Paleopsychology

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A field founded in 1997 by multi-disciplinarian Howard Bloom to "trace the evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present."

[edit] History

The term "paleopsychology" was first used in 1987 by evolutionary psychologist Kent Bailey in his book Human Paleopsychology: Applications to Aggression and Pathological Processes (NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum)

It was independently reinvented ten years later by Howard Bloom.

While researching his second book, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang to the 21st Century, Bloom noted that paleontologists often overlooked the social implications of their finds. For example, Bloom wrote in Global Brain that when "groups of the ancient bird Confuciusornis [were] found on the shore of a lake in northeast China's Liaoning Province" in the mid 1990s, the attention of paleontologists focused on the physiology of the specimens, not on the social implications of the fact that the birds were found in large groupings. Confuciusornis, Bloom noted, were discovered in what appeared to be flocks.

Bloom argued that sociality went back to the very beginnings of life. Bacteria--the early ancestors of all living things--tended to mass in groups of seven trillion or more 3.5 billion years ago. (See stromatolites.) The trilobites of 500 million years ago, Bloom pointed out, were also normally discovered in mass groupings.

Bloom contended that proto-sociality appeared in the very origins of the cosmos. The quarks that emerged in the first instant of the Big Bang, Bloom argued, instantly gathered in groups of three to form nucleons--protons and neutrons. The atoms that sprang into existence 300,000 years after the Big Bang, Bloom said, were social aggregations of protons, neutrons, and electrons. So, he noted, were the wisps of gas that gradually assembled in galaxies, then gave birth to stars.

The original Paleopsychologist Manifesto, "A Manifesto For A New Psychological Science", was issued by Bloom in May, 1997. It called for a field of study that would "trace the evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present." This manifesto led to the founding of The International Paleopsychology Project.

[edit] References:

Confuciusornis sanctus, a new Late Jurassic sauriurine bird from China, L Hou, Z Zhou, Y Gu, H Zhang - Chinese Science Bulletin, 1995

Z Zhou, L Hou. Confuciusornis and the early evolution of birds. Vertebrata PalAsiatica, 1998.

Lianhai Hou, Larry D. Martin, Zhonghe Zhou, Alan Feduccia and Fucheng Zhang. "A diapsid skull in a new species of the primitive bird Confuciusornis." Nature, 17 June 1999: 679 682.