Quotes About Evolution

In living entities, nature does not permit stillness: when one ceases to grow, one proceeds to disintegrate—in the mental realm no less than in the physical.

He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug.

more wealth is desired even though above a certain level it has ceased to translate into greater reproduction; with effective contraception much the same applies to sexual success; power, status, honor, and fame -connected to the above- are still hotly pursued even though their reproductive significance has become ambivalent. It is the evolution-shaped proximate mechanisms -the web of desire- that dominate human behavior, even where much of their original adaptive rationale has weakened.

No formal criterion or 'definition' should obscure the fact that the early state did not emerge full blown and in a clear-cut form. Its formation was a process rather than a one-time event, which regularly took generations and centuries to unfold.

Morality is a very real and extremely potent human postulate projected onto the world. It includes broadly shared common denominators, evolutionarily engraved in human nature by the logic and adaptive pressures of social life and social cooperation. It consists of a bundle of attitudes and precepts that serve this logic, which takes different and sometimes incommensurable forms between people and between different cultural traditions.

deadly aggression is a major, evolution-shaped, innate potential that, given the right conditions, has always been easily triggered. However, its ocurrence and prevalence are subject to wide fluctuations, depending on the prominence of these conditions.

Both the capabilities and evolutionary strategies of men and women, capabilities and strategies that were of course interconnected and mutually reinforcing, made men much more predisposed to fighting than women.

Rather than being discovered or revealed, morality is a historically developing human creation in the service of social needs.

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody's in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson's and Chapters.

things will never stay the same.

There is no progress toward ultimate freedom without transformation, and this is the key issue in all lives.

The road we have taken to this point has not been easy. But then again the road to change never is.

Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only seems that way in retrospect.

I don't worry about the survival of the novel. We're a storytelling species.

the world was shrinking, sympathies changing;

For my grandfather, race wasn't something you really needed to worry about anymore; if ignorance still held fast in certain locales, it was safe to assume that the rest of the world would be catching up soon.           In

began takings cabs

I realized that justifying the past mattered less than planning what to do next.

in a climate of constant technological change.

justifying the past mattered less than planning what to do next.

History travels not only forwards; history can travel backwards, history can travel sideways.

role development projects would

I didn't seem threatened, as they were, by the idea that the rest of the world was catching up to us.

I think it's great to have a new life every 10 years or so.