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Are human beings bent on violence, negativity, conflict, and war? Is it in our genes?
Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
You would think that by this time in our history we would be advanced enough to be past the inclination to murder, hate, and abuse one another. But we aren’t. We have inherited a brain predisposed to very bad habits of thinking, beginning with the way we have separated ourselves from all else so that our lives have become me-centric — self-centered, self-involved, self-obsessed, selfish. No wonder we cannot break the habit of war and revolution. We as a species are stuck!
The Smithsonian Institute reports that “Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years…”
Giving us some perspective, Smithsonian researchers say that “the long evolutionary journey that created modern humans began with a single step — or more accurately — with the ability to walk on two legs. One of our earliest-known ancestors, Sahelanthropus, began the slow transition from ape-like movement some six…