Quotes About Evolution

What Darwin did to nature, Sigmund Freud did to the self.

Year followed struggling year for me, and all that time I read--I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure...

I am not a talking vegetable, as you should be able to see. Even if a planet were to follow the one evolutionary way, out of some many millions, that leads to intelligence, it is impossible that it should duplicate in wood and leaf the form of a human being. The same thing might be said of stones, yet there are statues.

You know what the biologists say: Man has reached the stage where he evolves through his machines.

Designer of information superhighways need to take the occasional stroll down memory lane.

The only good classification is a living classification.

Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so, And spedde as wel in love as men now do.

Sports evolved through sexual selection, but they are not crude sexual displays.

In search of good ideas, I started to see that marketing underlies everything in modern human culture in the same way that evolution underlies everything in human nature.

Our inherited legacy of adaptatios is literally precious. Even the poorest parents give their children vast riches, in the form of senses, emotions, and mental faculties that have been optimized through millions of years of product development.

Psychopahy is basically the absence of sympathy. There are fewer female psychopaths, perhaps because female psychophats would not have shown sufficient sympathy to their babies in past generations.

Our inherited legacy of adaptations is literally precious. Even the poorest parents give their children vast riches, in the form of senses, emotions, and mental faculties that have been optimized through millions of years of product development.

Our sense of beauty was shaped by evolution to embody an awareness of what is difficult as opposed to easy, rare as opposed to common, costly as opposed to cheap, skillful as opposed to talentless, and fit as opposed to unfit.

Human vocabulary size may have evolved through the same sexual selection process that favored enormous song repertoires in some bird species. But whereas only male birds sing, both men and women use large vocabularies during courtship, because courtship and choice are mutual, and because unusual words work as reliable displays only if their meanings are understood.

Language lets us learn about potential mates much more efficiently and interactively than any other species can.

Other primate penises are pencil-thin, whereas the erect human penis averages over one inch in diameter. Also, most other primates have a penis bone called the baculum, and achieve erections mostly through muscular control, like a winch raising a rigid strut. The penis bone is typical of most mammals. By contrast, the male human relies on an unusual system of vasocongestion. The penis fills with blood before copulation, like a blimp inflating before flight.

Among primates, the intensity of sperm competition correlates much more strongly with testicle size than with penis size.

He theorized that these sex differences (dimorphisms) were due to females being choosier about their mates and males competing more intensely for mates. We now know that Darwin was correct. When mate choice occurs, females typically do the choosing.

Single mothers may have been the norm during most of human evolution, as they were during the previous 50 million years of primate evolution.

In almost all mammals and all primates, females do almost all of the child care, with very little help from males. Males could never be sure which offspring really carried their genes, whereas females could be certain. This uncertainty about paternity leads most male mammals to invest much more in pursuing new sexual opportunities than in taking care of their putative offspring.

As in other species, male humans participate much more often in competitive sports than females. But every human culture invents different sports. We inherit the physical capacities and motivations to learn sports, not the specific genes for football, skiing, or boxing.

Under natural selection, species adapt to their environments. When the environment refers to a species' physical habitat, this seems simple enough. If a species lives in the Arctic, it had better evolve some warm fur. Under sexual selection, species adapt too, but they adapt to themselves. Females adapt to males, and males adapt to females. Sexual preferences adapt to the sexual ornaments avaliable, and sexual ornaments adapt to sexual preferences.

Sexual selection for the human body was not restricted to sexual ornaments. Once the capacity for sports evolved, sexual choice could favor fit bodies over unfit bodies much more directly.

So, when women universally complain about their slothfully mute boyfriends, we learn two things. First, women have a universal desire to enjoy receiving high levels of verbal courtship effort. Second, high levels of verbal courtship effort are so costly that men have evolved to produce them only when they are necessary for initiating or reviving sexual relationships.