Quotes About Evolutionary

What is proposed is nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, conscious fertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the evolutionary process.

As for memes, the word 'meme' is a cliche, which is to say it's already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene.

The X chromosome does most of the heavy developmental lifting, while the little Y has been shedding its associated genes at a rate of about five every one million years, committing suicide in slow motion. It's now down to less than 100 genes. By comparison, the X chromosome carries about 1,500 genes, all necessary participants in embryonic construction projects. These are not showing any signs of decay.

Science cannot tell theology how to construct a doctrine of creation, but you can't construct a doctrine of creation without taking account of the age of the universe and the evolutionary character of cosmic history.

Is our desire for partnership just an evolutionary remainder, a Togetherness Delusion, where millions of women only think they need a relationship to be truly happy? Maybe. But you know what? That's fine with me.

One of the things I say is from an evolutionary point of view: probably the ideal rich environment for a baby includes more mud, livestock, and relatives than most of us could tolerate nowadays.

One such evolutionary system, or ridge, encompasses panhuman emotional faculties, or affective "programs." These include the basic, or primary, emotions that Darwin first identified: surprise, fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, and perhaps contempt. Certain reactions characteristic of the neurophysiology of surprise and fear are already evident in reptiles, and the other primary emotions are at least apparent in monkeys and apes.

Today, evolutionary psychologists say Watson misinterpreted his Little Albert experiment: the real reason Albert developed such a profound phobia of rats was not because behavioral conditioning is so intrinsically potent but because the human brain has a natural—and evolutionarily adaptive—predisposition to fear small furry things on the basis of the diseases they carry. (I explore this at greater length in chapter 9.)

The result of a physiological fear response that has no legitimate object, or that is disproportionate to the size of the threat, can be pathological anxiety—an evolutionary impulse gone awry.

To quote Dr. Ewer: 'Behaviour will tend to be always a jump ahead of structure and so play a decisive role in the evolutionary process.' In this light, evolution no longer appears as a tale told by an idiot, but rather as an epic recited by a stutterer-at times haltingly and painfully, then precipitating in bursts.

Human birth...is a solution to an evolutionary problem: how a mammal can walk upright, which requires a small, fixed, bony pelvis, and also possess a large brain, which entails a baby whose head is too big to fit through that small pelvis...in a sense, all human mothers give birth prematurely. Other mammals are born mature enough to walk and seek food within hours; our newborns are small and helpless for months.

I'll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or a parasite, as some scientists (the "New Atheists") have argued in recent years.

Because men and women in a relationship have many conflicting interests, evolutionary theory does not view love relationships as harmonious partnerships for childrearing; but a universal feature of human cultures is that men and women form relationships intended to last for years (marriage) that constrain their sexual behavior in some way and institutionalize their ties to children and to each other.

make altruism pay, and two back-to-back breakthroughs in evolutionary thinking showed how to do that. In chapter 3 I presented kin altruism (be nice to those who share your genes) and reciprocal altruism (be nice to those who might reciprocate in the future) as two steps on the way to ultrasociality. Once these

It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective.

I'll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality.

Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.

For the genuine materialist there is no fundamental, but only a gradual, an "evolutionary" difference, between man and a pest, a noxious insect

Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.

In fact, the socialization gives us the tools to fill our evolutionary roles. They are our building blocks.

THE GREAT IRONY is that in the beginning, the gut was all there was. "We're basically a highly evolved earthworm surrounding the intestinal tract," Khoruts commented as we drove away from his clinic the last day I was there. Eventually, the food processor had to have a brain attached to help it look for food, and limbs to reach that food. That increased its size, so it needed a circulatory system to distribute the fuel that powered the limbs.

Further evidence for the man-made nature of gods comes from their evolutionary history. It is a little-known fact, but gods evolve.

the beauty of commerce is that when it works it rewards people for solving other people's problems. It is 'best understood as an evolutionary system, constantly creating and trying out new solutions to problems in a similar way to how evolution works in nature. Some solutions are "fitter" than others. The fittest survive and propagate. The unfit die.

Letting good evolve, while doing bad, has been the dominant theme of history. That is why the news is full of only bad things being done, but we find when they are over that great good has happened unheralded. Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve.