Only recently have scientists rediscovered that the compassion, joy, and unselfish love so important to religion and to the Neolithic mind are not irrelevant to science. You see, the Neolithic (hunter-gatherer) mind that “natural selection built” was more like that of a four-year-old—all images, animism, magic, and emotion—than like that of a modern, highly educated adult. Dependence on the written word and the use of the scientific experiment to verify imagined cause and effect were still far in the future by the time that natural selection had completed the “hardware” of the Homo sapiens brain. Moreover, ever since our invention of new “software” like the printing press and the scientific method, we have had less and less respect for the superstitious, mystical brain that natural selection built. The task of a thoughtful future humanity m...
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