Concilience of the Sciences, Evolutionary Psychology, etc.
"The word "synoptic" comes to us from the Greek "sunoprikos," which means "seeing the whole together" or "taking a comprehensive view." It is an attempt to achieve an all-inclusive overview of one's subject matter and to see all its parts in relationship to one another."
"Synoptic philosophy sets out to see everything and see it as a whole. It is an attempt to view everything in the largest possible way. Synoptic philosophers, therefore, have a very wide range of interests and concerns and are intrigued by all areas of human knowledge. They want an overview of life, a worldview, and, it might be said, a universal view of each and all.""Aristotle and a Synoptic Philosophy", by Jonathan Dolhenty, Ph.D
Evolutionary psychology's past and present
This is from a web page at UCLA. Willian James is one of my heroes. I wrote a paper with a similar viewpoint in '67, but I did not know the name of the dicipline.
Some have claimed the preposterous notion that humans do not have "instincts". (You can exhale now, since either you were holding your breath with shock, or you really don't have breathing instincts, and you need to be reminded.) This passage recommended by Professor MuKraken puts forth an explanation for why some people did not notice the instincts, but were breathing anyway! :
Evolutionary psychology's past and present
Leda Cosmides & John Tooby
In the final pages of the Origin of Species, after he had presented the theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin made a bold prediction: "In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." Thirty years later, William James tried to do just that in his seminal book, Principles of Psychology, one of the founding works of experimental psychology (James, 1890). In Principles, James talked a lot about "instincts". This term was used to refer (roughly) to specialized neural circuits that are common to every member of a species and are the product of that species' evolutionary history. Taken together, such circuits constitute (in our own species) what one can think of as "human nature".It was (and is) common to think that other animals are ruled by "instinct" whereas humans lost their instincts and are ruled by "reason", and that this is why we are so much more flexibly intelligent than other animals. William James took the opposite view. He argued that human behavior is more flexibly intelligent than that of other animals because we have more instincts than they do, not fewer. We tend to be blind to the existence of these instincts, however, precisely because they work so well -- because they process information so effortlessly and automatically. They structure our thought so powerfully, he argued, that it can be difficult to imagine how things could be otherwise. As a result, we take "normal" behavior for granted. We do not realize that "normal" behavior needs to be explained at all. This "instinct blindness" makes the study of psychology difficult. To get past this problem, James suggested that we try to make the "natural seem strange":
Evolutionary Psychology, UCLA
Full Circle, The Moral Force of Unified Science Edward Haskel, editor
The universe is a Systems-Hierarchy. It has evolved in a cumulative manner, each higher step in this hierarchy, after the first, consisting of lower step components plus a new entity which has emerged out of the hierarchy, mutually modified.l,2 The world is therefore at the same time "richly strange and deeply simple." Edward Haskell