Browse 297 quotes about Homo Sapiens.
“Religion facilitates terrorists' goals by providing moral legitimacy to their cause, as well.”
Source: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence
“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
“Religion is paradoxical. It emerged out of intergroup competition, yet it has a remarkable power to unite. It sets people apart from one another, yet can also draw vastly different people together. Long ago we envisioned relationship with spiritual beings. In one sense these relationships were very mundane -they served practical human needs. The practical side of these relationships is also the source of their power to divide us, to pit one group against another. The divine side is in their capacity to quietly but persistently call us to transcend ourselves and find common ground for trust.”
Source: Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved
“Ongoing aggression not only impacts individuals, it also destabilizes social groups and disrupts functional social relationships. The uncertainty, ambiguity, and stress resulting from ongoing aggression and violence may impact the biological fitness of all group members.”
Source: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence
“Since the price of aggression can be high, individual fitness depends on the ability to accurately calculate potential costs. This requires a reliable assessment of the condition, motivation, and intent of potential adversaries.”
Source: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence
“Throughout human evolution, successful religious systems have provided a mechanism for resolving collective action problems by engendering social cooperation, reducing in-group reactive aggression, and optimizing out-group proactive aggression.”
Source: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence
“All contemporary world religions impose a moral framework upon their adherents, thereby enabling terrorists to present their conflicts in morally absolute dichotomies, such as good versus bad or righteous versus evil. While legitimizing one's own cause, religions are particularly effective at demonizing those with opposing views. The history of religion is replete with examples in which in-group passions are aroused and out-group hatreds are dangerously ingnited.”
Source: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence
“The use of religion to transform local power struggles into cosmic conflicts benefits terrorist groups who may otherwise be viewed as economically and politically self-serving.”
Source: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence
“Just as violence constitutes a very effective proximate mechanism of religion; religion serves as an excellent proximate mechanism for violence, as well.”
Source: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence
“The ability of ritual to evoke both positive and negative affect is, of course, not specific to religion. Secular dances, concerts, and -raves- induce feelings of happiness and joy, and military boot camp elicits pain, shock, and awe. Such secular experiences have strong emotional impacts on participants also, particularly during adolescence.”
Source: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence
“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
“Our desire for alcohol is not an evolutionary mistake. There are good reasons for why we get drunk.”
Source: Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
“There are individuals out there that were born to hunt humans. When you realize you're being hunted, you either break down, or you fight. The fighters are the ones who have an unflinching belief and faith in themselves.”
Source: Apex Predator
“The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.”
Source: The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
“We have arrived in the 21st century with evolutionary baggage, and a fair bit of intellectual confusion. Let us inderstand the baggage, in order to reduce the confusion, and increase our odds of moving forward with maximal human flourishing.”
Source: A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
“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
“We evolved to be physically active as we age, and in turn being active helps us age well. Further, the longer we stay active, the greater the benefit, and it is almost never too late to benefit from getting fit.”
Source: Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding
“La sensación de asombro frente a un cielo estrellado supone, todavía hoy, una emoción intensa, en la que se escucha el eco del antiguo estupor que marcó a las miles de generaciones que nos han precedido.”
Source: Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began
“... el humanismo se convirtió en la religión dominante en el mundo y [...] es probable que intentar cumplir el sueño humanista cause su desintegración.”
Source: Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
“Do we continue down the path of Homo destructus, consuming everything until there’s nothing left? Or do we lean into our capacity for compassion, interdependence, and balance? Do we become Homo cordis? Homo animus? Or something entirely new?”
“Biomasses are a biological reality that cannot be denied as existing, but even though they exist physically, yet they have not attained the height of Homo sapiens”
“El hombre es el único ser de la naturaleza capaz de destruir conscientemente a su propia especie.”
Source: Antropologia de la muerte
“Matar al otro es hacerle morir en nuestro lugar. Tal es la dura (y absurda) ley de la guerra. -¡Es él o soy yo!-. Entonces, más vale que sea él.”
Source: Antropologia de la muerte
“Desde el momento en el que el primero de nuestros antepasados convirtió un palo en una lanza, las consecuencias de los conflictos a lo largo de la historia han sido impuestas por la tecnologia.”
Source: DNA: The Secret of Life
“Humans went from experiential and physical beings to conceptual ones, and one could surmise that in the future we will become even more brainy still. The changes in sedentary lifestyle alone are staggering. Dietary changes might have led to a diabetes since there may be different levels of pancreatic reserve. The explosion of carbohydrate intake that moderns indulge in may surpass the limit of the pancreas to endure, resulting in either childhood diabetes or later onset type 2 diabetes. We must be careful not to outsmart ourselves and in vanquishing the predators that plagues us for millions of years to create new ones. Having moved from chaos to order, we need to appreciate order’s value, to protect and enhance it. Any slide into chaos may well be swift and irreversible.”
Source: Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness
“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
“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
“Terrorist training camps effectively employ fear, violence, and pain in rituals reminiscent of costly adolescent rites of passage.”
Source: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence
“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
“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
“Proactive aggression involves lower physiological arousal on the part of the aggressor, yet is likely to result in more lethal outcomes. Lack of social communication, the targeting of vulnerable body parts, and the goal-directed psychology of this type of aggression render it more akin to predation than to reactive aggression. Indeed, the same neural circuits that are activated during predatory behavior are engaged during proactive aggression.”
“Nuestra civilización sufre a causa de plantas cuya existencia se remonta tiempos inmemoriales, y cuyas respectivas virtudes fueron explotadas a fondo por todas las grandes culturas. Hasta hace algunas décadas nadie se preocupaba de regular su siembra o recolección, mientras ahora ese hecho botánico cobra dimensión de catástrofe planetaria. A tal punto es así que su amenaza reúne a capitalistas y comunistas, a cristianos, mahometanos y ateos, a ricos y pobres, en una cruzada por la salud mental y moral de la humanidad.”
Source: Historia general de las drogas
“La agricultura modifica los valores del cazador paleolítico, poniendo en lugar del mundo animal el vegetal, transformando la zoolatría en culto a la fecundidad, promoviendo el principio femenino a una posición superior y convirtiendo a la deidad celeste en un -deus otiosus-.”
Source: Historia general de las drogas
“El momento presente, alejado tanto de un ideal como del otro, se caracteriza por algo que puede llamarse -era del sucedáneo-, con tasas nunca vistas de envenenados por distintos adulterantes, drogas nuevas que lanzar sin cesar laboratorios clandestinos y incontables personas detenidas, multadas, encarceladas y ejecutadas cada año en el planeta.”
Source: Historia general de las drogas
“Cuando las motivaciones no pueden satisfacerse, dejan de ser deseables y pierden, por tanto, su valor como estímulos para la supervivencia.”
Source: Deseo y placer: La ciencia de las motivaciones (Ariel)
“We humans will be diminished if we cannot even protect the animals closest to us, who share almost all of our genes, and who differ from us only by degree.”
Source: Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are
“By contemplating the full spectrum of scenarios of the coming technological singularities many can place their bets in favor of the Cybernetic Singularity which is the surest path to cybernetic immortality and engineered godhood as opposed to the AI Singularity when Homo sapiens is hastily retired as a senescent parent. This meta-system transition from the networked Global Brain to the Gaian Mind is all about evolution of our own individual minds, it’s all about our own Self-Transcendence.”
Source: The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution
“El hombre a quien solo le interesan las relaciones sexuales ocasionales no tiende a invertir tanto esfuerzo.”
Source: The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating
“La belleza no se halla repartida de forma democrática.”
Source: The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating
“En todo el mundo, los hombres desean que su esposa sea atractiva, joven y sexualmente leal y que le guarde fidelidad hasta la muerte. No cabe atribuir tales preferencias a la cultura occidental, al capitalismo, al fanatismo de los blancos anglosajones, a los medios de comunicación o al constante lavado cerebral de la publicidad. Son universales en todas las culturas y no hay ninguna en que no se manifiesten. Son mecanismos psicológicos evolutivos profundamente arraigados que dirigen nuestra decisión de emparejarnos, del mismo modo que las preferencias gustativas evolutivas dirigen nuestras decisiones de consumo alimenticio.”
Source: The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating
“Se ha demostrado que el hombre que emplea la coerción para obtener relaciones sexuales manifiesta un conjunto específico de características. Suele ser agresivo con las mujeres, sostiene el mito de que en el fondo quieren ser violadas y presenta un perfil de personalidad marcado por la impulsividad, la agresividad y la hipervirilidad, combinados con un elevado grado de promiscuidad sexual. Los estudios sobre violadores demuestran asimismo que poseen una baja autoestima.”
Source: The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating
“Los varones constituyen, claramente, el sexo más coercitivo y violento y son responsables de la mayoría de las conductas socialmente inaceptables, ilegales o repulsivas del mundo.”
Source: The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating
“La coerción y la violencia son armas que los hombres emplean en una amplia variedad de contextos interpersonales, tanto sexuales como no sexuales.”
Source: The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating