A. V. Newton retired as a senior lecturer and emeritus consultant in the Faculty of Medicine in Liverpool, where he was mainly involved in teaching dental students. His research interests in pain were greatly assisted by membership of the local neuroscience group, ‘The Brain Cell’. This inspired a lifetime interest in neuroscience, the fruits of which have been applied to the interesting and important puzzle of human origins. He is a past chairman of the University Art Group and long-term committee member. He is married, with three children.
Humanity has long sought to answer the big questions, like who are we and where are we going? It is possible that some of these questions are actually too big to be tackled by the rational mind. Religions claim to have the answer, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to believe in them. If you don’t believe in religious answers, you have a rather more complex answer to the problems of existence. Among other things, there arises the question of why so many people do believe in religions and a rather smaller number of people find it difficult or impossible to accept religious tenets. This seems to be a neurological problem, even a psychiatric one. What is the answer?The preceding book in this series, ‘The Unreasonable Silence of the World’ provided one interpretation of the available evidence in relation to the unique survival of Homo sapiens out of a wide variety of hominid forms following our departure from the primate line approximately seven million years ago. The remarkable invention of mythologies occurred about 100,000 years ago, dominated human belief and social systems until the present day, and was probably mainly responsible for that unique survival. Mythology achieved this dominance by creating a reality that relegated the real world to second place. ‘Culture: The Great Escape’ explores this departure - the escape - as it affects the modern world and considers how it is that science is often thought to be reducing these traditional avenues of escape.
Most people are interested in their roots, often being highly gratified if their personal ancestry can be traced back to some notable historical character. Roots, however, go a lot further back than the written records about people and are implicated in the puzzle of our origin: why are we such symbolically proficient biological creatures that have distanced ourselves so far away from the rest of the animal kingdom?
One solution is the magical one, that we arrived at the behest of an omnipotent being 6,000 years ago, fully formed and frolicking with the dinosaurs, as did the rest of our fellow creatures. For those who think the magical solution is a trifle simplistic there is the real problem that the human brain reached modern size around 250,000 years ago – but our lifestyle was still exceedingly primitive. Our most notable talents are therefore less than 150,000 years old and arrived, frequently tinged with serious flaws now termed, collectively, as the mental illnesses.
Cover painting: The Thinker and the Thought by A. V. Newton.
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