Charles Oxnard 
HUMANS AND CHANGE: SEVEN IDEAS OUT OF THE ORDINARY [EPUB ebook] 
Seven Ideas out of the Ordinary

Many people today deny the idea of Human Change (especially when the word ‘evolution’ is used). Many others, accepting that we have changed in the past, do not see change as still occurring. My ideas (challenges) are: not only that we are still changing, but that we are changing ever more rapidly, and in new ways.

Is Homo sapiens (vainly named, wise human) already in the process of becoming Homo sapientior (wiser human)? Can we expect further change to Homo sapientissimus (wisest human)? Or do we have to fear regression to Homo nerdensis?

The seven Ideas of my title cover: Sex, yesterday, today and tomorrow; Gender: women’s struggles (and men’s); Particularly Dangerous Ideas: Race and Ethnicity, Kin and Ancestors; Ideas on Aging: Life Span, Mortality and Death; Ideas about the Brain: changed, changing and unique; Failure of Ideas: Cheating, Damned Cheating and ‘Chorruption’; My Mistakes: Ideas I missed.

Contents:

• How Do You Get Ideas, Daddy?


• Ideas about Sex: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow


• More on Sex: Yesterday’s Changes


• Ideas about Gender: Women’s Struggles (and Men’s)!


• Dangerous Differences: Race and Ethnicity, Kindred and Ancestors


• Aging and Death: Life Span, Mortality, Wellness and Illness!


• Human Brains: Not Just Bigger — Changed, Changing, Unique!


• Progress of Ideas: Challenge, Threat and Glory?


• Failure of Ideas: Cheating, Damned Cheating and ‘Chorruption’


• My Mistakes: Ideas I Missed!


• An Eighth Idea out of the Ordinary: Damages to Learning!

Readership: General interest, general and popular science, educated interested lay-persons, unconventional educators, the education profession itself, students interested in and bound for high schools, colleges, universities and beginning careers.

Key Features:

• Many people are opposed, for many different reasons, to the idea of human evolution. And many more, while accepting the overall idea, have learnt about it through teaching that has crystallised into accepted facts, standard wisdoms, current practices, even gold standards


• But acceptance of these can hide mistakes, reject knowledge of change, and prevent the discovery of new facts, wisdoms, better practices, and ‘platinum’ standards. These are often presented, to students (and also to the general public) as the end of the matter


• Contrariwise, it is important that students should bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies. They are not here to worship what is known, but to question it (Bronowski, 1975)


• Many teachers, many text-books, many media representations, tell stories of human change that imply we know how it came about, and that it is virtually complete. Even new fossils are said to confirm the old story. All this hides arm-chair thinking and questioning, field and laboratory testing, and brain and mind changing


• Since we came down from the trees, or in from the plains, or even up from the waterside (this last idea naturally condemned as a heresy by the conventional wisdom), or however else we got here, most of our-lives have been spent on staying a-live. Our futures were thought to be in the afterlife, not in our hands


• This is a book for those who believe that we can shape, even if only in part, the futures of humans and humanity. Who believe that there is a moral imperative for us to do it and get it right. But that misinformation, in print, on-line, and by artificial intelligence are degrading democracies, through, damage to education. Policies and actions: of oppositions, elites, governments and nations, are getting in the way


• This leads me to urge a call to arms, to challenge these problems that modern democracies and autocracies, both, are causing: damage to teaching, learning, questioning, creating, and disseminating, and therefore damage to ourselves and the generations after us. This may be our last chance to fix things before it’s too late