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Famous Azar Gat Quotes

“...more wealth is desired even though above a certain level it has ceased to translate into greater reproduction; with effective contraception much the same applies to sexual success; power, status, honor, and fame -connected to the above- are still hotly pursued even though their reproductive significance has become ambivalent. It is the evolution-shaped proximate mechanisms -the web of desire- that dominate human behavior, even where much of their original adaptive rationale has weakened.”

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Book:War in Human Civilization
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“However, contrary to the fashion in much of the gender studies, cultural norms play, and diverge, along a scale set by our inborn dispositions. (Needless to say, the subject is extremely complex and, as we see later, it becomes even more complex with the new opportunities, interactions, and tensions created by accelerated cultural evolution.) The fact remains that among hunter-gatherers, in the 'human state of nature’, women’s participation in warfare was extremely marginal. Even more tan hunting in which women also marginally engaged in a few societies, fighting was a male preserve and the most marked sex difference.”

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Book:War in Human Civilization
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“Nevertheless, my contention is precisely that Homo sapiens sapiens possesses an innate, omnipresent, evolution-shaped predisposition for ordering its world, which among other things extends to form the foundation of mythology, metaphysics, and science. As with all other adaptive predispositions, this human propensity to construct interpretative mental frameworks of the world expresses itself as a powerful urge, a profound emotional need, which humans simply cannot help or do without. We are compulsive meaning seekers. It is this propensity -intertwined as it is with the evolution of symbolic representation and generalized conceptual thought- that is responsible for our species' remarkable career.”

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Book:War in Human Civilization
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“The first obvious and generally controversy-free, fighting-related difference between men and women is that of physical strength. Men are considerably stronger than women, on average, of course, and all the following data are on average. To begin with, men are bigger than women. They are about nine percent taller and proportionately heavier. Even these facts do not tell the whole story, because in muscle and bone mass men's advantage is bigger still. Relative to body weight, men are more muscular and bony, with the main difference concentrated in the arms, chest and shoulders. Fat comprises only 15 per cent of their body weight, compared with 27 per cent in women.”

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Book:War in Human Civilization
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“The expansion of the state thus had the effect of gradually diminishing tribal and local boundaries within the same ethnos, and of reducing the differences between separate -ethnies- in multi-ethnic states and empires, subsuming them within supra-ethnic identities, even to the point of creating new, transformed, and larger ethnic identities.”

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Book:War in Human Civilization
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“Again, as young males have always been the most aggressive element in society whereas older men were traditionally associated with a counsel of moderation and compromise, it has been suggested that the decline in young men’s relative numbers may contribute to the pacificity of developed societies while explaining the greater belligerency of developing ones, particularly those of Islam.”

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Book:War in Human Civilization
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