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 Entelechy is not accepting submissions at this time; have a look at our daughter journal The Evolutionary Review: Art. Science. Culture.


Lise Carlson. Enso. 2006. Oil on canvas, 20x24. 

Katherine Abbott
Nancy E. Aiken
Emil Alzamora
Alice Andrews
Sophie Andrews
David Appelbaum
Bill Bakaitis
Simon Baron-Cohen
Lise Carlson Bass
Anya Bellow
William Benzon
Ilya Bernstein
Celia Bland
Howard Bloom
Natalie Bronstein
James Brody
Joseph Carroll
Chris Cassidy
Jennifer Cazenave
Ewa Chrusciel
Monica d. Church
Kathryn Coe
Tim Cole
Frank Craig
Greg Darms
Deborah Denicola
Courtney Druz
 Wyatt Ehrenfels
Julie Evanoff
Dylan Evans
D.A. Feinfeld
Heinz Insu Fenkl
Maryanne Fisher
Adrian Flange
Miriam Fried
Herbert Gintis
Glenn Geher
Amy Gilliland
Julie O'Leary Green
Bjorn Grinde
Ira Joel Haber
Nancy W. Hall
Keith S. Harris
Tania Hershman
Bradley Earle Hoge
Tim Horvath
Paul Hostovsky
Elizabeth Insogna
John A. Johnson
Megan J.Z.
Calla Jones
Robert Kelly
Laura Kipnis
James V. Kohl
Daniel J. Kruger
Eric D. Lehman
S. Leland-St. 

                         

evolutionary tao 

 issue no. 9

 

( scroll down issue; past and current contributors' names are linked) 


 

 

poetry 

not haiku     COURTNEY DRUZ
the graduation of prometheus  BRIAN WILKINS
amputation     D.A. FEINFELD


stories

a natural selection    ANYA BELLOW
tornadoes along a möbius strip   JAMES  WARNER
not just-so stories     CHESTER DIMSDULL, MARYANNE FISHER, GLENN GEHER,
                                          DANIEL KRUGER, ROSEMARIE SOKOL, SARAH STROUT

 

discourse


the biology of the imagination      SIMON BARON-COHEN
modernized mutating vinegar tasters      ROSEMARIE SOKOL
celebrity aesthetics as mortality terror management     DANIEL J. KRUGER
the last appletree    DAVID APPELBAUM
the lie of memory    ERIC D. LEHMAN


reviews

the most dangerous animal   ALAN T. LLOYD
redefining seduction    ROSEMARIE SOKOL
social intelligence    ZACHARY P. NORWOOD

Jason Letts
 Phillip Levine
Alan T. Lloyd
Tanya Marcuse
Alden Marin
Deborah Marsden
Chris Metze
Jalina Mhyana
David Michelson
Jeff Miller
Stephen Mounkhall
Julienne Mullette
Rich Murphy
John A. Musacchio
Jenny Nelson
Zachary P. Norwood
Craig Palmer
Jill Parisi
David Pearce
Irene Pérez
Ronald Pies
Megan Pinch
Gretchen Primack
Marnia Robinson
Jason Ronstadt
Jennifer Ryan
Natalie Safir
Ellen Salle
Jay Santini
Yvette A.Schnoeker-Shorb
Rupert Sheldrake
Joseph Shohan
Irwin Silverman
Rosemarie Sokol
David Livingstone Smith
Iva Spitzer
Todd I. Stark
H.D. Steklis
Sarah Strout
Jason Stern
Lynn Strongin
Michelle Scalise Sugiyama
Paula Superti
Jason Tandon
William A. Tiller
David Tucker
George Wallace
George Williamson
Jannie Wolff
John Wymore
Pauline Uchmanowicz
G. Krishna Vemulapalli
Lindsey Vona
Sergio Vucci
James Warner
Brian Wilkins
Gary Wilson
Bill Yake

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


poetry

 

Not Haiku


Sergio Vucci. Untitled, 15. 2003. Polaroid Spectra Print.



courtney druz

 

  

 

 

 
 

 

When I look up and see branches

framed in the three-pane strip above the blinds,

black and tenuous like brush strokes

against the paper-white sky of late winter, late afternoon,

my eyes are opened

and I think of other filaments

thrusting their fractal tips into some blank —

the blood’s inverted branches gasping into the lungs’ air,

 

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The Graduation of Prometheus

                                    

brian wilkins 

  

 


                        

       
 

 

 
 

We, the firebringers and conmen,

who studied in those bestial nests
and were baptized in the nonsense of brooks
scattered like blown dandelions
impelled by wishes and novel space.

Some got religion and faithfully

read more

 



 

 

 

 


 

 

 


Amputation


Sophie Andrews. White Dust and Roses. 2007.


d.a. feinfeld

 

  

 

 


                        

       
 

 

 

Winner of Best of the Web 2009


After that surgery, my name seemed to me to be no more than a
loose rubric under which at intervals, aspects of myself
occasionally reassembled and functioned. -Larry McMurtry


After drugging and cutting,
split sinews, veins lopped to tree-stumps,
he finds one unplanned side effect:
amputation of his given name.

He dreams in the colors of pain: red bands
over his eyes battle black sunspots.
Half-awake, nerve-cords loosed
from their mooring, he collects
arms or legs for shocked instants,

and, blinking in blood-mist, gropes
along a strange

read more

 

 


 

 

 

 

stories


 

A Natural Selection


Frans Floris. Judgment of Paris. 1548.

alice andrews

   


                               
 

 

It was April and balmy. Russell opened the window to his home office and could barely remember what it was like to feel cold, though it had just snowed a week earlier. He looked at a picture of Lilah on the desk and thought about putting it in a drawer. But he had a strange superstition about putting framed pictures flat down — as if, by dint of some voodoo magic, the person in the picture would suffer somehow. So he kept it there...and then went back to rereading emails from Clare — like the one sent in haste after she read his novel Face Blind (about a young boy with prosopagnosia

read more

 

 


 

 

 


Tornadoes Along a Möbius Strip

 

james warner

 

In the year following Greg's divorce, he and his seven-year-old daughter Helen had a computer game they played together before bedtime. In the game you were a sphere that could move forwards, backwards, to the right, or to the left, by pressing W, S, A, or D on the keyboard. The space bar let you jump. While trying to collect as many jewels as possible on a series of platforms, you had to avoid trap-doors, moving walls, bumpers, exploding devices etc. One mistake, and you soared downwards to expire in a lagoon far below. Irritating music played all the time. As a representation of life under capitalism, it was actually not

read more

 

 


 

 



Not Just-So Stories

REFLECTIONS ON AN EP CONFERENCE THROUGH AN EP LENS 

 


                                                                                                                                                       photo: jay landolfi

First Inaugural NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society Conference (NEEPS) State University of New York at New Paltz; April 2007

 

 chester dimsdull, maryanne fisher, glenn geher, daniel kruger, rosemarie sokol, sarah strout

 

 

 

 

Genuinely altruistic hominids spotted in New York’s Hudson Valley!


GLENN GEHER

When it comes to altruism, the party line in evolutionary psychology goes something like this: True altruism doesn’t really exist – it’s not an evolvable quality of organisms given how natural selection works her magic (which is by selecting features of organisms that have the effects of replicating their own particular genes). The two predominant kinds of altruism discussed by evolutionists both

 

Penis Envy
SARAH STROUT

It was interesting to note, given the plenary address of Gordon Gallup and his slide show of giant penises (as they were projected to monumental proportions on a 6-foot screen), that after the plenary, a number of men in the audience were to be overheard blatantly proclaiming their heterosexuality and indicators of fitness ("I run every day"!) to the women around them, as if they were actually competing with a potential competitor in the form of

read more

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

discourse

 

The Biology of the Imagination



Deborah Marsden. Intelligent Evolution. 2007.

 simon baron-cohen

 

In what sense might something as intrinsically human as the imagination be biological? How could the products of the imagination — a novel, a painting, a sonata, a theory — be thought of as the result of biological matter? After all, such artifacts are what culture is made of. So why invoke biology? In this essay, I will argue that the content of the imagination is of course determined more by culture than biology. But the capacity to imagine owes more to biology than

read more

 

 

 

 

simon baron-cohen


 

 

 


Modernized Mutating Vinegar Tasters

AN ADAPTATION OF THE ANCIENT CHINESE 'VINEGAR TASTERS' STORY

 
 

rosemarie sokol

 


                        

 

       
 

 

 

"The Vinegar Tasters" is an ancient Chinese tale about three wise men in a city in China, who, in fact, represent the three major teachings there: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Let's assume, however, for the sake of psychology, that we’ve instead walked down a very busy street in present-day Scholarville; where people of all kinds partake in various interactions. Each strikes up a different conversation about an aspect of psychology,

read more

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 


Celebrity Aesthetics as Mortality Terror Management

 


                                 Ira Joel Haber. Nude.
 

daniel j. kruger

 

  

 

 


                        

dankruger

       
 

 

 

Did you know that your academic productivity can be attributed to your subconscious desire to avoid thinking about your own possibly imminent death? Publications and other cultural artifacts are products of a compensatory psychological mechanism for ameliorating the psychological terror resulting from the awareness of one’s own mortality. Like cognitive dissonance and other paradigms before it, Terror Management Theory is on the verge of becoming the latest mainstream psychological meta-theory for explaining a wide array of psychological and cultural phenomena.
Although some evolutionists have claimed that the phenomena cited by TMT are artifacts of coalitional psychology (e.g., Navarrete, Kurzban, Fessler, & Kirkpatrick 2004), TMT remains a powerful tool for dissecting cultural products and events. For example, witness the recent existential crisis of American celebrity singer Cher. Faced with the recognition of her impending senescence

 

read more

 

 

 

 


 

 

 


The Last Appletree 



                                            
david appelbaum

 

 


     david/derrida           kate hamilton

 

 

The appletree was a riddle to me. It was a gnarled silhouette in an early dusk, a sport that had escaped from the domestic orchard downwind. Far from farmland or pasturage, it stood alone, a single tree in a glen halfway up the mountain slope. As I looked from below, a bright winter star shone at the top — Albadaron. In the wind, it was eclipsed momentarily by a withered apple clinging  

read more

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


The Lie of Memory

 


 Deborah Marsden. Electromagnetism. 2007.

 

eric d. lehman

 

 

 

Memory works in strange ways. Scientists are still unsure how it is stored, and even more baffled by the fact that it seems to change over time. How do events we perceive as objective reality become muddled fantasy? Why do people forget something for years, and then suddenly it pops into their minds? What makes certain neurons fire and not others? Where? When? Scientists don’t like chaos.

It is unfortunate for them, then, that our minds warp and fluctuate

read more

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

reviews

 

Understanding the Human Capacity for Warfare

A REVIEW OF THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL by DAVID LIVINGSTONE SMITH

most dangerous animal
 

alan t. lloyd

 

  
 

 


                        

 

       
 

In reading the pre-publication of David Livingstone Smith’s The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War, my first association was to a short story I read in school – Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game.” Not knowing if Smith was familiar with this story, I found the parallels between the theses of these two works quite striking. Connell tells the story of a big game hunter who falls off his boat and is rescued by a bored Cossack aristocrat weary with the ease of the hunt. He devises a more challenging prey — one which can use reason and cunning — human beings. The big game hunter now becomes the hunted, confronting panic and confusion, and forcing himself to draw on inner resources never imagined. These archetypal and revelatory stories are elemental in Smith’s

 

read more

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

A REVIEW OF REDEFINING SEDUCTION
by DONNA SHEEHAN & PAUL RAFFEL

redefining seduction


 

rosemarie sokol

 

Redefining Darwin:
Another Popular Distortion of Evolutionary Theory

 
 

 

 

In the mid-1990s, two women took a pre-feminist approach towards dating and mating that was surprisingly well-received — landing The RulesTM on the national bestseller list, and into popular American culture. Shamoon and Fein (1995) proclaimed that by following these simple, albeit oppressive, rules to dating, any woman could bag a mate in due time. Some of these rules include avoiding the phone in an effort to play hard to get, and letting the man take the lead.

After such socially regressive rules, Redefining Seduction, the author-proclaimed “evolutionary documentary for women,” seems a breath of relief for

 

read more

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

Compassionate Capitalism?


social intelligence
 

 

zachary p. norwood

 

 A REVIEW OF SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE by DANIEL GOLEMAN
 

 


                        

       
 

 

 

My flat looks out over the largest import/export operation in New Zealand: Ports of Auckland. Responsible for $20 billion worth of merchandise annually, and pushing 4.6 million tons of products in 2006, Ports of Auckland symbolizes a small fraction of an unimaginably vast global market. At night, the emergency lights of port vehicles flash incessantly, and the whole operation comes to life. I’m often transfixed with a mixture of awe and disgust at this marvel of man, this perpetual motion machine of diesel-powered ships and cranes, straddle carriers and semi trucks, all following a predetermined circuit with methodical, ant-like efficiency.
What’s the point of it all, I often wonder. What indeed? This endless, Sisyphean toil — is it really just so I can have my favorite Belgian ale, organic Australian muesli, and canned tomatoes

read more

 

 

 

 


 

 

Copyright © 2007  Entelechy: Mind & Culture. New Paltz, NY. All rights reserved.