1 hr
Beliefs Are Real For Those Who Hold Them feat. Agustín Fuentes unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc
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- Business
“Belief” as a word can take on so many meanings. Most people only think about it in terms of religion. But our guest says belief plays a central role in many other critical distinctively human things, including economics, love and politics. He further defines belief as the “capacity humans have to commit wholly and fully to this mix of experience, imagination, ideology, thoughts, and ideas.”
Agustín Fuentes is a primatologist and biological anthropologist at Princeton University whose research focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. From chasing monkeys in jungles and cities, to exploring the lives of our evolutionary ancestors, to examining human health, behavior, and diversity across the globe, Agustín is interested in both the big questions and the small details of what makes humans and our close relations tick.
His written works include “Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths about Human Nature,” “Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being,” and “The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional.”
Greg and Agustín dig into the world of believing, discussing how human niches differ from other organisms, tolerating heterogeneous cultural beliefs, and the physiology of our beliefs, and what we are getting wrong about human nature.
“Belief” as a word can take on so many meanings. Most people only think about it in terms of religion. But our guest says belief plays a central role in many other critical distinctively human things, including economics, love and politics. He further defines belief as the “capacity humans have to commit wholly and fully to this mix of experience, imagination, ideology, thoughts, and ideas.”
Agustín Fuentes is a primatologist and biological anthropologist at Princeton University whose research focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. From chasing monkeys in jungles and cities, to exploring the lives of our evolutionary ancestors, to examining human health, behavior, and diversity across the globe, Agustín is interested in both the big questions and the small details of what makes humans and our close relations tick.
His written works include “Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths about Human Nature,” “Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being,” and “The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional.”
Greg and Agustín dig into the world of believing, discussing how human niches differ from other organisms, tolerating heterogeneous cultural beliefs, and the physiology of our beliefs, and what we are getting wrong about human nature.
1 hr