The ones who I train to become scientists go at it like the warriors they should be, overturning existing knowledge and reigning paradigms, each disc… - Robert Sapolsky

We build theologies around violence, elect leaders who excel at it, and in the case of so many women, preferentially mate with champions of human combat. When it’s the "right" type of aggression, we love it.

Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words." You say "Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops." This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.

The notion of the psychopathology of the shaman works just as readily in understanding the roots of major Western religions as well.