Quotes from Heather E. Heying

Science is a method that oscillates between induction and deduction—we observe patterns, propose explanations, and test them to see how well they predict things we do not yet know. We thus generate models of the world that, when we do the scientific work correctly, achieve three things: they predict more than what came before, assume less, and come to fit with one another, merging into a seamless whole.

Most people, when their culture began to run wood through sawmills and build homes out of the dimensional lumber that results, would not have thought to ask what, in our human experience and capability, might be affected by this.

understanding why we are susceptible to such illusions can provide insight into the risks of hyper-novelty.

Mixing up your genotype with someone else's, possibly breaking up some bad genetic combinations that had been riding around in you, perhaps discovering new good combinations, and giving your offspring a chance at being a better fit in a landscape that has not yet occurred—these are the benefits of sexual reproduction.

We should also not expect that men and women will make identical choices, or be driven to excel at identical things, or even, perhaps, be motivated by the same goals. To ignore our differences and demand uniformity is a different kind of sexism. Differences between the sexes are a reality, and while they can be cause for concern, they are also very often a strength, and we ignore them at our peril.

Fire and cooking were necessary precursors to our use of food as social lubricant, as facilitator of culture and connection.

Humans no longer eat merely to satisfy energetic requirements, any more than we have sex just to make babies.

Asking if a particular trait is due to nature or nurture implies a false dichotomy between nature, genes, and evolution on the one side and between nurture and environment on the other. In fact, all of it is evolutionary.

Flow can be found in so many things: Teaching, carving, exploring. Healing, writing, making right. Unearthing, interpreting, speaking truth. What is common between them is an exhilaration in the engagement, the challenge, and no guarantee of success.

Does your pet love you? Of course your pet loves you. (Qualifier: your pet can love you if it's a mammal or one of a few clades of birds, like a parrot. If your pet is a gecko or a python or a goldfish, your pet is probably incapable of love.) Love develops for every evolutionary pairing that requires devotion. We love our pets, and our pets love us. Dogs, in particular, are love generators who hang out with you and help you know that you're not alone. Dog is love, unmoored.

What, then, might deodorants and perfumes have done to our ability to smell the signals emitted by our bodies? What might lives filled with clocks have done to our sense of time? What have airplanes done to our sense of space, or the internet to our sense of competence? What have maps done to our sense of direction, or schools to our sense of family? You get the point.

Group membership never disappears, but an organism will try to pass as something it's not, if enough of its traits transform. We are nucleate, heterotrophic, vertebral, brainy, bony fish. We are fish.

In Nietzsche's framework, joy is the feeling of your power increasing. [...] Power comes in many forms, one of which is mastery. As we become expert—in creation or discovery, in helping or healing, in communicating or leading—we gain power. That power is revealed in flow, and in joy.

Furthermore, once we have a category, we often stop looking outside of the categories for meaning, as our formal system of carrots and sticks exists solely within the categories

Ultimately, Laura found sufficient resources, both internal and external, to wean herself from the medications, and to see her emotions and moods as fundamentally human, rather than as problems to be solved.

engaging in more ancient activities, be it walking or sports, gardening or hunting, will often integrate all aspects of physical activity without any planning or counting being required.

we are all distinct—what will work for one person may not work for another; this variation between individuals is perhaps the most fundamental of evolutionary observations.

When we sit down to eat a meal together, especially when we are breaking bread that we have ourselves made, we gain far more than calories.

it is the human discovery of that molecule that has elevated it to the status of being studied. It was there all along, but now we have imbued it with mystical qualities. Our discovery of it changes nothing about what it does. We often mistake an effect (e.g., of an action, a treatment, a molecule) for our understanding of the effect. What a thing does, and what we think (or know) that it does, are not the same thing.

Our current higher education system is steeped in a philosophy that doubts our ability to even perceive the physical world. That philosophy is called postmodernism.

Postmodernists have been at the leading edge of promoting the view that reality is socially constructed.

the human niche is niche switching. More specifically, we argue that the human niche is to move between the paired, inverse modes of culture and consciousness.

One of the most outstanding conclusions of some postmodernists is that all of reality is socially constructed. They have even taken issue with the conclusions of Newton and Einstein, on the basis that the privilege of those scientists is obvious in their equations and, as old white guys, their biases inherently prevented them from knowing anything real of the world.

We are being solidified by modernity into states that, in prior eras, would have been more ephemeral.