Quotes About Evolutionary

When we attempt to clear up the mess others have made, or when we love the unlovely, we demonstrate the kind of weirdness God likes. We give the lie to the evolutionary survival of the fittest maxim...

Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.

As you live you evolve and grow and discover, and I don't like to look at anything as an arrival. I always like to look at it as a discovery and an evolutionary process.

Human embryos develop then discard gills, tails, and other apparent echoes of their evolutionary past.

But that is not the approach of the evolutionary psychologists, who argue that we can best understand our states of mind if we identify their evolutionary origins, and the contribution that they (or some earlier version of them) might have made to the reproductive strategies of our genes.

A lesson learned long ago: the human brain was much more sensitive to side-to-side displacement than front-to-back. An evolutionary quirk, presumably, like most things.

Synergistic convergence is the most important idea we have at our disposal to prevent collapse scenarios and move forward in a nonlinear manner toward an evolutionary society.

A system is more than the sum of its parts. It may exhibit adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and sometimes evolutionary behavior.

You're wired by evolution to find bad news more motivational than good. To seek it out.

The scholarly term is Intermittent Variable Rewards. Which simply means that unpredictability has great power to addict. Because we have an innate evolutionary compulsion to know.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

The fact that women work is no reason to suppose that they have altered their personalities. From an evolutionary point of view, the oddity is that there have been historical periods when women did not work. Without the calories that women provided through gathering tubers, vegetables, and honey, families would have starved. What marks our present-day environment as special is not the fact of women working but of women having to leave their children in order to do so.

When we're engaged in physical activity, our visual sense is sharpened, especially with regard to stimuli appearing in the periphery of our gaze. This shift, which is also found in non-human animals, makes evolutionary sense: the visual system becomes more sensitive when we are actively exploring our environment. When our bodies are at rest—that is, sitting still in a chair—this heightened acuity is dialed down.

I think open source is an evolutionary idea for humanity, this idea of transparency. It played out for us in the technology world, but it also played out with the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission and Wikipedia.

Check your testosterone levels. Every study on evolutionary psychology has correlated testosterone levels with dominance.

I know nothing about economics and—from evolutionary logic—could not have predicted a thing about the collapse of 2008, but I have disagreed for thirty years with an alleged science called economics that has resolutely failed to ground itself in underlying knowledge, at a cost to all of us

It is the fundamental unfairness of parenthood that if we do our jobs well, the deepest bond we are given will walk out the door with a wave over the shoulder. We get good training along the way. We learn to say "Have a great time, sweetie" while we are longing to pull them back to safety. And against all the evolutionary imperatives of protecting our gene pool, we give them car keys. And freedom. It's our job. And I wanted to be a good mother.

The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal. A species and a culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it. The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences.

The emphasis on empathy accomplishes several significant goals in view of a posthuman theory of subjectivity. Firstly, it reappraises communication as an evolutionary tool. Secondly, it identifies in emotions, rather than in reason, the key to consciousness.

The gods, I correct her. Monotheism sucks, like all despotisms. The species is naturally, democratically, polytheistic, apart from that evolutionary elite which has dispensed with the divine requirement entirely. You instinctively want the gods to be many because you are One.

We live in a world of unimaginable surprises - from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light's dancing for eons upon the earth - and yet paradise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise. This is wondrously strange. If one didn't know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.

The temptation to start each day with several glazed donuts and to end it with an extramarital affair might be difficult for some people to resist, for reasons that are easily understood in evolutionary terms, but there are surely better ways to maximize one's long-term well-being.

Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings.

Rome was an evolutionary society, not a revolutionary one. Constitutional crises tended to lead not to the abolition of previous arrangements but to the accretion of new layers of governance.