Quotes About Evolution

Human vice is proof that biological adaption is, speaking literally, a thing of the past. Our minds are adapted to the small foraging bands in which our family spent ninety-nine percent of its existence, not the topsy-turvy contingencies we have created since the agricultural and industrial revolutions. [...] People do not divine what is adaptive for them or their genes; their genes give them thoughts and feelings that were adaptive in the environment in which the genes were selected.

There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They're called women.

It's often said that the Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and that has been true of energy as well.

Man has no nature; what he has is history.

economist Friedrich Hayek observed, "If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations

It has become commonplace to conclude that humans are simply irrational—more Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock, more Alfred E. Neuman than John von Neumann. And, the cynics continue, what else would you expect from descendants of hunter-gatherers whose minds were selected to avoid becoming lunch for leopards?

If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations

To claim that [natural selection at the level of competing groups] is morally superior to natural selection at the level of competing individuals would imply, in its human application, that systematic genodice is morally superior to random murder.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley

Charles Kenny's Getting Better.17

Yes, you read that right: if we take the Flynn Effect at face value, a typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910. To state it in an even more jarring way, a typical person of 1910, if time-transported forward to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental retardation.

Things that can't go on forever can go on much longer than you think.

People hold many beliefs that are at odds with their experience but were true in the environment in which we evolved, and they pursue goals that subvert their own well-being but were adaptive in that environment

War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention. —Henry Maine

Steven Pinker

Una civilización optimista está abierta a la innovación y no la teme, y se basa en las tradiciones de la crítica.

disasters are instant, improvements are gradual

Controversies remain over the details, but today no biologist doubts that evolutionary dynamics like mutualism, kinship, and various forms of reciprocity can select for psychological faculties that, under the right circumstances, can lead people to coexist peacefully.4

I ask you to consider three medical miracles we take for granted: X-rays, cardiac catheterization, and general anesthesia. I contend all three would be stillborn if we tried to deliver them in 2005."43 (The same observation has been made about insulin, burn treatments, and other lifesavers.)

A dollar today, no matter how heroically adjusted for inflation, buys far more betterment of life than a dollar yesterday. It buys things that didn't exist, like refrigeration, electricity, toilets, vaccinations, telephones, contraception, and air travel, and it transforms things that do exist, such as a party line patted by a switchboard operator to a smartphone with unlimited talk time.

If contemporary humans seem irrational, don't blame the hunter-gatherers.

The Enlightenment is an ongoing process of discovery and betterment.

In Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, the psychologist Michael McCullough shows that we do have this dimmer switch for revenge.

in support of the idea that moral progress is compatible with a biological approach to the human mind and an acknowledgment of the dark side of human nature. 3