Quotes About Evolution

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot.

Women's proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.

El presente puede cambiar el pasado y el futuro puede cambiar el presente.

When we first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-animal world, we used categories that had originally evolved to represent the pre-human animal social world. Our minds are far older than mere humanity.

growing might be the most important form of winning.

En otras palabras, nuestras mentes son mucho más antiguas que la humanidad. Nuestras categorías son mucho más antiguas que nuestra especie. Nuestra categoría más básica, tan antigua en cierto modo como el propio acto sexual, es la del sexo, masculino y femenino.

We are always and simultaneously at point "a" (which is less desirable than it could be), moving towards point "b" (which we deem better, in accordance with our explicit and implicit values).

Knowledge must pass through many stages of analysis—a multitude of transformations—before it becomes, let us say, commonplace.

The "fit" in "fitness" is therefore the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand.

Hace unos 300 millones de años, los cerebros y los sistemas nerviosos eran comparativamente simples. No obstante, ya poseían la estructura y la neuroquímica necesarias para procesar información sobre el estatus y la sociedad.

You might be winning but you're not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?

Ya estábamos compitiendo por una posición antes de tener piel, manos, pulmones o huesos. Así, hay pocas cosas más naturales que la cultura. Las jerarquías de dominación son más antiguas que los árboles.

It is far better to become something than to remain anything but become nothing.

dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted.

the circuits that engage you — for example when you're having an argument about something fundamental with someone that you love. So you're trying to structure the world around you, jointly, to create a habitable space that you both can exist within. You're using the same circuits — the abstracted version — that our archaic ancestors would have used when they went out into the unknown itself to encounter beasts and predators and geographical unknowns.

The first woman made the first man self-conscious and resentful. Then the first man blamed the woman. And then the first man blamed God. This is exactly how every spurned male feels, to this day. First,

Circumstances change, and so can you. Positive feedback loops, adding effect to effect, can spiral counterproductively in a negative direction, but can also work to get you ahead.

It is a truism of biology that evolution is conservative.

The human race has been dealing with loss and death forever. We are the descendants of those who could manage it.

Some things change quickly, but they are nested within other things that change less quickly.

You don't understand how what you want—and, therefore, what you see—is conditioned by the immense, abysmal, profound past. You simply don't understand how every neural circuit through which you peer at the world has been shaped (and painfully) by the ethical aims of millions of years of human ancestors and all of the life that was lived for the billions of years before that.

Dominance hierarchies are older than trees

Nuestras mentes son mucho más antiguas que la humanidad.

Your mother's recipe for fish heads and rice, no matter how celebrated in her village of origin, doesn't cut it in these days of grapefruit foam and Scotch/tobacco ice-cream.