Quotes About Evolution

39. Brains as computers – computers as brains. Artificial intelligence is now poised to surpass human intelligence. 39. © VLADGRIN/Shutterstock.com.

How did it happen that in the one species whose success depends above all on cooperation, individuals who are supposedly less cooperative (men) control individuals who are supposedly more cooperative (women)? At present, we have no good answer.

Whales can hear one another from hundreds of kilometres away, and each whale has a repertoire of characteristic 'songs' that may last for hours and follow very intricate patterns. Every now and then a whale composes a new hit, which other whales throughout the ocean adopt.

The proponents of this 'ancient commune' theory argue that the frequent infidelities that characterise modern marriages, and the high rates of divorce, not to mention the cornucopia of psychological complexes from which both children and adults suffer, all result from forcing humans to live in nuclear families and monogamous relationships that are incompatible with our biological software.1 Many

what life was like in the millennia separating the Cognitive Revolution from the Agricultural Revolution.

In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.

Like a government diverting money from defense to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons.

What was the Sapiens' secret of success? How did we manage to settle so rapidly in so many distant and ecologically different habitats? How did we push all other human species into oblivion? Why couldn't even the strong, brainy, cold-proof Neanderthals survive our onslaught? The debate continues to rage.

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word 'domesticate' comes from the Latin domus, which means 'house'. Who's the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It's the Sapiens.

replication of cultural information units called 'memes'.

How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation

The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language.

Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution.

Uma das poucas leis férreas da história é que os luxos tendem a se tornar necessidades e a gerar novas obrigações. Uma vez que as pessoas se acostumam a um certo luxo, elas o dão como garantido.

Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master.

Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny. A conscious effort has to be made to sustain laws, customs, procedures and manners, otherwise the social order would quickly collapse.

we might fiddle with Homo sapiens to such an extent that we would no longer be Homo sapiens. Bionic

Al igual que un gobierno que reduce el presupuesto de defensa para aumentar el de educación, los humanos desviaron energía desde los bíceps a las neuronas. No

We have bred docile cows that produce enormous amounts of milk, but are otherwise far inferior to their wild ancestors. They are less agile, less curious and less resourceful. We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximise the human potential. Indeed we have no idea what the full human potential is, because we know so little about the human mind. (page 50)

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging.5

When the car replaced the horse-drawn carriage, we didn't upgrade the horses – we retired them. Perhaps it is time to do the same with Homo sapiens.

That evolution should select for larger brains may seem to us like, well, a no-brainer. We are so enamoured of our high intelligence that we assume that when it comes to cerebral power, more must be better. But if that were the case, the feline family would also have produced cats who could do calculus, and frogs would by now have launched their own space programme. Why are giant brains so rare in the animal kingdom?

Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural.

One of the most common uses of early stone tools was to crack open bones in order to get to the marrow.