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41 - The Psychology of Extraterrestrials

The New Frontier?

from Part IX - Applying Evolutionary Principles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2020

By
Jerome H. Barkow
Edited by
Lance Workman ,
Will Reader  and
Jerome H. Barkow
Lance Workman
Affiliation:
University of South Wales
Will Reader
Affiliation:
Sheffield Hallam University
Jerome H. Barkow
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
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Summary

We begin with very broad strokes: if we take the Ancient Greeks and Romans as founders of Western civilization and ignore the cosmologies of the many other peoples of the world, then from Ptolemy and the first century CE until sixteenth-century Europe, the Earth was the center of the universe and all else rotated around it. With the work of Copernicus, the Earth was demoted and the sun was given the honor of centrality. But by the early twentieth century, the very notion of centrality was abolished and our sun took its place as one among a vast number of stars in an expanding universe. In similar fashion, the centrality of Homo sapiens has steadily declined. In Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythology, intelligent humans were created and given dominion over the Earth by an all-powerful deity; the only other intelligences were that deity itself and its supernatural creations: angels and demons and devils and djinns.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior , pp. 507 - 514
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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