Omnivore - As We Evolve: Empathy, Monogamy, and Networked Minds?

This is an excellent and diverse collection of links from Bookfoum's Omnivore blog, this time dedicated to the various possibilities of evolution - past and future.


As We Evolve

AUG 8 2013 

9:00AM

• Thomas Grund, Christian Waloszek, and Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich): How Natural Selection Can Create Both Self- and Other-Regarding Preferences, and Networked Minds. 
• How could we engineer humans to have more empathy? Charlie Jane Anders wonders. 
• A study says some species have become monogamous through evolution and, for primates, infanticide is at its root. 
• The work is only beginning on understanding the human genome: Elizabeth Quill interviews Eric D. Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. 
• Marek Kohn on the Neanderthal mind: Troglodytes who couldn't compete, or humans with complex culture?
• This island life: Lewis Spurgin on the strange biology of island populations highlights the role of chance, not just selection, in evolutionary change. 
• What is the fastest articulated motion a human can execute? On the mechanics and evolution of human throwing. 
• Infections, institutions, and life history: Daniel Hruschka on searching for the origins of individualism and collectivism. 
• Living people linked to 5,500 year-old DNA. 
• What will become of humans as we evolve under the selective pressures of our modern lives and technology? If we adapt to some of the more bizarre elements of the present, humans could undergo some surreal changes. 
• Nobody expects atoms and molecules to have purposes, so why do we still think of living things in this way?

Unlimited Realities - "Transformation Through Intimacy" Robert Augustus Masters

This is a nice interview with Robert Augustus Masters about his new book, an updated edition of Transformation through Intimacy, Revised Edition: The Journey toward Awakened Monogamy - the interview was conducted by Lisa Zimmer on her (new-to-me) podcast Unlimited Realities.

"Transformation through Intimacy" Robert Augustus Masters

by Unlimited Realities with Lisa Zimmer

Listen to internet radio with Unlimited Realities with Lisa Zimmer on Blog Talk Radio

Thursday May 25, 2012

Robert Augustus Master, PhD is an integral psychotherapist, trainer of psychotherapists, relationship expert, and spiritual teacher (www.robertmasters.com).

Dr. Masters has written a book  on intimacy, monogomy, and the depth of love in relationships to teach us how to evolve our personal relationships. His wisdom is shown in how well the detailed and easily applied tools he shows us can actually create a deepening within our committed relationships.

The understanding of crucible/sanctuary of our committed unions allows us to evolve those connections easily.

This book is full of Dr. Masters's genius. A must read book for all desiring to feel, have, experience more love in their lives.

Robert Augustus Masters - The Evolution of Intimate Relationship

Integral Life's series called Integral Post features leaders in that community penning an article a month (give or take). One of those leaders is Robert Augustus Masters - and his most recent article is from the Introduction to the reissue of his excellent book, Transformation Through Intimacy: The Journey Toward Awakened Monogamy.

The Evolution of Intimate Relationship

Posted February 12th, 2012 by Robert Augustus... in Integral Post

	Image: Double Helix by Mark Henson

Robert Augustus Masters shares the introduction to his new book, Transformation Through Intimacy: The Journey Toward Awakened Monogamy, now available for preorder on Amazon.

Intimate relationship has over the last four or five decades evolved so far from its long-established ways—mutating in diverse directions—that its very nature and structuring, once a largely unquestioned given, is clearly up for some deep questioning and reformulating.

Reformulating, revisioning, restructuring, reinventing—how we tend to look at intimate relationship is changing almost as rapidly as intimate relationship itself.

One result of this is that many of us do not have a particularly clear view of intimate relationship and its possibilities. Nonetheless, we have to admit that something is different about intimate relationship now. We look back just two generations, and it seems as if we’re looking back many hundreds of years. Things are shifting that fast.

For a very long time, intimate relationship was viewed and lived, with few exceptions, as an alternative—and not necessarily an equivalent alternative!—to spiritual life. There was the householder, and there was the spiritual seeker, and there wasn’t much overlap between them. As wide as this split was for men, it was even wider for women. Intimate relationship was something you did—or endured—until there was cultural permission to do something “deeper.”

Now there not only is a significant amount of cultural permission—small by conventional standards yet substantial enough to register on societal radar screens—for something “deeper” to happen within intimate relationship, but also an increasing pull toward it. So intimate relationship has, at its leading edge, become less a prelude to spiritual opening and awakening, and more a catalyst or crucible for it.

Read the whole column.