“Just because humans have become "advanced" enough to vaccinate their young, write histories, and speculate about our origins, this does not mean that evoutionary processes have ceased to operate.”
Source: Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
“A person is good at it because he worked on it.”
Source: Quantraz
“In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God.”
Source: The Plague
“To sum up, then, fundamentalism is neither religion in excess nor politics in disguise. It is an attempt to preserve a particular kind of hierarchy based on coalition, when this is threatened by the perception of cheap and therefore likely defection.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“Instead of causes, biology is repeatedly about propensities, potentials, vulnerabilities, predispositions, proclivities, interactions, modulations, contingencies, if/then clauses, context dependencies, exacerbation or diminution of preexisting tendencies. Circles and loops and spirals and Möbius strips.”
Source: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“To be good is just never to lose it. How does evil begin in a life? How can it begin? Yet we were there once.”
Source: The Italian Girl
“People may have finely tuned coalitional capacities, but they do not necessarily have access to how these work. The cues that make some people appear reliable and others less so are computed in ways that often escape conscious attention.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“...coalitional dynamics would predict that whatever outsiders do is often little concern to fundamentalists. What matters is what other members of the group are likely to do.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“Religion is not just about flying mountains, talking trees and biological monsters but also about agents whose mental states matter a lot, about connections with predation and death, about links with morality and misfortune.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“...the fact that early humans did decorate corpses, lay out the bodies in particular postures or bury people with flowers, aligned horns or tools would support the notion that some ritualization of death is a very ancient human activity.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought