Quotes About Evolution

History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.

formation of moral values in society doesn't come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance.

Don't talk about "progress" in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.

Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa.*4

bounded rationality: we cannot possibly measure and assess everything as if we were a computer; we therefore produce, under evolutionary pressures, some shortcuts and distortions. Our knowledge of the world is fundamentally incomplete, so we need to avoid getting into unanticipated trouble. And even if our knowledge of the world were complete, it would still be computationally near-impossible to produce a precise, unbiased understanding of reality.

The model was right, it worked well, but the game turned out to be a different one than anticipated.

Aside from the decorum of ancient thought as opposed to the coarseness of fresh ink, I have spent some time phrasing the idea in the mathematics of evolutionary arguments and conditional probability. For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out.

Theories are superfragile; they come and go, then come and go, then come and go again;

Society doesn't evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meetings, academic conferences, tea and cucumber sandwiches, or polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere—and someone with soul in the game. And asymmetry is present in about everything.

it so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error. And

we are not learning from a mere thousand days, but benefiting, thanks to evolution, from the learning of our ancestors—which found its way into our biology.

my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on.

behavioral problem; we like to emit logical and rational ideas but we do not necessarily enjoy this execution. Strange as it sounds, this point has only been discovered very recently (we will see that we are not genetically fit to be rational and act rationally; we are merely fit for the maximum probability of transmitting our genes in some given unsophisticated environment).

Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny.

We need tricks to get us there but before that we need to accept the fact that we are mere animals in need of lower forms of tricks, not lectures.

Frano Barovi? reading this chapter wrote to me: "Machines: use it and lose it; organisms: use it or lose it." Also note that everything alive needs stressors, but not all machines need to be left alone—a point we will visit in our discussion of annealing. But

had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it—we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind.

innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity

Yet in practice it is the negative that's used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid. You reduce most of your personal risks of accident thanks to a small number of measures.

survival pressures within the organism play a role in its overall improvement under external stress.

We sacrifice ourselves in favor of our genes, trading our fragility for their survival.

This visible tension between individual and collective interests is new in history…

we got here by accident does not mean that we should continue to take the same risks.

What survives must be good at serving some (mostly hidden) purpose that time can see but our eyes and logical faculties can't capture.