Browse 297 quotes about Homo Sapiens.
“In place of a process that 'others' distressed people, we can look for ways to 'belong' them. For sure they do belong, and the belonging begins on a vast scale. As a regular human being, having inherited protections that kept every one of their ancestors alive at least long enough to start a family, the patient can consider themselves well equipped to handle, in their own time and in their own way, whatever lies ahead. They possess a genius for survival that has accumulated over countless generations; in this real sense, all of their fore -fathers and mothers- are on their side.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Evolutionary scholars have long stressed the adaptive role of aggressive and antisocial behavior as a high-risk strategy for social and mating competition. In evolutionary psychopathology, antisocial disorders are usually regarded as costly but potentially adaptive strategies rather than behavioral dysfunctions. Some authors have focused specifically on the evolution of psychopathy, and argued that this condition embodies a "cheater" social strategy designed to exploit other people's trust and cooperative behavior while avoiding reciprocation.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“Evolution in the cognitive niche has endowed our species with remarkable abilities such as language, abstract reasoning, and sophisticated mentalizing. These species-typical innovations have been accompanied by rapid changes in brain structure and functionality. While adaptations such as language are hugely beneficial, they are also likley to carry some costs. A number of authors have argued that vulnerability to psychosis is one of those costs -the price our species pays for its unique set of cognitive skills. From this perspective, there are no individual fitness benefits to psychosis proneness; vulnerability to schizophrenia and other psychoses is a general byproduct of our evolved design, and unfortunate combinations of genetic and environmental factors determine the onset of a full-fledged disorder in some individuals.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“Even properly functioning defenses are subject to activation errors, evolutionary/developmental mismatches and maladaptive learning; moreover, mechanisms that are initially functional may become damaged or dysregulated following periods of chronic hyperactivation. In other words, conditions that start as adaptive response may sometimes morph into dysfuntions along the way.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“...agriculture and its attending social changes have likely increased selection for traits such as self-control, lower time discounting, and tolerance for routine over the past few millennia.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“To the extent that psychological mechanisms rely on information acquired through learning, they are vulnerable to maladaptive outcomes owing to the intrinsic limitations of learning processes. Indeed, the massive capacity for individual and social learning required to exploit the cognitive niche may contribute to explain our species' seemingly unique vulnerability to mental disorders.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
“Humans were designed by evolution to live in societies, but they may not understand how societies work.”
Source: Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
“Information is our environment, our niche, and as we are complex animals we constantly transform that niche, sometimes in ways that make it possible to acquire even more information from our surroundings.”
Source: Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
“The ability of humans to speak a modern language and the evolution of our ability to think about ourselves thinking about ourselves thus appear to parallel each other.”
Source: Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion
“...a mature understanding of death appears to be one of the last milestones in the cognitive development and evolution of the human brain.”
Source: Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion
“Prior to about 40,000 years ago, hominins had been observing other hominins die for more than six million years. They were intimately acquainted with death as something that happened to others. They observed people die within their living group - children from disease, women from childbirth, men from hunting accidents, and older adults from starvation. They also occasionally encountered deceased hominins as they foraged for food or followed herds of deer. Unlike today, when the biological realities of death are relegated to the offices of medical examiners and morticians, early hominins saw corpses in all stages of decomposition, since even the occasional burial of bodies was apparently not practiced until the last 100,000 years.”
Source: Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion
“The journalistic cliché that this is the -information age- is misleading if it suggests that in the past, either recent or distant, we did not depend on information.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“Humans transform the world through our creative technologies, and we cannot survive without them.”
Source: Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
“Our brains needed to be able to do more than simply create models of the world. The power of imagination took root in the brains of our ancestors because it helped them predict uncertain futures.”
Source: The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War
“Stress is a survival mechanism that serves an obvious evolutionary function. When we are anxious, our autonomic nervous system releases a cascade of chemicals (stress hormones), which give our body instructions on how to prepare to face danger. Our heart beats faster to pump more blood to the muscles, and our breathing becomes heavier to provide us with more oxygen. Muscles tense up to protect us from injury and to facilitate fighting or running. Sweating helps cool the body down. Our attention increases, and our reflexes become sharper, keeping us alert. Stress acts as motivation, helping us to focus on our goals and rise to meet our challenges, whether those involve studying for an exam, flying a fighter jet or scoring that match-winning goal. In short, stress serves a purpose. The problem, however, is that beyond certain threshold stress ceases to be useful.”
Source: Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living
“Evolutionary analyses suggest that stress is not what it used to be. For most of human history our ancestors lived in physical and social environment that were very different from what most of us experience today. Life in those environments imposed a set of selection pressures that shaped our species’ genome and behavior, leading to the evolution of anatomically modern humans. Although it is not entirely clear where exactly one should draw the line between them and more archaic forms, paleoanthropologists agree that by at least 50,000 years ago our ancestors were fully human.”
Source: Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living
“Humans are characterised by developmental plasticity, an adaptation that allows for survival in geographically or temporally variable ecological conditions, but survival at one age may at a cost to health at later ages.”
Source: Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
“The practice of caring for oneself is common today, and evolutionary approaches suggest self-care may even pre-date anatomically modern humans who evolved over 150,000 years ago.”
Source: Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
“Angst may have replaced fear and physical pain in modern societies, yet, without depreciating the merits of traditional society or ignoring the stresses and problems of modernity, this change has been nothing short of revolutionary. People in pre-modern societies struggled to survive in the most elementary sense. The overwhelming majority of them went through a lifetime of hard physical work to escape hunger, from which they were never secure. The tragedy of orphanage, child mortality, premature death of spouses, and early death in general was inseparable from their lives. At all ages, they were afflicted with illness, disability, and physical pain, for which no effective remedies existed. Even where state rule prevailed, violent conflict between neighbors was a regular occurrence and, therefore, an ever-present possibility, putting a premium on physical strength, toughness, and honor, and a reputation for all of these. Hardship and tragedy tended to harden people and make them fatalistic.”
Source: War and Strategy in the Modern World
“The grief triggered by the loss of loved ones does not appear to be an adaptation produced by natural selection as it does not appear to increase an individual's fitness in any way -at least not in non-social species. Depression caused by loss is more likely to be a by-product of the ability to form long-term attachment relationships. Grief is the price we have to pay when the attachment relationship is finally broken. This assumption is supported by the fact that a person may also experience symptoms of depression as a result of the death of their beloved dog, horse or other pet. The stronger the attachment, the longer the symptoms of depression last. On the other hand, the knowledge of the pain caused by the loss of an important person or pet makes us take more care of the people or pets that are important to us.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“...there may be observable patterns at a macro level, individual suicides can be understood as outputs of a chaotic system, or mental accidents. They ought to be -predictable unpredictable-.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Suicides are the residue left after the human brain has done the best it can with the information to hand.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Evolution by natural selection tends generally to promote adaptations up to the edge of chaos -the boundary between order and disorder. Where all fitness-relevant regularities have been subsumed, what remains is noise, devoid of predictive utility.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“...the environment of evolutionary adaptedness is a statistical composite of the adaptation-relevant properties of ancestral environments.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The first, pian, is an ancient self-protective signal that enables animals to navigate fitness hazards in their external and internal environments. The aversiveness of pain is designed precisely to induce action to end or escape it. The second suicidogenic adaptation is the exceptional intellect of the mature brain, which is able to obey the imperative to escape pain, effectively but maladaptively, by terminating its own consciousness. These dual 'pain' and 'brain' conditions - motivation and means, respectively - are not only necessary for deliberate self-killing but sufficient.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Any animal aware that it could relieve its suffering by ending its own life would be expected to seize the opportunity. By this light, suicide can be understood as the default human response to intolerable distress.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Depression can also serve as a signal for the abandoner that the relationship was important to the abandoned person. It may arouse so much empathy in the abandoner that they return to the relationship.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The first, pain, is an ancient self-protective signal that enables animals to navigate fitness hazards in their external and internal environments. The aversiveness of pain is designed precisely to induce action to end or escape it. The second suicidogenic adaptation is the exceptional intellect of the mature brain, which is able to obey the imperative to escape pain, effectively but maladaptively, by terminating its own consciousness. These dual 'pain' and 'brain' conditions - motivation and means, respectively - are not only necessary for deliberate self-killing but sufficient.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Specifically, obligate bipedalism has long been suspected to be an important aetiological factor for acquired spinal diseases that afflict our species because of the types of stresses it puts on our spines.”
Source: Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
“Your fundamental assumption is wrong. You think you are this vehicle. This naked ape. Homo sapiens. I tell you, you are no more human than a driver is the car he is driving. You would never go to a junkyard to look for the driver would you?”
Source: The Meditating Psychiatrist Who Tried to Kill Himself
“The biblical account of the origin of the cosmos in Genesis, for example, posits that a god created the physical universe particularly with human beings in mind, and so unsurprisingly placed the Earth at the center of creation.
Modern cosmological knowledge has refuted such an account. We are living in the golden age of cosmology: More has been discovered about the large-scale structure and history of the visible cosmos in the last 20 years than in the whole of prior human history. We now have precise knowledge of the distribution of galaxies and know that ours is nowhere near the center of the universe, just as we know that our planetary system has no privileged place among the billions of such systems in our galaxy and that Earth is not even at the center of our planetary system. We also know that the Big Bang, the beginning of our universe, occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, whereas Earth didn’t even exist until about 10 billion years later.
No one looking at the vast extent of the universe and the completely random location of homo sapiens within it (in both space and time) could seriously maintain that the whole thing was intentionally created for us. This realization began with Galileo, and has only intensified ever since.”
“Man has emerged from dust of stars to contemplate the universe around him.”
Source: Wrinkles in Time
“Once industrialisation ocurred, non-communicable (chronic) diseases (NCDs; e.g., cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cardio-vascular, and non-infectious respiratory diseases) started to rise and replace infections. Tobacco use, physical inactivity, unhealthy diets and the harmful use of alcohol are key risk factors for NCDs.”
Source: Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
“Human dietary variation, including our ability to intensify carbohydrate-rich resources, is known to be a key evolutionary strenght. Diet and environment are key drivers of our evolutionay past, and a transition to agriculture among many populations worldwide has had far-reaching implications for our foodways and health.”
Source: Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
“Diet has played a role in the evolutionary success of our species and the diversity of local diets exploited may be a key to a health strategy in adapting to local environments.”
Source: Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach
“Our inherited legacy of adaptatios is literally precious. Even the poorest parents give their children vast riches, in the form of senses, emotions, and mental faculties that have been optimized through millions of years of product development.”
Source: Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
“Our inherited legacy of adaptations is literally precious. Even the poorest parents give their children vast riches, in the form of senses, emotions, and mental faculties that have been optimized through millions of years of product development.”
Source: Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
“The scientist in me is perfectly comfortable with the animal lover in me, and we are both happy to celebrate together the miracle of our relationship with dogs.”
Source: The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs
“There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“Humans never invented anything that goes as deep as scientific investigation into understanding why the world is the way it is, nor have we found any other way of seeking knowledge that gets it so consistently right. Doing science is also difficult and frustrating, and in many ways goes against the grain of our spontaneous ways of thinking.”
Source: Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
“If contemporary humans seem irrational, don't blame the hunter-gatherers.”
Source: Rationality
“For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.”
Source: The French Lieutenant’s Woman
“The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.”
Source: Time Enough for Love
“There is perhaps no topic more widely discussed among theologians, philosophers and scientists of nearly all times and all cultures than the origin of the Universe.”
Source: Dark Cosmos: In Search of Our Universe's Missing Mass and Energy
“The universe is a strange place, and we're all in it together.”
Source: Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality
“Each of our human bodies contains far more atoms than there are stars in the visible universe, and our brains contain about as many as neurons as there are stars in our galaxy. The universe within is a worthy compliment to the universe beyond.”
Source: Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality
“...the iron in your blood not only links you to the ancient stars that created it in their nuclear forge but also to the magnetic shield around our world that protects life on Earth.”
Source: Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History
“We are as utterly reliant on fire today as were our Paleolithic ancestors who huddled around a campfire; we've just hidden it behind the scenes of the modern world.”
Source: Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History
“Planet Earth - the universe's verdant tightrope of consciousness for lonely homo sapiens to traverse.”
“The reality is that we are bodies born from other bodies, bodies feeding other bodies, bodies having sex with other bodies, bodies seeking a shoulder to lean or cry on, bodies traveling long distances to be close to other bodies, and on.”
Source: Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are