Quotes About Instinct

I don't understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.

But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.

Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.

We appear to be hardwired to punish those who have slighted us, even if—and this is the counterintuitive bit—even if our acts of vengeance hurt us more than those who have trespassed against us.

PREDATORS RUN FOR THEIR DINNER. PREY RUN FOR THEIR LIVES. —OLD ECOLOGIST'S PROVERB

ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH. —PETE RICHERSON AND ROBERT BOYD

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies.

ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

My genes done gone and tricked my brain By making fucking feel so great That's how the little creeps attain Their plan to fuckin' replicate But brain's got tricks itself, you see To get the bang but not the bite I got this here vasectomy My genes can fuck themselves tonight. - The R-Selectors, Trunclade

If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its metaphorical little heart.

PREDATORS RUN FOR THEIR DINNER. PREY RUN FOR THEIR LIVES.

The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.

It has been related that dogs drink at the river Nile running along, that they may not be seized by the crocodiles.

Out of raw emotion emerges instinctive truth.

The plotting he'd had to do to come to this point had exhausted Kidman's capacity for calculation; his natural, impulsive violence was regaining the upper hand.

Old habits die hard.

That is normal human behavior. We tend to go with strong hunches. System 1 follows a primitive psycho-logic: if it feels true, it is. In the Paleolithic world in which our brains evolved, that's not a bad way of making decisions. Gathering

Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.

The faith instinct…simply cannot be killed. That 'simply cannot' means that we simply cannot not live—cannot live as if life were meaningless, without purpose; as if life were merely material or mechanical or not spiritual. Such an effort in its deadly futility represents a historical ending time, a time just before the faith instinct will show itself again.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

Snap judgments are sometimes essential. As Daniel Kahneman puts it, "System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions from little evidence."13

Repress the natural and it comes back even stronger: not everyone can be a fetishist