The biology of belief...
By Bruce Lipton...

"the evolution of human civilization is self-similar to the evolution of a single giant organism. We humans are the cells in that ' social' organism. The relevance is that human civilization will evolve through the phases that characterized the evolution of animals, Human civilization will go through evolutionary phases that are redundant to previous evolution patterns. For example, in the evolution of vertebrate animals, the pattern provided for fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, an evolutionary jump occurred between each of these major classes of organisms, Civilization is in the process of such a jump now, as we are evolving from a reptilian-based civilization to a mammalian-based civilization. The intellectual character of our culture's leadership is currently most similar to that of reptilian behavior. And yet more advanced mammalian characters yourself and myself are in the process of rewriting a new blueprint for civilization, different from the way we are living now. Reptiles are 'conscious,' and do not express the trait of 'self-consciousness.' What that means is that they live for the moment but they have no conception or vision about how their actions today affect civilization tomoorow.
LG: Not much abstract thinking in that state of being.
BL: A perfect example is our going to war in Iraq , without even considering what the consequences of the war will lead to six weeks later. We fought the war without even a notion of how to deal with the population when the war is over. That is an excellent example of reptilian thinking. A mammalian civilization is a very different one because the character of mammals is that they are nurturers. Nurturing means to 'take care of things so that the future will be better.' Mammalian civilization would be focused upon taking care of the planet, while the current reptilian government, like dinosaurs, are raping the planet for what they need at the moment with no consideration of how their actions affect the future.