Research Catalog

Title

The origin of human nature : a Zen Buddhist looks at evolution / Albert Low.

Author

Low, Albert.

Publication

Brighton [England] ; Portland, Or. : Sussex Academic Press, 2008.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xx, 245 p. : ill.; 23 cm.

Summary

"The Origin of Human Nature offers an original and fertile way to integrate spiritual and scientific views of human evolution. It offers a new and refreshing alternative to the way we think about our origins: random mutation (mechanistic neo-Darwinism), Genesis (God did it all personally), and Intelligent Design (God personally does what we can't otherwise account for). The result is an invigorating perspective on how our best qualities - our capacity for love, our appreciation of beauty, our altruistic capability, our creativity and intelligence - have come into being and evolved. The author takes issue with Richard Dawkins' published texts, and provides a point by point rebuttal of the neo-Darwinist argument." "How we think about our origin matters: if we think we are machines living among other machines, we will act accordingly. By showing evolution as a creative and intelligent process with its own inherent logic, The Origin of Human Nature resolves the dilemma of how to have, at the same time, both truth and ethics. Instead of starting in an imagined remote and uncertain past and moving to the present, this book starts at the certain and immediate present and works back. That consciousness, creativity, and intelligence exist is certain. The question is: how can these have evolved?"--Jacket.

Subject

• Consciousness > Religious aspects
• Consciousness

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [223]-228) and index.

Contents

On Darwin's theory -- On subjectivity and objectivity -- 'Knowing', the basis of experience -- Knowing and evolution -- On a new way of thinking -- On intention -- Intention as dynamic process -- 'Blind, unconscious, automatic' process of intention -- On Causation and programming -- What is creativity? -- Creative or mechanical evolution? -- Evolution of intelligence -- On the evolution of consciousness -- Ambiguity of 'I-You' -- Birth of ego -- On humans and evolution.

ISBN

• 9781845192600 (pb : alk. paper)
• 1845192605 (pb : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2007028505

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library