Quotes from Malcolm Potts

It is in the interests of society to put the Pill into slot machines and to place cigarettes on prescription.

It would be a service to mankind if the pill were available in slot machines and the cigarette were placed on prescription.

Our earliest ancestors evolved a psychological switch that allowed them to dehumanize and kill members of their own species, and our modern weapons help too, by depersonalizing killing.

In short, controlling more resources means you are likely to have more progeny surviving to future generations: Team aggression is one way that both chimpanzees and humans have hit upon to reap that evolutionary reward.

For millions of years our human, and before them, hominid ancestors lived in small bands of a few hundred persons wherein the women contributed most of the calories by gathering edible plants and men provided much of the protein through hunting. Most of our behavioral predispositions were evolved to adapt us to this type of life, and not to our very different, contemporary world of computers, cars and concrete.

After World War II, Marxist archaeologists argued that Stone Age societies were economically self-sufficient and therefore incapable of warfare -that is until they excavated skeletons with flint arrows embedded in them.

Some Rousseauean anthropologists protest that reports of cannibalism represent a racist desire to denigrate other cultures, but the scientific evidence suggests otherwise.

The fact that as the population of any species grows, the pressure on its natural resources increases and competition becomes more severe.

Cruelty takes many forms, but all those forms depend on the human hability to dehumanize and de-individualize another person.

Rare is the Stalin-like individual, who lacks empathy and who seems to take pleasure in inflicting pain or watching pain inflicted to others; common is the -virtuous citizen acting in the name of righteous causes-.

The evolutionary logic of team aggression is to kill as many members of the outgroup as possible, at as minimum risk to yourself as possible.

A few people -and a few chimpanzees- are just frankly antisocial. Presumably, such cases are the result of something going grievously wrong in a brain that has been built by a particular combination of genes and then submitted to a particular set of environmental pressures, so that it places almost everyone in an outgroup. When such individuals act alone, they are antisocial. But when they gain control over groups or even whole nations, they join the ranks of history's greatest villains.

The more we appreciate from whence we came biologically, the better placed we will be to build up those cultural and environmental influences that help ameliorate the worst aspects of war.

human beings are condemned to live in two ethical and behavioral worlds at once -the morality of empathy for and reciprocity with ingroups, and cold-hearted team aggression aimed at outgroups.

We humans are a frightening animal. Throughout our species existence, we have used each new technology we have developed to boost the destructive power of our ancient predisposition for killing members of our own species.

The evidence of history is that no advance which can be applied to the killing of other human beings goes unused.

Again and again, we see how cultures and religions frame women's sexuality as both powerful and dangerous, and as something that must be kept under control.

the male desire to control women's sexual activity can be traced to efforts to ensure paternity. This impulse lurks behind even the most extreme or bizarre expressions of religious obsession, misogyny, and sexual repression.

For billions of years, evolution has been driven by competition caused by the simple fact that, left unchecked, all living things can reproduce faster than their environment can sustain

We are, as a species, in the process of proving Malthus's proposition that population will always outstrip resources.

killing other members of our own species -a rarity in the animal kingdom- is a male behavior that evolved early in our history, because those individuals who manifested such a predisposition were more likely to transmit their genes to the next generation than those who didn't. War and violence, then, are indelibly linked to sex and reproduction.

Systematic rape is one of the most hideous, and most explicitly male, expressions of warfare, but it is hardly the only one. All wars are extraordinarily costly in material terms and grotesquely painful in human terms. Yet wars are so much a part of the human experience that we don't always pause to realize that one of the most astonishing aspects of war is the very fact that we so regularly go out and deliberately kill members of our own species.

Respect and loyalty go together and gang members, like the formal military, hoplites, Yanomamo warriors, and chimpanzees on patrol, will risk and give their lives for one another.

Belief in the supernatural is another powerful route to overcoming the very natural desire to stay alive.