Quotes About Evolution

To appreciate this burden, one doesn't have to believe that we are cavemen out of time, only that evolution, with its speed limit measured in generations, could not possibly have adapted our brains to modern technology and institutions

The age distribution of a population changes slowly, as each demographic pig makes its way through the population python.

the problem of meaning, like many mysteries in philosophy, may always be shrouded in enigma, because it pushes our common sense into conceptual realms that it did not evolve to think in.

The likelihood that, in attacking a member of your own species, you will get hurt is a powerful selection pressure that disfavors indiscriminate pouncing or lashing out.

Could the world be getting not just more literate and knowledgeable but actually smarter?

If we keep track of how our laws and manners are doing, think up ways to improve them, try them out, and keep the

Children acquire spoken language instinctively but written language only by the sweat of their brow, because spoken language has been a feature of human life for tens or hundreds of millennia whereas written language is a recent and slow-spreading invention.

As always, the challenge is to find an exogenous change that precedes the change in sensibilities and behavior so we can avoid the circularity of saying that people stopped doing cruel things because they got less cruel.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind.

If a gene could build a brain that could tell when copies of itself were sitting in another animal's gonads, it would make the brain enjoy the other animal's well-being, and make it act in ways that increased that other animal's well-being.

It is about the relation of words to a community—how a new word, which arises in an act of creation by a single speaker, comes to evoke the same idea in the rest of a population, so people can understand one another when they use it.

A list of ways in which we're stupid can't explain why we're so smart.

These fields include genetics, which explains the replicators that make natural selection possible, and game theory, which illuminates the fates of goal-seeking agents in a world that contains other goal-seeking agents.2

For every job lost to automation, a new one will materialize that we cannot anticipate: he unemployed forklift operators will retrain as tattoo removal technicians and video game costume designers and social media content moderators and pet psychiatrists.

Language is re-created every generation as it passes through the minds of the humans who speak it.

The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors.

Yet in every issue touched by the Rights Revolutions—interracial marriage, the empowerment of women, the tolerance of homosexuality, the punishment of children, and the treatment of animals—the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today's conservatives are more liberal than yesterday's liberals.

We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life and death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness and answer any question we are capable of asking. We cannot hold ten thousand words in short-term memory. We cannot see in ultraviolet light. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience.

As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a "natural" trait is the same as condoning it.

Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired.

When we first sort of break in or bust into the house, if you will, there's some tough love.

Enemies, as well as lovers, come to resemble each other over a period of time.

If you really love something, you never try to keep it the way it is forever. You have to let it be free to change.

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.