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  • 41 - The Psychology of Extraterrestrials
  • from Part IX - Applying Evolutionary Principles
  • Edited by Lance Workman, University of South Wales, Will Reader, Sheffield Hallam University, Jerome H. Barkow, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
  • Book: The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior
  • Published online: 02 March 2020
  • Print publication: 19 March 2020, pp 507-514
  • View extract

    Summary

    We begin with very broad strokes: if we take the Ancient Greeks and Romans as founders of Western civilization and ignore the cosmologies of the many other peoples of the world, then from Ptolemy and the first century CE until sixteenth-century Europe, the Earth was the center of the universe and all else rotated around it. With the work of Copernicus, the Earth was demoted and the sun was given the honor of centrality. But by the early twentieth century, the very notion of centrality was abolished and our sun took its place as one among a vast number of stars in an expanding universe. In similar fashion, the centrality of Homo sapiens has steadily declined. In Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythology, intelligent humans were created and given dominion over the Earth by an all-powerful deity; the only other intelligences were that deity itself and its supernatural creations: angels and demons and devils and djinns.

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