Quotes About Evolution

And human babies, whose brains are so enormous that a child must be pushed out through the birth canal a year before he or she can walk are bets so huge that a woman can't even put her chips on the table by herself.

If the hive switch is real—if it's a group-level adaptation designed by group-level selection for group binding—then it must be made out of neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones.

La conclusión es que la mente humana está preparada para el tribalismo. La evolución humana no es sólo la historia de unos individuos que compiten con otros dentro de cada grupo; es también la historia de grupos que compiten contra otros, a veces con violencia.

They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.

Todos descendemos de personas que pertenecieron a grupos que fueron constantemente mejores para ganar esa competición. El tribalismo es nuestra herencia evolutiva para agruparnos y prepararnos para el conflicto intergrupal.

I didn't want to make the classic mistake of amateur evolutionary theorists, which is to pick a trait and then ask: "Can I think of a story about how this trait might once have been adaptive?" The answer to that question is almost always yes because reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality

As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists. Darwin's ideas about group selection fell out of favor in the 1960s, but recent discoveries are putting his ideas back into play

Group selection may or may not be common among other animals, but it happens whenever individuals find ways to suppress selfishness and work as a team, in competition with other teams.

When I say that human nature is selfish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers. When I say that human nature is also groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group's interests, in competition with other groups.4 We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players. Stated

We are the descendants of successful tribalists, not their more individualistic cousins.

Domesticated animals (including humans) are more childlike, sociable, and gentle than their wild ancestors.

After just thirty generations the foxes had become so tame that they could be kept as pets.

It seems to take more than just a high level of social intelligence to get reciprocal altruism going. It takes the sort of gossiping, punitive, moralistic community that emerged only when language and weaponry made it possible for early humans to take down bullies and then keep them down with a shared moral matrix.43

he simply picked the cages that produced the most eggs in each generation. Then he bred all of the hens in those cages to produce the next generation. Within just three generations, aggression levels plummeted. By the sixth generation, the death rate fell from the horrific baseline of 67 percent to a mere 8 percent. Total eggs produced per hen jumped from 91 to 237, mostly because the hens started living longer, but also because they laid more eggs

Yet punish we do, and our propensity to punish turns out to be one of the keys to large-scale cooperation.

genetic evolution greatly accelerated during the last 50,000 years. The rate at which genes changed in response to selection pressures began rising around 40,000 years ago, and the curve got steeper and steeper after 20,000 years ago.

If genetic evolution was able to fine-tune our bones, teeth, skin, and metabolism in just a few thousand years as our diets and climates changed, how could genetic evolution not have tinkered with our brains and behaviors as our social environments underwent the most radical transformation in primate history?

But as a psychologist studying morality, I can say that multilevel selection would go a long way toward explaining why people are simultaneously so selfish and so groupish.91

our brains, bodies, and behavior show many of the same signs of domestication that are found in our domestic animals: smaller teeth, smaller body, reduced aggression, and greater playfulness, carried on even into adulthood.

human nature is 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

Vengeful and grateful feelings appear to have evolved precisely because they are such useful tools for helping individuals create cooperative relationships, thereby reaping the gains from non-zero-sum games.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship.

When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.