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Quote by K. Kanagalatha

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The Goddess in the Living Room

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K. Kanagalatha

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“Among Chinese Singaporeans and Malaysians, many hold the belief that when Admiral Cheng Ho landed in Nanyang, he relieved himself in the jungle, and the steaming puddle of shit and piss evolved into the durian tree. To put it less elegantly, the mounds of flesh inside the durian resemble a row of little turds, resting neatly in a boat-shaped husk.”

NatureSingaporeMalaysiaDurianMalayaCheng Ho
Book:Durians Are Not the Only Fruit
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“Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children’s intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers’ stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion.”

TeachingFamous Teachers
Book:The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession
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“Perhaps we are just apes with brains being manipulated by memes in much the way we are manipulated by the cold virus. Instead of looking only at the prerequisite competences our ancestors needed to have in order for language to get under way, perhaps we should also consider unusual vulnerabilities that might make our ancestors the ideal hosts for infectious but nonvirulent habits (memes) that allowed us to live and stay mobile long enough for them to replicate through our populations.”

PhilosophyCultureCultural EvolutionLanguage Evolution
Book:From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
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“[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves — the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers — brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains — books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish them from genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer.”

EvolutionMemeCultural EvolutionMemeticsUniversal Darwinism
Book:The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
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“[E]ach culture is just like a tree whose essence and whole potential are already contained in the seed. Nothing during the course of a civilization is ever discovered, or invented, or created, which was not already present inside that seed.”

RealityCivilizationCultural Evolution
Book:A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World
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