Browse 435 quotes about Evolutionary Psychology.
“On the spectrum of team aggression, street gangs are one step nearer to a preliterate raiding party than to terrorists and therefore they are perceived as less threatening -they only destroy themselves. Some aspects of gang behavior do parallel chimpanzee raids, but in an urban jungle. -Gang warfare- is driven by the two basic emotions that also fuel chimpanzee and preliterate warfare -territory and revenge, or just being from another neighborhood. Merely belonging to another gang is enough reason to justify an attack, as also happens with the chimpanzees of Gombe. Unlike terrorists who attack a perceived outgroup for ideological reasons, in the case of Al Qaeda by mounting attacks halfway across the world, gangs fight their neighbors for what they perceive as territory and resources.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“Abandoned weapons and corpses may be washed away, removed by animals, dismembered by the victors as trophies, or buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of by the vanquished after defeat. It is reasonable to expect that direct archaeological evidence of warfare will be limited, and that it will actually tend to underestimate the frequency and bloody nature of past conflicts.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“For history and biology also show that even if we are a violent species, in which males have an inborn predisposition to engage in team aggression, the specific conditions of our environment, culture, economic well-being, and demographic structure can have dramatic impacts on how our most fundamental impulses are expressed.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“Once individuals are identified as belonging to an outgroup, there seems to be no limit to he human capacity for cruelty.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“Once individuals are identified as belonging to an outgroup, there seems to be no limit to the human capacity for cruelty.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“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
“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
“…human beings are condemned to live in two ethical and behavioral worlds at once -the morality of empathy for and reciprocity with ingroups, and cold-hearted team aggression aimed at outgroups.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“We humans are a frightening animal. Throughout our species existence, we have used each new technology we have developed to boost the destructive power of our ancient predisposition for killing members of our own species.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“The evidence of history is that no advance which can be applied to the killing of other human beings goes unused.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“Under natural selection, species adapt to their environments. When the environment refers to a species' physical habitat, this seems simple enough. If a species lives in the Arctic, it had better evolve some warm fur. Under sexual selection, species adapt too, but they adapt to themselves. Females adapt to males, and males adapt to females. Sexual preferences adapt to the sexual ornaments avaliable, and sexual ornaments adapt to sexual preferences.”
Source: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
“Each trait that we consider sexually attractive already summarizes a huge amount of information about an individual's genes, body, and mind.”
Source: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
“There is plenty of evidence from evolutionary psychology that men and women have physical, emotional and mental adaptations for short-term liaisons and adulterous affairs.”
Source: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
“Women differ in the exact male height they prefer, but almost always prefer a man taller than themselves. Different ethnic groups may prefer different facial features, but all prefer faces that are symmetrical and averagely shaped for their population. If you don't look for the universals of human beauty at the right level of description, you will not find them.”
Source: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
“We are supposed to be explorers of infinity, not prisoners of primitivity.”
Source: Mukemmel Musalman: Kafir Biraz, Peygamber Biraz
“Any human endeavor rooted in the pursuit of truth must rely on fact and not feelings.”
Source: Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense
“We are both thinking and feeling animals. The challenge is to know when to activate the cognitive (thinking) versus the affective (feeling) systems.”
Source: Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense
“Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carry'd one step further, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are deriv'd, must also be resembling. When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc'd to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both.”
Source: A Treatise of Human Nature
“Emotions such as happiness. fear, lust, disgust, or envy, serve as solutions to recurring evolutionary challenges that our ancestors have faced.”
Source: Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense
“Computation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal.”
Source: How the Mind Works
“[O]ur percept is an elaborate computer model in the brain, constructed on the basis of information coming from [the environment], but transformed in the head into a form in which that information can be used. Wavelength differences in the light out there become coded as 'colour' differences in the computer model in the head. Shape and other attributes are encoded in the same kind of way, encoded into a form that is convenient to handle. The sensation of seeing is, for us, very different from the sensation of hearing, but this cannot be directly due to the physical differences between light and sound. Both light and sound are, after all, translated by the respective sense organs into the same kind of nerve impulses. It is impossible to tell, from the physical attributes of a nerve impulse, whether it is conveying information about light, about sound or about smell. The reason the sensation of seeing is so different from the sensation of hearing and the sensation of smelling is that the brain finds it convenient to use different kinds of internal model of the visual world, the world of sound and the world of smell. It is because we internally use our visual information and our sound information in different ways and for different purposes that the sensations of seeing and hearing are so different. It is not directly because of the physical differences between light and sound.”
Source: The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
“[T]he form that an animal's subjective experience takes will be a property of the internal computer model. That model will be designed, in evolution, for its suitability for useful internal representation, irrespective of the physical stimuli that come to it from outside. Bats and we need the same kind of internal model for representing the position of objects in three-dimensional space. The fact that bats construct their internal model with the aid of echoes, while we construct ours with the aid of light, is irrelevant.”
Source: The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
“They say, in life change is the most important thing for you to evolve.
I think it's the pain which makes a person evolve, A species evolve.
Time will throw a thousand happy moments, which will teach you nothing. Real sense of life is understood when you go through that one painful moment.
Which will help you evolve, which will help you change.”
Source: World Hypnotized: Making of the Fuhrer
“One of the most fascinating aspect of humans is their 'object of fascination' which makes them remarkably unique from each other!””
“Sapient or Savage (The Sonnet)
To be or not to be,
That is not the question.
To be human or stay animal,
That is the question.
Human and animal,
What is the difference!
To be animal is to be selfish,
To be human is to go beyond the self.
There's more to life than us and them,
There's more to life than loss and gain.
There's more to life than money and fame,
There's more to life than dogmatic lanes.
To be or not to be, that is not the question.
Be sapient or stay savage, it's your decision.”
Source: Find A Cause Outside Yourself: Sermon of Sustainability
“We are all refugees inside our mind - a sentient being trying to escape its animal past towards a human future, and in doing so, we set the foundation for a civilized world.”
Source: Tum Dunya Tek Millet: Greatest Country on Earth is Earth
“Modern humans' group.minded interdependence thus served to spread human sympathy and helping to all in the group, best characterized as a sense of loyalty to the group. As a consequence, there emerged in modern humans a distinctive in-group/out-group psychology.”
Source: A Natural History of Human Morality
“Ritual is as old as humanity. The first humans ritually raised hands and voices in both desperation and exaltation, just as we do today. That protracted continuity is no historical accident. Ritual has been as critical to our success as fire and tools.”
Source: Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
“Religious beliefs influence how populations reproduce with one another and how many children they have; thus, religion has evolutionary consequences (in addition to its probable evolutionary origins).”
Source: Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us
“Long ago, our ancestors realized that the natural world was not the only wellspring of resources essential to our survival. The mind was just as rich. Humans possess a wealth of psychological resources necessary for survival: empathy, loyalty, commitment, and goodwill. Just as material resources must be processed and managed, so too with psychological resources.”
Source: Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
“So confident are we in ritual's power that we dare brandish it against the might of Nature herself. Nature will have its way with us, but we have always used ritual to rob it of the last word. It is nature that determines when a baby is born. But it has always been ritual that decides when a child's body has taken adult form. But it has always been ritual that decides when the boy is recognized as a man or the girl has become a woman. Nature directs our lusts and desires, but it has always been ritual that decides who our legitimate partner is. And in the end, nature snuffs the life from the body. But it has always been ritual that determines when our beloved is dismissed from our care. Humans are the only species that take offense at Nature's indifference to our plight. Ritual is a defiant gesture expressing that offence. If we abandon ritual do we give up something of our humanity? No. It is much simpler than that. If we abandon ritual, we give up being human.”
Source: Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
“The ubiquitous singing, chanting, and dancing of traditional societies laid the requisite groundwork from which civilization and modernity sprouted. Take that away and Homo Sapiens are thoroughly ordinary primates - upright chimpanzees, nothing more.”
Source: Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
“Despite the many material comforts of modern life, anyone who has lived long enough knows that life's joys are at minimum balanced by its sorrows. Loved ones die, jobs are lost, houses flood, fields burn, hearts and bones get broken, able bodies grow old and ill. None of this is new. Humans have been struggling - and rejoicing- since time immemorial. To keep their footing while shouldering their burdens, our ancestors always turned to ritual. Ritual mobilized the psychologiacl resources necessary to withstand whatever life threw at us.”
Source: Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
“Despite the many material comforts of modern life, anyone who has lived long enough knows that life's joys are at minimum balanced by its sorrows. Loved ones die, jobs are lost, houses flood, fields burn, hearts and bones get broken, able bodies grow old and ill. None of this is new. Humans have been struggling - and rejoicing- since time immemorial. To keep their footing while shouldering their burdens, our ancestors always turned to ritual. Ritual mobilized the psychological resources necessary to withstand whatever life threw at us.”
Source: Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
“People can cooperate, compete peacefully, or use violence to achieve their objectives, depending on what they believe will serve them best in any given circumstance.”
Source: Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars
“Cooperation is dramatically more effective when cultural codes -above all language, but also customs, values and other patterns of thought and behavior- are shared. Culture, cultural diversity, and, hence, the facility of shared culture cooperation are unique to humans and differentiate them from other social animals. Hence the innate human tendency to prefer those who belong to their kin-culture community over strangers.”
Source: Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars
“Humans employ simplified conceptual frameworks and normative cues to make sense of and cope with the infinite complexity of the natural and social world. This is the magical devise that has made our species' amazing trajectory possible, and it relies on our unique capacity for social learning.”
Source: Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars
“The red lipstick? It's supposed to signal fertility and readiness to mate. Just like the swollen red butt of a baboon. That tight-fitting little dress that shows off your curves? From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, big breasts represent a healthy mate who can feed a lot of offspring. That's why men are programmed to like big tits. When you show off your curves, what you're really doing is advertising to the whole world: "Look at me! I'm a healthy female! I'd be a perfect mate! Come mount me!”
Source: Why Men And Women Can't Be Friends
“Reasoning is hard to practice compared to the capacity of sentiments, but when practiced, it opens up new gateways of perception.”
Source: Build Bridges not Walls: In the name of Americana
“The world of science and the world of everyday experience do not always connect especially well.”
Source: How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures
“Fear is an archetypical instinct of survival.”
Source: Amor Apocalypse: Canım Sana İhtiyacım
“Esperanza Impossible Sonnet 30
There is nothing free about your will,
All of it is conditioned to the hilt.
If you are to foster any original will,
A lot of soil you've got to till.
Perception is not observation,
Perception is prediction.
The brain doesn't care about observing,
It only puts forward a self-serving illusion.
Your will is but puppet to that illusion,
Which means you are but a puppet to evolution.
You do have the brain power to take control,
But it'll take a lot of inconvenient self-correction.
If you can do that, you shall rise as sapiens.
Or you'll just end up as compost in nature's garden.”
Source: Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence
“Nothing appeals to political leftists like government-mandated mediocrity.”
Source: The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans, Third Edition
“Their relationship echoed, in many ways, the binds of trust and mutual protection that kept prisoners alive and sane in Nazi concentration camps. In those camps, researchers found, the "basic unit of survival" was the pair, not the individual.”
Source: Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West