The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder
Robert Ardrey's Nature of Man Series Book 3
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Narrated by:
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Mikael Naramore
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By:
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Robert Ardrey
About this listen
Violation of biological command has been the failure of social man. Vertebrates though we may be, we have ignored the law of equal opportunity since civilization's earliest hours. Sexually reproducing beings though we are, we pretend today that the law of inequality does not exist. And enlightened though we may be, while we pursue the unattainable we make impossible the realizable.
©1970, 2014 STORYDESIGN, LTD. (P)2015 STORYDESIGN, LTD.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Sex, Time, and Power offers a tantalizing answer to an age-old question: Why did big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? The key, according to Shlain, is female sexuality. Drawing on an awesome breadth of research, he shows how, long ago, the narrowness of the newly bipedal human female's pelvis and the increasing size of infants' heads precipitated a crisis for the species. Natural selection allowed for reconfiguration of hormonal cycles, entraining women with the periodicity of the moon - and imbuing women with the concept of time.
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Interesting conjecture
- By DJKPP on 10-15-20
By: Leonard Shlain
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Before the Dawn
- Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
- By: Nicholas Wade
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Just in the last three years a flood of new scientific findings, driven by revelations discovered in the human genome, has provided compelling new answers to many long-standing mysteries about our most ancient ancestors, the people who first evolved in Africa and then went on to colonize the whole world. Nicholas Wade weaves this host of news-making findings together for the first time into an intriguing new history of the human story before the dawn of civilization.
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Amazing information
- By Albert on 06-15-07
By: Nicholas Wade
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Genesis
- The Deep Origin of Societies
- By: Edward O. Wilson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 3 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Genesis demonstrates that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least 17 - among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp - have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation.
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Simply awful
- By Mike A Klotz on 02-07-20
By: Edward O. Wilson
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The Creative Spark
- How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional
- By: Agustín Fuentes
- Narrated by: Agustín Fuentes
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tradition of Jared Diamond's million-copy-selling classic Guns, Germs, and Steel, a bold new synthesis of paleontology, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology that overturns misconceptions about race, war and peace, and human nature itself, answering an age-old question: What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth? Creativity. It is the secret of what makes humans special, hiding in plain sight.
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What's new?
- By Mark on 05-02-17
By: Agustín Fuentes
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Sex and War
- How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
- By: Malcom Potts, Thomas Hayden
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Human beings have been battling one another since time immemorial. But why war and terrorism? Why are men almost always the killers, and why are war and sex so inextricably linked? Why do we kill members of our own species intentionally, when few other animals do so?
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This is the Berkley view point on terriorism
- By J.T. on 08-22-11
By: Malcom Potts, and others
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A Troublesome Inheritance
- Genes, Race, and Human History
- By: Nicholas Wade
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years - to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes.
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This is NOT Racism!...
- By Douglas on 06-01-14
By: Nicholas Wade
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Evolution
- The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory
- By: Edward J. Larson
- Narrated by: John McDonough
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Edward J. Larson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and eminent science historian. This marvelously readable, yet sumptuously erudite work traces the development of the scientific theory of evolution. From Darwin's essential trip to the Galápagos, to the most contemporary studies in sociobiology, this work takes listeners both into the field and laboratories of the world's greatest evolutionary scientists, and shows how the theory of evolution has itself evolved.
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An Excellent History!
- By Bradly D. Elder on 08-13-07
By: Edward J. Larson
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The World Until Yesterday
- What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
- By: Jared Diamond
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 18 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence.
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A visit with our ancient ancestors
- By BRB on 01-30-13
By: Jared Diamond
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Letters to a Young Scientist
- By: Edward O. Wilxon
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Edward O. Wilson has distilled sixty years of teaching into a book for students, young and old. Reflecting on his coming-of-age in the South as a Boy Scout and a lover of ants and butterflies, Wilson threads these twenty-one letters, each richly illustrated, with autobiographical anecdotes that illuminate his career - both his successes and his failures - and his motivations for becoming a biologist.
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Long on biography, short on advice
- By A. Mandelin on 08-02-18
By: Edward O. Wilxon
What listeners say about The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- wbiro
- 07-14-16
Good Science, Acknowledged Inadequate Philosophy
The book contains a vast amount of science - verified knowledge that still holds true after four and a half decades of vast change (and further verified knowledge) - the author could have stopped half-way through for a full book, so you still get a lot of science for your money.
The author does do a lot of weak philosophizing, and he readily admits that philosophy was (and it still is) weak, noting the "shuddering, drunken, tottering of a social structure supported by an inadequate philosophy" (he was speaking of urban ills, but it applies across the board of human existence). This did not stop the author from heaping copious amounts of such inadequate philosophy onto the reader/listener (and probably spurred him to at least try to remedy it - he failed).
He does attempt to correlate the observed animal individual and social behavior with that of humans, and I noted that it does correlate - to lower humans (who do not yet have my new philosophy) (my family dismissed me out-of-hand, but I counter with, "Hey, at least it cuts across race, religion, and gender - now you have people who are only separated by being enlightened or not"). So the book gives us a wealth of insight into our instinctive side (the Freudian 'Id') - if we went around mindlessly (like most people do). I also came away knowing where pulp fiction writers get their character material.
There is a lot of fascinating accounts of species population dynamics that will surprise anyone who has heretofore gone on conventional wisdom (that populating control in animals is resource-driven - it is not always the case, in some species there are fascinating inborn self-regulating genetic behaviors involved - like lemmings mass-self-destructing, female titmice aborting if they even smell another male within four days (population too dense) and snowshoe hares dying off out of sheer nervous breakdowns (again population too dense - no matter what the state of local resources are - more from territorial issues). So the book is still eye-opening in many ways to the non-population dynamics non-animal behavior specialist (meaning me, and probably you).
The author is a good writer, and gives us a lot of great passages, such as "materialism has been the human's rainbow's end" and "tyrants find their power in the mob", and great observations made, such as "animal (and human) play - where there is no great penalty for making wrong decisions".
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- Anonymous User
- 10-11-24
Excellent
A must read to anyone who considers himself to be a human.
Continues the excellent level of Ardrey’s previous nature of man series books.
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