ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
What makes a human so curious about human nature that they would spend more than a decade writing a book on the subject. If I am to blame anyone, it will be my parents. Both instilled in me the two qualities that I am most thankful for – a curiosity about all aspects of life and a love of other humans. My father was an intellectual genius. His first career was as an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Washington after the Second World War. Just months before receiving his PHD in 1951, he was hired away by IBM where he spent the next thirty-five years as a programmer, analyst, and teacher. He also served as an Army Air Forces navigator and instructor in WWII and as an Air Force reservist during the Vietnam War. He identified as a moderate Republican.
My mother’s genius was social. She ran
church youth groups (along with my father) and directed church choirs. She,
more than anyone, cultivated my social conscience. Both my parents were life-long
Christians, yet never zealots. They were active in the Council of Churches and
respected many forms of worship. And speaking of religious influences, I must
mention the minister of our family church in San Jose, California. Reverand
Richard Taylor was not your typical Baptist preacher. In 1963 he started
exposing me to speeches by the few U.S. Senators opposed to my country’s
military involvement in Southeast Asia. He also took our church youth group to
Synagogues and Buddhist Temples for the sake of a well-rounded spiritual education.
Next, I would like to thank my wife,
children, and grandchildren. While I am comfortable in nearly any social
situation, I am most content, alone in my office library. However, my family won’t
allow me to hide there for long. Being a husband, a father, and a grandparent are
the identities I most savor.
As for the sources for the information
used in this book, you need only look at the Bibliography to see the degree of
indebtedness I have to scientists, philosophers, and deep thinkers that have
contributed to our wealth of knowledge about Human Nature. I spent countless
hours taking copious notes on books and articles I read. Still, gaps of knowledge remained in the subjects I
wanted to cover. That’s when our son-in-law Andrew introduced me to ChatGPT.
All I needed to do was formulate the right question and that AI service
collected material in seconds that would have taken me weeks to gather. And I
must also credit it for a portion of the writing. For example, I had my own
ideas about what I could write on the subject of Sex. In response to my request
for a summarized essay on the subject, ChatGPT gave me an eloquent few
paragraphs that I not only agreed with but could do little to improve. So, in
the end, I must credit the AI app as not only my research assistant but for
some chapters, my co-author.
The collaboration with AI was even more
a factor in the book’s illustrations. To avoid messy copyright issues, I
initially planned to learn how to draw images myself. Fortunately for the
reader, I discovered ChatGPT had the capability to create semi-realistic
pictures based on my prompts. (e.g., For Chapter 89, I wrote “Repeat picture
(contained in the Preface), but with much less hair”.) You will have your own opinion, but I believe Chat
did a wonderful job.
Finally, I would like to thank you, the
reader, for making it this far. While I primarily wrote this book to better
myself, I likely wouldn’t have put in the effort without the hope that others
would benefit from the information I’d gather and share. We are all in this
life together after all.