Quotes About Evolutionary

Why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.

Nature's government spontaneously brings satisfaction to everyone because it promotes all innumerable, diverse tendencies of life in the evolutionary direction.

I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.

Evolutionary processes made us susceptible to suffering but also gave us—accidentally—a tool by which we can prevent much of this suffering. The tool, once again, is our reasoning ability. Because we can reason, we can not only understand our evolutionary predicament but take conscious steps to escape it, to the extent possible.

Repeatedly in the nineteenth century, western cities came into being when eastern capital created remote colonies in landscapes that as yet contained relatively few people. Movements of capital helped explain why large cities developed so much more quickly in the West than Turner's evolutionary frontier stages suggest.

On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory.

Now, traveling about twice as far back again in Earth time, back to 542 million years ago, we encounter another sudden massive wave of extinction instigated by runaway biology: The Cambrian substrate revolution, when the texture and chemistry of the seafloor (at that time, the entire habitable surface of the planet) was rapidly remade by a spurt of biological innovation that caused both mass death and fantastic new evolutionary opportunity. This

We are the first species in the known history of three and a half billion years of life on earth with the capacity to control our own destiny. The prospect of designing our destiny remains excellent to the degree that we comprehend our evolutionary past. Only by examining the complex repertoire of human sexual strategies can we know where we came from. Only by understanding why these human strategies have evolved can we control where we are going.

What humans have spontaneously identified as good and bad - or as positive and negative - are evolutionary complementations in need of more accurate identifications.

When we're in touch with our body, we're attuned to our intuition, needs, and desires and will be in the best position to make evolutionary choices for our health and wellbeing.

The sorrow, grief, and rage you feel is a measure of your humanity and your evolutionary maturity. As your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal.

Ultimately, human intentionality is the most powerful evolutionary force on this planet.

Above all, for Western people with their hypertrophied rationality, the development and expansion of a direct, emotional experience of reality, unobstructed by words and concepts, would be of evolutionary significance. (Aldous Huxley's "Human Resources")

That short-sleeping that we're now suffering is a consequence of our lifestyle. It's not a consequence of evolutionary habituation.

Exchanging the old boss for a new boss is not situational leadership. True situational leadership—flexible, effective, evolutionary—can only arise from self-management. And that means that situational leadership doesn't change fundamentally with circumstances. It is always about giving up control.

Without an evolutionary worldview, Christianity does not really understand, much less foster, growth or change. Nor does it know how to respect and support where history is heading.

From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .

From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions – fear, desire, anger – serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost, and I felt its futility now.

The Towner paper contained a very interesting statement, as an aside, concerning the five ebolaviruses: "Viruses of each species have genomes that are at least 30–40% divergent from one another, a level of diversity that presumably reflects differences in the ecologic niche they occupy and in their evolutionary history.

Maybe speech has been an evolutionary mistake; maybe everybody would get along better if we couldn't talk to each other.

There is a common misconception that the human brain is the pinnacle of billions of years of evolution. This may be true if we think of the entire nervous system. However, the human neocortex itself is a relatively new structure and hasn't been around long enough to undergo much long-term evolutionary refinement.

The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological, evolutionary process. Yet we face an enormous crisis because the most central and important aspect of globalization-its economy-is currently being organized in a manner that so gravely violates the fundamental principles by which healthy living systems are organized that it threatens the demise of our whole civilization.