“Cruelty takes many forms, but all those forms depend on the human hability to dehumanize and de-individualize another person.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“Our earliest ancestors evolved a psychological switch that allowed them to dehumanize and kill members of their own species, and our modern weapons help too, by depersonalizing killing.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“Mendelevium was discovered and named during the Cold War era so the scientists who discovered it had to convince the U.S. government to allow their proposal to name the element for Dmitri Mendeleev, who was a Russian scientist. Since he was known as the father of the periodic table, the International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry approved the use of his name for element 101.”
Source: Magical Elements of the Periodic Table Presented By The Actinide Knights
“I was lonely all right. I was lonely for that big ass standing beside me.”
Source: Post Office
“Some Rousseauean anthropologists protest that reports of cannibalism represent a racist desire to denigrate other cultures, but the scientific evidence suggests otherwise.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“The fact that as the population of any species grows, the pressure on its natural resources increases and competition becomes more severe.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“Rare is the Stalin-like individual, who lacks empathy and who seems to take pleasure in inflicting pain or watching pain inflicted to others; common is the -virtuous citizen acting in the name of righteous causes-.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“The evolutionary logic of team aggression is to kill as many members of the outgroup as possible, at as minimum risk to yourself as possible.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“A few people -and a few chimpanzees- are just frankly antisocial. Presumably, such cases are the result of something going grievously wrong in a brain that has been built by a particular combination of genes and then submitted to a particular set of environmental pressures, so that it places almost everyone in an outgroup. When such individuals act alone, they are antisocial. But when they gain control over groups or even whole nations, they join the ranks of history’s greatest villains.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“The more we appreciate from whence we came biologically, the better placed we will be to build up those cultural and environmental influences that help ameliorate the worst aspects of war.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World