Quotes About Evolution

They will, on the one hand, have sex with just about anything that moves, given an easy chance, like males in a low-MPI species. On the other hand, when it comes to finding a female for a long-term joint venture, discretion makes sense; males can undertake only so many ventures over a lifetime, so the genes that the partner brings to the project—genes for robustness, brains, whatever—are worth scrutinizing. The

Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species.

A female in a high-MPI species may seek signs of generosity, trustworthiness, and, especially, an enduring commitment to her in particular.

Natural selection cannot directly 'see' an individual organism in a specific situation and cause behavior to be adaptively tailored.

The evolutionary fusion of hierarchy and reciprocal altruism accounts for a good part of the average human life. Many, if not most, of our swings in mood, our fateful commitments, our changes of heart about people, institutions, even ideas, are governed by mental organs that this fusion wrought. It has done much to form the texture of everyday existence.

emotions are just evolution's executioners.

As a rule, two extremely different alternative traits will not both be preserved by natural selection. One or the other is usually at least slightly more conducive to genetic proliferation. However marginal its edge, it should win out, given enough time.

Why was it given to Darwin, less ambitious, less imaginative, and less learned than many of his colleagues, to discover the theory sought after by others so assiduously? How did it come about that one so limited intellectually and insensitive culturally should have devised a theory so massive in structure and sweeping in significance?

the basic evolutionary logic common to people everywhere is opaque to introspection. Natural selection appears to have hidden our true selves from our conscious selves. As Freud saw, we are oblivious to our deepest motivations—but in ways more chronic and complete (and even, in some cases, more grotesque) than he imagined.

Darwin, on grounds such as this, believed that the human species is a moral one—that, in fact, we are the only moral animal. "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them," he wrote. "We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity.

natural selection doesn't even care about our short-term happiness.

If I let go of that feeling and cease to identify with it—in other words, take a step toward the interior version of the not-self experience—I'm rejecting natural selection's insistence that I consider myself special. Take that, natural selection!

It's true that Darwin didn't live the optimally utilitarian life. No one ever has. Still, as he prepared to die, he could rightly have reflected on a life decently and compassionately lived, a string of duties faithfully discharged, a painful, if only partial, struggle against the currents of selfishness whose source he was the first man to see. It wasn't a perfect life; but human beings are capable of worse.

Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself.

Todos los organismos, incluidos los seres humanos, han sido diseñados por la selección natural para reaccionar a su entorno en modos que conduzcan a una «mejora» (según los criterios de la propia selección natural) de las cosas, lo cual significa que, en mayor o menor medida, casi siempre estamos escudriñando el horizonte en busca de cosas que nos hagan infelices, que nos incomoden o que no nos satisfagan

At the dawn of organic sentience

Human nature consists of knobs and of mechanisms for tuning the knobs, and both are invisible in their own way.

However the genes get the job done, it is selfish from their point of view, even if it seems altruistic at the level of the organism.

the line between society and organism is unclear.

Almost all of the cells in the human body are sterile. Only the sex cells—our "queen bees"—get to make copies of themselves for posterity. That the zillions of sterile cells act as if they were perfectly content with this arrangement is doubtless grounded in the fact that the r between them and the sex cells is 1;

For a species low in male parental investment, the basic dynamic of courtship, as we've seen, is pretty simple: the male really wants sex; the female isn't so sure.7

from natural selection's point of view, feelings would make great labels for thoughts, labels that say things like "high priority," "medium priority," "low priority.

Darwin once summed up natural selection in ten words: "[M]ultiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

We're designed by natural selection to get satisfaction out of finding the answers to questions.