Human Nature: Paleolithic Emotions, Medieval Institutions, God-Like Technology | E.O. Wilson

[Music] When we address human creativity, I think what we are dealing with right from the start is what makes us human. There's been a great shortcoming in the humanities in explaining themselves in order to improve the creative powers of the humanities. By that, I mean most considerations of human behavior, its origin, and its meaning within the humanities stops about the time of the origin of literacy, when we can deal with symbols and with the first written languages and understand them.

Or perhaps it goes back to ten thousand years to the beginnings of Neolithic civilization, but that's just an ID link of time in the origin of the emotions and the set up of the human brain that permitted our understanding of the humanities and then ultimately science to the bottoms of their depth. This then brings us to what I like to call an acronym: PAPEN. P-A-P-E-N, and that is a designation of the areas of science that are most relevant to the humanities when they address the origins, especially of the human species and the appearance of modern Homo sapiens some several hundred thousand years ago.

PAPEN stands for paleontology, anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology, and neural biology. These are the branches of science that need information on the origin of humans and the deep history of pre-human existence, which are needed to explain the origins of creativity in modern human beings and the ways and the reasons our emotions exist and rule us.

This leads to the way that I have tried to put it in saying that modern humanity is distinguished by Paleolithic emotions and medieval institutions like banks and religions and godlike technology. We are a mixed-up and, in many ways, still archaic species in transition. We are what I like to call a chimera of evolution; we walk around and exist in this fairly newly made civilization that we created, a compound of different traits of different origins and different degrees of forward evolution. [Music]