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Evolutionary Psychology Quotes

Browse 435 quotes about Evolutionary Psychology.

Evolutionary Psychology Quotes

“Our deep-time ancestors very likely had the genetic resources needed for formal quantitative reasoning, but without the cultural invention of numerals and a umber line, those resources could not be exploited. The same may be true of language. The central role of cultural learning in the construction and transmission of language (qua social phenomenon) is enough to show that the use of language depends on cultural scaffolds, not just appropriate genetic potential.”

LanguageEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensHuman SpeciesUltrasociality
Book:From Signal to Symbol: The Evolution of Language
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“People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are [confused]. They have mixed up ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now). [A] good way to understand the logic of natural selection is to imagine that genes are agents with selfish motives. [T]he genes have metaphorical motives — making copies of themselves — and the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish motives into a human brain — heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow unselfishness. The love of children (who carry one's genes into posterity), a faithful spouse (whose genetic fate is identical to one's own), and friends and allies (who trust you if you're trustworthy) can be bottomless and unimpeachable as far as we humans are concerned (proximate level), even if it is metaphorically self-serving as far as the genes are concerned (ultimate level). Combine this with the common misconception that the genes are a kind of essence or core of the person, and you get a mongrel of Dawkins and Freud: the idea that the metaphorical motives of the genes are the deep, unconscious, ulterior motives of the person. That is an error.”

EvolutionSelfishnessAltruismEvolutionary PsychologyEgoismNatural SelectionSelfish GeneSelfish Gene TheoryProximate CauseGene Centered EvolutionGene Centered Natural SelectionUltimate Cause
Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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“The key factor is the commitment required to make relationships work. When people are raised in a community that they cannot easily escape, they do what our ancestors have done for millions of years: They learn how to manage relationships, and how to manage themselves and their emotions in order to keep those precious relationships going. There are certainly many online communities that have found ways to create strong interpersonal commitments and a feeling of belonging. but in general, when children are raised in multiple mutating networks where they don't need to use their real names and they can quit with the click of a button, they are less likely to learn such skills.”

RelationshipsCommunityEvolutionary PsychologySocial AnxietySocial RelationsMental Development
Book:The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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“…overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world-are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.”

RelationshipsCommunityEvolutionary PsychologySocial AnxietySocial RelationsMental Development
Book:The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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“Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and- as I will show-unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consciousness-perpetually-to managing what became their online brand. This was now necessary to gain acceptance from peers, which is the oxygen of adolescence, and to avoid online shaming, which is the nightmare of adolescence. Gen Z teens got sucked into spending many hours of each day scrolling through the shiny happy posts of friends, acquaintances, and distant influencers.”

RelationshipsCommunityTeensEvolutionary PsychologySocial AnxietySocial RelationsGen Z2010Mental DevelopmentWoke Generation
Book:The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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“La conclusión es que la mente humana está preparada para el tribalismo. La evolución humana no es sólo la historia de unos individuos que compiten con otros dentro de cada grupo; es también la historia de grupos que compiten contra otros, a veces con violencia.”

MoralEvolutionary PsychologyEvolucionEmpatiaTribalSesgoPsucologia
Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
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“Todos descendemos de personas que pertenecieron a grupos que fueron constantemente mejores para ganar esa competición. El tribalismo es nuestra herencia evolutiva para agruparnos y prepararnos para el conflicto intergrupal.”

MoralEvolutionary PsychologyEvolucionEmpatiaTribalSesgoPsucologia
Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
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“The duality that is inherent to us… A division of wills, of desires, which causes us to be inhabited by an internal struggle between various entities... What makes us a single being? If we are the synergy of the trillions of cells that inhabit us, which have evolved with the history of the Earth and our species through their adaptations, and that are in constant replacement and renewal throughout an individual's life.”

Evolutionary PsychologyDualismInternal Awareness
Author:Raydrich Rocha
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“A dualidade que nos é inerente… Uma divisão de vontades, de quereres, que faz com que sejamos habitados por uma luta interna entre diversas entidades… O que faz de nós um único ser? Se somos a sinergia entre as trilhões de células que nos habitam, que evoluíram com a história da terra e da nossa espécie através de suas adaptações, e que estão em constante substituição e renovação durante a vida de um indivíduo.”

Evolutionary PsychologyDualismInternal Awareness
Book:Consciência: Delírios e Galopes
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“Page 43: Natural selection is a multilevel process that operates among groups in addition to among individuals within groups. Any unit becomes endowed with the properties inherent in the word organism to the degree that it is a unit of selection. The history of life on earth has been marked by many transitions from groups of organisms to groups as organisms. Organismic groups achieve their unity with mechanisms that suppress selection within without themselves being overtly altruistic. Human evolution falls within the paradigm of multilevel selection and the major transitions of life. Moral systems provide many of the mechanisms that enable human groups to function as adaptive units.”

Evolutionary PsychologyGroup Selection
Book:Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society
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“LOVE THY NEIGHBOR The Evolution of In-Group Morality By John Hartung January 1995 Skeptic 3(4) The world's major religions espouse a moral code that includes injunctions against murder, theft, and lying — or so conventional 19th- and 20th-century Western wisdom would have it. Evidence put forth here argues that this convention is a conceit which does not apply to the West's own religious foundations. In particular, rules against murder, theft, and lying codified by the Ten Commandments were intended to apply only within a cooperating group for the purpose of enabling that group to compete successfully against other groups. In addition, this in-group morality has functioned, both historically and by express intent, to create adverse circumstances between groups by actively promoting murder, theft, and lying as tools of competition. Contemporary efforts to present Judeo-Christian in-group morality as universal morality defy the plain meaning of the texts upon which Judaism and Christianity are based. Accordingly, that effort is ultimately hopeless.”

Evolutionary PsychologyPsychology Of ReligionGroup Selection
Author:John Hartung
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“Our immune system is evolving through trials of use in fighting illnesses and the bombardment of our modern world toxins and that this evolution not only engages the strengthening of the body and it’s T-Cell use but also our emotional intelligence and a higher awareness of our human nature and its original DNA coding as a highly self-reflective and intelligence evolving entity.”

PsychologyHuman NatureHealthEvolutionary PsychologyImmune SystemT Cells
Book:What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct
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“Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, "Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.”

ScienceEvolutionary PsychologyMonogamy
Book:Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
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“Violence is a social and political problem, not just a biological and psychological one. Nonetheless, the phenomena we call ‘social’ and ‘political’ are not external happenings that mysteriously affect human affairs… they are shared understandings among individuals at a given time and place.”

PhilosophySciencePoliticsPsychologyViolenceSocietyHuman NatureSociologyEvolutionary PsychologySocial Theory
Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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“Although we suffer from many of our ancestors' bad habits, they also evolved a motivational system that continues to reward us when we get it right. This is happiness.”

SciencePsychologyNonfictionEvolutionary PsychologyBehavioral Psychology
Book:The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy
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“We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favour and we persuaded ourselves along the way. Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed societal strategy. We're descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half truths who in order to convince others, simultaneously convinced themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track – when it didn't suit us we couldn't agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. That's why there are divorces, border disputes and wars, and why the statue of the Virgin Mary weeps blood and the one of Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and science were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature. Disinterested truth. But it couldn't save us from ourselves, the ruts were too deep. There could be no private redemption in objectivity.”

SciencePerceptionBeliefsEvolutionary PsychologyConfirmation Bias
Book:Enduring Love
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“When we as civilized adults dream, we work our way back to the primitive organization that humans knew for millions of years before language and civilization. Then we use our unconscious and power of imagination to camouflage the dream in imaginative ways.”

MindLanguageDreamsEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychoanalysisSchizophreniaAncient Mind
Book:Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
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“[L]asting love is something a person has to decide to experience. Lifelong monogamous devotion is just not natural—not for women even, and emphatically not for men. It requires what, for lack of a better term, we can call an act of will. . . . This isn't to say that a young man can't hope to be seized by love. . . . But whether the sheer fury of a man's feelings accurately gauges their likely endurance is another question. The ardor will surely fade, sooner or later, and the marriage will then live or die on respect, practical compatibility, simple affection, and (these days, especially) determination. With the help of these things, something worthy of the label 'love' can last until death. But it will be a different kind of love from the kind that began the marriage. Will it be a richer love, a deeper love, a more spiritual love? Opinions vary. But it's certainly a more impressive love.”

LoveFeelingsMarriageRespectDeterminationAffectionEvolutionary PsychologyLasting Love
Book:The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
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“People are always invoking evolutionary psychology for everything. "Why do men hang around asking women out? Oh, to improve their reproductive success," every damn thing - religion, art - it can all be explained by evolutionary psychology. But in our hearts we know that evolutionary psychology is only sort of accurate, because it really doesn't capture what's most interesting about our lives.”

PeopleKnowsMenHeartArtInterestingPsychologyOur LivesAskingDamnCaptureAccurateEvolutionary PsychologyMost InterestingDamn Things
Author:D. T. Max
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“Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.”

PeopleWorldHumansLooksTermPsychologyEconomicsBlindMedicineSpotsErasBiologySurprisingConsideringEcologyEvolutionary PsychologyComputingSnapshotsEvolutionary BiologyBlind Spots
Book:Prey
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“Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.”

PeopleIfsThinkingNeedsHumansHas BeensBookDreamMightPsychologyRecordsHuman NatureLettersOppositesScientistTreatsClaimsWake UpSelfishNewspapersWickedSomedayEvolutionary PsychologyResearchersFlatteringLove One AnotherHistory BooksBad DreamKnavery
Author:Steven Pinker
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“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”

MenMindImportantLightSciencePsychologyFieldsFutureResearchCapacityFoundationThrownEvolutionary PsychologyOrigin Of SpeciesMental PowerOpen FieldsOrigin Of Man
Book:On the Origin of Species
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“The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.”

KnowsWorldHumansKindFactsLeftNumbersPsychologyHuman NatureTasksAddInsightAssumptionSatisfyingSmallestEvolutionary Psychology
Book:How the Mind Works
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