Browse 435 quotes about Evolutionary Psychology.
“Considering how much animals act like us, share our physiological reactions, have the same facial expressions, and possess the same sort of brains wouldn't it be strange indeed if their internal experiences were radically different?”
Source: Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
“Sports are not exactly spiritual, but playing them depends on some of spirituality’s key ingredients for bonding people together, like coordinated and collective physical movement and group celebrations. Research consistently shows that teen who play team sports are happier than those who don’t. humans are embodied; a phone-based life is not. Screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter.”
Source: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
“The simple act of eating together, especially from the same plate or serving dish, strengthens that bond and reduces the likelihood of conflict. This is one deficiency the virtual world can never overcome, no matter how good VR gets.”
Source: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
“In short, there is no consensual structuring of time, space, or objects around which people can use their ancient programming for sacredness to create religious or quasi-religious communities. Everything is available to every individual, all the time, with little or no effort. There is no Sabbath and there are no holy days. Everything is profane. Living in a world of structureless anomie makes adolescents more vulnerable to online recruitment into radical political movements that offer moral clarity and a moral community, thereby pulling them further away from their in-person communities.”
Source: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
“Nothing is ever lost. Just as the face-to-face rituals of tribal society continue in disguised form among us, so the unity of political and religious power, the archaic ‘mortgage’, as Voegelin called it, reappears continually in societies that have experienced the axial ‘breakthrough’. Kings who ruled ‘by divine right’, are obvious examples, but so are presidents who claim to act in accordance with a ‘higher power’. At every point as our story unfolds, we will have to consider the relation between political and religious power. But one thing is certain: the issue never goes away.”
Source: Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
“As we have seen, the establishment of the early state and the beginning of archaic society destroyed the uneasy egalitarianism of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of hominin evolution, but in so doing made possible much larger and more complex societies. A dramatic symbolism that combined with social power, enacted in entirely new forms of ritual, involving, centrally, sacrifice -even human sacrifice- as a concrete expression of radical status difference.”
Source: Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
“Religion is complicated- the emphasis here being on the verb -is-. Religion as we see it today is the product of many millennia of evolutionary history. Neither the Olympian pantheon nor the Roman magisterium was part of religion in our ancestral world. To understand religion as a cultural adaptation, we must understand what it was when it first emerged, and what kind of world it was born into.”
Source: Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved
“Humans are designed not with a specific adaptive religious module, but instead with a mind prepared to engage in the myriad social/emotional/cognitive activities that fall under what we call -religion-.”
Source: Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved
“...cooperation on a grand scale required ritual on a grand scale.”
Source: Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
“Across history, human societies have devised numerous ways to show that an individual has been punished for cheating rules. These signals range from scarlett letters, to shaved heads, to amputated fingers.”
Source: Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us
“Having concepts of gods and spirits does not really make moral rules more compelling but it sometimes makes them more intelligible. So we do not have gods because that makes society function. We have gods in part because we have the mental equipment that makes society possible but we cannot always understand how society functions.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“Societies have religion because social cohesion requires something like religion. Social groups would fall apart if ritual did not periodically reestablish that all members are part of a greater whole.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“Social exchange is certainly among the oldest of human behaviors, as humans have depended on sharing and exchanging resources for a very long time.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“Every molecule in our body is conditioned through millions of years of natural selection to ensure our survival, but if you can jeopardize your own survival to lift up another life, that, my friend, is called human life.”
Source: Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None
“That there are no women hoboes in the civilized world today [1918] is incontestable proof of the superiority of the economic status of woman over man.”
“Identifying evolutionary origins of nefarious behavior in no way justifies or excuses it.”
Source: When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
“Just as modern science has created novel vaccines and drugs to eliminate many "natural diseases", with enough knowledge we can create personal, social, and legal environments that curtail or suppress the components of male psychology that contribute to sexual coercion.”
Source: When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
“It is a source of power to recognize that women hold the reins in this evolutionary equation, and their mate selections, in principle, have the power to undermine male control and create greater equality between the sexes.”
Source: When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
“One way to curtail men's proprietary mindset is to empower women -a trend that started with first-wave feminists who ushered in women's right to vote and continues today with women's increasing access to their own resources.”
Source: When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
“We should accept the likelihood that male violence and male dominance over women have long been a part of our history. But with an evolutionary perspective we can firmly reject the pessimists who say it has to stay that way. Male demonism is not inevitable.”
Source: Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
“Neuroscience is Poetry (Sonnet 2717)
Human brain is the most astonishing
transdimensional engineering of Mother Nature,
from outside it's just a 3 pound lump of goop,
but inside, the very fabric of spacetime
bursts into existence -
we stretch time when we suffer,
we compress time when we're joyful,
we expand space in empathy,
we collapse distance through memory -
we invent gods when we feel helpless,
we invent weapons when we're scared,
we invent poetry when we're inspired,
we invent politics when we want control -
in short, the human brain is bigger
on the inside than the outside.”
Source: Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
“Human brain is the most astonishing transdimensional engineering of Mother Nature, from outside it's just a 3 pound lump of goop, but inside, the very fabric of spacetime bursts into existence.”
Source: Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
“The human brain is bigger on the inside than the outside.”
Source: Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
“Malamuth, Sockloskie, Koss, and Tanaka (1991) proposed a model of the characteristics of aggressors that suggests that coercive sex may be conceptualized as resulting from the convergence of (1) relatively high levels of ‘impersonal’ sex and (2) hostile, dominating characteristics… According to this model, the determinants of coercive sex can often be traced to early home experiences and parent–child interactions… Individuals experiencing this type of home environment may develop negative views of male–female relationships, which may foster a relatively impersonal orientation to sexuality, a hostile ‘schema’ about social relationships, or both.” (pp. 281–282)”
Source: Sex, Power, Conflict: Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives
“If groups could come together in low-anxiety situations, they discovered, these strangers would have the chance to empathize with one another... Most policies are enacted witht he assumption that a change in attitude will lead to a change in behaviour, but in the case of intergroup conflict, it is the change in behaviour- in the form of contact - that will most likely change attitudes.”
“Anyone who says that our worst behaviors are inevitable knows too little about primates, including us.”
Source: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“Our worst behaviors, ones we condemn and punish, are the products of our biology. But don’t forget that the same applies to our best behaviors.”
Source: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“Be dubious about someone who suggests that other types of people are like little crawly, infectious things.”
Source: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“We’re the only species that institutionalizes reconciliation and that grapples with –truth-, -apology-, -forgiveness-, -reparations-, -amnesty-, and –forgetting-.”
Source: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant forces we don’t know a thing about.”
Source: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“Many of our best moments of morality and compassion have roots far deeper and older than being mere products of human civilization.”
Source: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience; that’s how we learn –context, context, context.”
Source: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“Rationality may be key to establishing peace, but the irrational importance of sacred values is key to establishing lasting peace.”
Source: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“Be careful when our enemies are made to remind us of maggots and cancer and shit. But also beware when it is our empathic intuitions, rather than our hateful ones, that are manipulated by those who use us for their own goals.”
Source: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“Totalitarianism is not a historical coincidence. In the fynal analysis, it is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.”
Source: The Psychology of Totalitarianism
“...you don't really have to be good at everything. Life offers so many chances to use one tool instead of another, ond often you can use a strength to get around a weakness.”
Source: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
“Psychopahy is basically the absence of sympathy. There are fewer female psychopaths, perhaps because female psychophats would not have shown sufficient sympathy to their babies in past generations.”
Source: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
“Psychopathy is basically the absence of sympathy. There are fewer female psychopaths, perhaps because female psychophats would not have shown sufficient sympathy to their babies in past generations.”
Source: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
“Anyone who wishes to imply superiority in their particular line of work is apt to style themselves an artist. The imperatives of fitness display allow us to understand the passion with which people debate whether something is or is not an art. A claim that one's work is art is a claim for sexual and social status.”
Source: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
“Beauty conveys truth, but not the way we thought. Aesthetic significance does not deliver truth about the human condition in general: it delivers truth about the condition of a particular human, the artist.”
Source: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
“Perception is all about assumption,
Our brain hasn't evolved to observe reality.
Biases prevent the observation of biases, unless,
You are hellbent to expand across comfort and luxury.”
Source: Find A Cause Outside Yourself: Sermon of Sustainability
“It is extremely interesting to observe how certain people seem to be 'elected' by the cosmos to be the forerunners of a new ideology, or to carry out a specific mission within society.”
“The common denominator of all jokes is a path of expectation that is diverted by an unexpected twist necessitating a complete reinterpretation of all the previous facts — the punch-line…Reinterpretation alone is insufficient. The new model must be inconsequential. For example, a portly gentleman walking toward his car slips on a banana peel and falls. If he breaks his head and blood spills out, obviously you are not going to laugh. You are going to rush to the telephone and call an ambulance. But if he simply wipes off the goo from his face, looks around him, and then gets up, you start laughing. The reason is, I suggest, because now you know it’s inconsequential, no real harm has been done. I would argue that laughter is nature’s way of signaling that "it’s a false alarm." Why is this useful from an evolutionary standpoint? I suggest that the rhythmic staccato sound of laughter evolved to inform our kin who share our genes; don’t waste your precious resources on this situation; it’s a false alarm. Laughter is nature’s OK signal.”
Source: A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers
“Selection shaped our brains and bodies to maximize reproduction at enormous costs to human happiness.”
Source: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
“...killing other members of our own species -a rarity in the animal kingdom- is a male behavior that evolved early in our history, because those individuals who manifested such a predisposition were more likely to transmit their genes to the next generation than those who didn't. War and violence, then, are indelibly linked to sex and reproduction.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“Systematic rape is one of the most hideous, and most explicitly male, expressions of warfare, but it is hardly the only one. All wars are extraordinarily costly in material terms and grotesquely painful in human terms. Yet wars are so much a part of the human experience that we don't always pause to realize that one of the most astonishing aspects of war is the very fact that we so regularly go out and deliberately kill members of our own species.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“In short, controlling more resources means you are likely to have more progeny surviving to future generations: Team aggression is one way that both chimpanzees and humans have hit upon to reap that evolutionary reward.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“After World War II, Marxist archaeologists argued that Stone Age societies were economically self-sufficient and therefore incapable of warfare -that is until they excavated skeletons with flint arrows embedded in them.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“The transition that we make with age reflects not only our growing experience and shifting philosophies, but also a changing willingness to engage in or condone violence. Young men are the revolutionaries, the superstar computer programmers, the best athletes, the most courageous soldiers, the bravest mountaineers, and the most creative musicians, but they are also the most vicious gang members and nearly all the suicidal terrorists.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“Respect and loyalty go together and gang members, like the formal military, hoplites, Yanomamo warriors, and chimpanzees on patrol, will risk and give their lives for one another.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World