Quotes from William Von Hippel

If you drop one of us naked and alone into the wilderness, you've just fed the creatures of the local forest. But if you drop one hundred of us naked into the wilderness, you've introduced a new top predator to this unfortunate stretch of woods.

People who have myopia genes and live in modern environments usually develop nearsightedness; people who have myopia genes but live as hunter-gatherers almost never do. So even effects that are largely genetic can at the same time be largely environmental.

It's easy to imagine a world in which genes have control over our minds, and for many animals they do. But once we took the evolutionary pathway toward greater intelligence and a lifestyle that relies on learning rather than inborn knowledge, our genes had no choice but to relinquish much of their control.

Of all the preferences that evolution gave us, I suspect the desire to share the contents of our minds played the single most important role in elevating us to the top of the food chain.* We are the fiercest predator on the planet by virtue of the power of our minds, but even human minds aren't that special on their own.

Loss of trust matters because distrust leads people to disengage from their communities, reduce commitment to their workplace and lose the degree to which they share important information with each other. In short, without trust, people focus on self-protection and become unwilling to make themselves vulnerable. (...) People who lack trust are limited in what they can accomplish together.

It was our capacity to learn from the experiences of others that gave Homo sapiens an enormous local advantage, with new strategies and innovations built on a platform of prior discoveries. As a consequence, each generation had no need to reinvent the wheel, and a child could acquire an understanding of the world that a few generations back would have been available only to geniuses.