Human systems - such as stock
markets, fashions and musical tastes - seem to change capriciously.
This book suggests a not so novel hypothesis for how we are and a fairly
novel hypothesis about how we got to be how we are.
The not so novel hypothesis is that people are paradoxical - that is
they act in ways which are often contradictory, indeed self-contradictory.
They can behave as war-mongers and peaceniks, avaricious thieves
and altruistic Samaritans, cooperative bees and lone wolves, conformist
teachers' pets and rebels without a cause. Not just different people - the
same people can do all these things.
This idea is not so novel because it has been around a long time in various
religions - everything from Christianity seeing humans as part
divine and part devilish through to Chinese Taoist ideas about yin and
yang in human behaviour. Maybe the religions were on to something,
even if they express it in mystical terms, because there is quite a lot of
thoroughly modern and scientific literature which suggest that humans
do indeed behave paradoxically - from organisation theory, economics
and other sources (as we shall see later).
However, treating paradoxical behaviour (and its source in paradoxical
instincts) as axiomatic about humans is taking this a step further than
most writers have done so far. Most social scientists have retreated into
one of two camps: either adopting a 'blank slate' view of the sources of
human behaviour or rather one-sided views of heritable behaviour.
What is proposed systematically in these pages is that human instincts
and behaviour are permanently contradictory - which is what we mean
by paradoxical. Understanding this paradoxical nature is fundamental
to understanding our branch of life on earth.
We share some of these characteristics with some close relatives in the
primate branch of life (and even a few other animal neighbours). This is
hardly surprising as we are an evolved species and didn't (contrary to
what some people say) simply materialise out of thin air. The novel
hypothesis is just that - humans have evolved paradoxical instincts. We
are weird because we evolved that way. It is deeply buried in our evolutionary
history and is therefore ineradicable."
Prof. Colin Talbot
Director
Nottingham Policy Centre
www.nottingham.ac.uk/npc/public-policy
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Nottingham
NG7 2RD
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