Humans

"Evolution is the ultimate example of how much a simple learning algorithm can achieve given enough data. Its input is the experience and fate of all living creatures that ever existed. (Now that's big data.) On the other hand, it's been running for over three billion years on the most powerful computer on Earth: Earth itself."
Pedro Domingos: The Master Algorithm
“Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from.” ― Abraham Lincoln
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Preamble to the Declaration of Independence

The ever-recurrent phenomena of history do not have reasonable causes. It is a mere commonplace to say that they are caused by what common parlance so aptly terms ‘human nature’. Unreasoning and unreasonable human nature causes two nations to compete, though no economic necessity compels them to do so; it induces two political parties or religions with amazingly similar programmes of salvation to fight each other bitterly and it impels an Alexander or a Napoleon to sacrifice millions of lives in his attempt to unite the world under his sceptre. We have been taught to regard some of the persons who have committed these and similar absurdities with respect, even as ‘great’ men, we are wont to yield to the political wisdom of those in charge, and we are all so accustomed to these phenomena that most of us fail to realize how abjectly stupid and undesirable the historical mass behaviour of humanity actually is.

Having realized this, however, we cannot escape the question why reasonable beings do behave so unreasonably.
On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz

As the only known beings able to comprehend, humans are privileged to be able to appreciate unfolding evidence of the awesome scale of the universe, the natural world, and of deep history. Religion and its imaginary god(s) have held us back and could lead to our destruction. The future is up to us.

Next

Media

Religion

Sex

Population

Evolution

Malthus

Demography

Short Term Thinking

Groupthink

Ability to see patterns

Confirmation Bias

Conspiracies

Dunning–Kruger effect

Bubbles

Bibliography

On Human Nature E.O.Wilson

Our Political Nature, the Evolutionary origins of what divides us by Avi Tuschman

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The Darwinian trap : the hidden evolutionary forces that explain our world (and threaten our future) by Kristian Ronn

Humans, A Monstrous History by Surekha Davies

Human: A Brief History of How We F***ed it all up by Tom Phillips