Quotes About Evolution

The Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz told us that we lack control over our aggressive instincts. Not long afterward the British biologist Richard Dawkins stated that our chief purpose on earth is to obey our "selfish genes.

Such cases deserve attention since they show that apes do not have to be prompted by experimental conditions concocted by us humans to plan for the future. They do so of their own accord.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. —Charles Darwin

American naturalist William Morton Wheeler made the English term popular as the study of "habits and instincts."11

Neuroimaging studies indicate that imitating people of one's own gender activates reward centers in the brain, whereas imitating people of the opposite gender does not. This doesn't necessarily mean that the brain is in charge, because it too reacts to the environment. But it does suggest that evolution has equipped our young with a feel-good bias to conform to their gender.

ethology's focus was on behavior that develops naturally in all members of a given species.

homosexual, most humans may be at the heterosexual end, but every bonobo is totally bi, or a perfect Kinsey

Taken by themselves, emotions are pretty useless. Simply being fearful doesn't do an organism any good. But if a fearful state prompts an organism to flee, hide, or counterattack, it may well save its life. Emotions evolve, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone.

Aristotle's scala naturae, which runs from God, the angels, and humans at the top, downward to other mammals, birds, fish, insects, and mollusks at the bottom.

What is the largest land mammal doing with three times as many neurons as our own species?

This suggests that for our species, too, the cerebellum is critically important.63

Charles Darwin himself had written a whole tome about the parallels between human and animal emotional expressions.

In the same way that humans have a "handy" intelligence, which we share with other primates, elephants may have a "trunky" one. There

Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The

Sociobiology, E. O. Wilson

We can't return to this preindustrial way of life. We live in societies of a mind-boggling scale and complexity that demand quite a different organization than humans ever enjoyed in their state of nature. Yet, even though we live in cities and are surrounded by cars and computers, we remain essentially the same animals with the same psychological wants and needs.

En nuestra especie, la atracción por la juventud tiene sentido debido a nuestro vínculo de pareja que conduce a familias estables. Las mujeres jóvenes están más disponibles y son más valiosas por la larga vida reproductiva que tienen por delante. De ahí el eterno anhelo femenino por parecer joven a base de bótox, implantes, estiramientos faciales y demás.

large-scale breeding experiments.

Nosotros evolucionamos a partir de comedores de fruta arborícolas - de ahí nuestros ojos frontales, nuestra visión de color y nuestras manos prensoras-, pero nuestro tamaño y nuestras aptitudes especiales nos confieren un porte depredador. Probablemente es por esto por lo que nos llevamos tan bien con nuestras mascotas favoritas, que son dos carnívoros peludos.

Behavior doesn't fossilize. This is why speculations about human prehistory are often based on what we know about other primates. Their behavior indicates the range of behavior our ancestors may have shown.

Traditionally, primatologists looked at alpha males as those who succeeded in spreading their genes. But in making this point, we relied entirely on observed sexual activity. The more we saw a male mate, the more offspring he sired, we thought. This assumption proved flawed. While alpha males have no qualms about mounting females in the open, other males often get busy out of sight and at night.

Position in the male hierarchy is only one factor in the mating game. The other one is female preference.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. —Charles Darwin (1871)

This is clearly not so. Pigeons, for example, do better than humans at mentally rotating visual images, and some birds have an amazing memory for the location of hidden objects. Clark's nutcrackers store up to 33,000 seeds in caches distributed over many square kilometers and find most of the caches again months later.28As someone who occasionally forgets where he has parked an item as large and significant as his car, I am impressed by these peanut-brained birds.