Quotes About Evolution

selfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members.

Our lives are restrained by two laws of biology: all of life's entities and processes are obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry; and all of life's entities and processes have arisen through evolution and natural selection.

The reason is simply the extreme improbability of the preadaptations necessary for it to occur at all. Each of these evolutionary steps has been a full-blown adaptation in its own right.

the origin of eusociality requires the preadaptation of a constructed and guarded nest site.

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968, I started to think, write, and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

Because of the distinctive adaptive challenges we face as a species, we require a way to inject controlled doses of chaos into our lives.

Given that the pre-frontal cortex is a key to our success as a species, consuming any amount of alcohol or other intoxicant seems really stupid.

Evolution is not stupid, and works much faster than most people realize.

At best, we base our thinking on disconnected facts or snippets of scientific knowledge uninformed by a broader evolutionary perspective.

Humans transform the world through our creative technologies, and we cannot survive without them.

As the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik and her colleagues have observed, general intelligence, behavioral flexibility, ability to solve novel problems, and a reliance on learning from others tends to roughly correlate with an extended period of helpless immaturity.13 This relationship is found across a broad range of animals, including birds and mammals, suggesting that it tracks a fundamental evolutionary trade-off between narrow competence and creative flexibility.

Innovations are always necessarily gradual and incremental, building on the accumulated insights of past humans. We are the cultural animal par excellence, and our ability to share the products of our individual creativity and pass them on to future generations is the key to our ecological dominance.30

Our desire for alcohol is not an evolutionary mistake. There are good reasons for why we get drunk.

we are simply not well adapted, evolutionarily, to be able to consume alcohol safety outside of the traditional context of ritual and social controls.

Rome wasn't deconstructed in a day.

I know it sounds like the end of the world, but worlds are ending every day and it's not always such a bad thing.

Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.

Today's science is tomorrow's technology.

From the lowest animals of which we can affirm intelligence up to man this type of intellect is found.

No problem can be solved at the same level of consciousness that created it." This

It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.