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Homo Sapiens Quotes

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Homo Sapiens Quotes

“My simple explanation of why we human beings, the most advanced species on earth, cannot find happiness, is this: as we evolve up the ladder of being, we find three things: the first, that the tension between the range of opposites in our lives and society widens dramatically and often painfully as we evolve; the second, that the better informed and more intelligent we are, the more humble we have to become about our ability to live meaningful lives and to change anything, even ourselves; and consequently, thirdly, that the cost of gaining the simplicity the other side of complexity can rise very steeply if we do not align ourselves and our lives well.”

InspirationalHumanityHeavenDifficultHellSelf HelpEvolutionSpeciesWell BeingParadiseUnhappinessGood LifeWomen EmpowermentHuman ConditionSelf KnowledgeEconomistAdaptationFinding HappinessHomo SapiensHuman DevelopmentOpposites AttractComplexBiosphereThrivingSelf CreationGood Life ExamplesKen WilberAnthropacyAutognosisAutonomiesAutopolesisBritish AuthorEarths FutureFinding Well BeingFuture HumanityHolarchyImperfect AdaptationIntegral PhilosopherMen EmpowermentPost Modern Philosopher
Author:Dr Robin Lincoln Wood
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“We enjoy free sunshine, oxygen, water and life-supporting climate to live. The blessings and hardships are good and bad only till we are alive. All social problems and their solutions become irrelevant when we are no more. Beneath all the chaos and clutter and hopes and fears, we need to reflect on what is the purpose of life?”

PhilosophyRealityScienceConsciousnessEvolutionPhilosophy Of LifeMeaning Of LifeHomo SapiensOrigins Of Life
Book:Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World
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“My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that.”

DifferentProblemBitsMy OwnShareSpecialSorryTinyPsychologicalCentsConsistencyDiagnosisHomo SapiensBananasChimpanzeesGenome
Book:Engleby: A Novel
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“When homo sapiens is changing, it will not be by the whole race gaining simultaneously whatever qualities better fit it for survival, but rather by certain types of mankind proving superior to the rest in survival value, so that they contribute a larger proportion to the later generations, and in so doing drag the average qualities of humanity in the same direction.”

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Author:Charles Galton Darwin
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“The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens ) and human free will (in the factual rather than theological sense) are conjoined concepts, and no better evidence can be produced than the "experimental" production of markedly different solutions in identical environments.”

HumansDifferentCultureEnvironmentSolutionsConceptsEvidenceProductionsFree WillIdenticalTheologicalHomo SapiensFactualContingency
Book:Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history
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“Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway to consciousness in the form of Homo sapiens or Little Green Men, for example - can be construed as a highway to heaven, but must be viewed as a tortuous track rutted with uncountable obstacles and festooned with innumerable alternative branches. Any reasonably precise repetition of our earthly route on another planet therefore becomes wildly improbable even in a trillion cases.”

MenLittlesFormHeavenConsciousnessCasesExamplePossibilityPlanetsGreenEnvironmentalTrackObstaclesAlternativesEvolveRangeBranchesRoutesPreciseRepetitionUnpredictableHighwaysPathwaysHomo SapiensImprobableEnvironmental History
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined.”

HumansLittlesEnjoyAnimalConsciousnessMoralDoubtCenturyPositionCreaturesArgumentTraditionMachinesSpeciesFolksExtremesVersionsDefinedDecentNo DoubtHuman HistoryHomo SapiensContinuumUnfeelingMistreat
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?”

IfsCertainUniverseAsksViewsCommonConditionsExpressionMaterialsUltimateUniversalConstitutionIndependentFundamentalsStructurePropertyRaisedGradesPhenomenonFossilsVaryHomo SapiensRarityMartiansOddballs
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“There is a further advantage [to hydrogen bombs]: the supply of uranium in the planet is very limited, and it might be feared that it would be used up before the human race was exterminated, but now that the practically unlimited supply of hydrogen can be utilized, there is considerable reason to hope that homo sapiens may put an end to himself, to the great advantage of such less ferocious animals as may survive. But it is time to return to less cheerful topics.”

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Author:Bertrand Russell
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“The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens , provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.”

WorldFirstsMayI CanFeelingsLastsRememberPrayingDegreesGloryStrangerThreadConsistencyI PrayHomo SapiensDesolation
Book:The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge
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“I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research.”

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Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“We call ourselves Homo sapiens--man the wise--because our intelligence is so important to us. For thousands of years, we have tried to understand how we think: that is, how a mere handful of matter can perceive, understand, predict, and manipulate a world far larger and more complicated than itself. The field of artificial intelligence, or AI, goes further still: it attempts not just to understand but also to build intelligent entities.”

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Author:Stuart J. Russell
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“For more than a century, people have often thought that the conclusion to draw from Darwin's vision is that Homo sapiens, our species - and we're just animals too, we're just mammals - that there is nothing morally special about us. I myself don't think this follows at all from Darwin's vision, but it is certainly the received view in many quarters.”

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Author:Daniel Dennett
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“None of the three great apes is considered ancestral to modern man, Homo sapiens, but they remain the only other type of extant primate with which human beings share such close physical characteristics. From them we may learn much concerning the behavior of our earliest primate prototypes, because behavior, unlike bones, teeth, or tools, does not fossilize.”

MenHumansMayDoeThreeHuman BeingsShareModernTypeBehaviorToolsBonesTeethCharacteristicsBiologyWildlifeApesHomo SapiensModern ManPrimatesPrototype
Book:Gorillas in the Mist
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“Zoologists have reckoned there are up to at least 750 species of animal that have been observed exhibiting same-sex behaviour, or gender role transformation (which is very common in a wide range of fauna). There is only one species on earth, however, which has exhibited homophobia or transphobia. And that is the species homo sapiens sapiens. Us. So let's not allow the foolish, ignorant or bigoted ever to use words like "natural."”

Has BeensUseEarthSexNaturalAnimalCommonRolesTransformationSpeciesGenderWideFoolishIgnorantRangeBehaviourHomo SapiensHomophobiaGender RolesZoologist
Author:Stephen Fry
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“That there is a continuous link from humans to gorillas, with the intermediate species merely long dead, is beyond the understanding of speciesists. Tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny piece of insensible embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly leaps to infinite, incomputable value.... Self-styled pro-lifers, and others that indulge in footling debates about exactly when in its development a foetus becomes human, exhibit the same discontinuous mentality. Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil.”

MindHumansLongSelfValuesEvilUnderstandingHalfPiecesAtheismDevelopmentConceptsFlowInfiniteSpeciesPositive AtheismTinyDebateLabelsTiesLeapLinksMentalityIndulgeExhibitsHomo SapiensTissuesIndulge InGorillasInsensibleHalf Measures
Author:Richard Dawkins
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“The humanity and the humility, which are very different than the biological species homo sapiens. Humanity versus homo sapiens - very different things. We are biological creatures, we are animals, no doubt, but when you talk about "humando," you're talking about that particular kind of animals who are aware of their impending extinction, who have the capacity to be sensitive to catastrophe and disaster and calamity and profound crisis.”

KindDifferentHumanityAnimalTalkingDoubtHumilityParticularCreaturesCapacityCrisisProfoundSpeciesDisasterSensitiveNo DoubtDifferent ThingsCatastropheVersusExtinctionCalamityHomo Sapiens
Author:Cornel West
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“A billion homo sapiens are added every 11 years to the planet. The hypertrophy of a single species pushes other life-forms out of bed and into extinction. The decline of biological diversity is real and severe. The alarming loss of soil fertility, forest cover, and coral reef viability and the release of fossilized CO2 that nature put away 300 million years ago in its march toward greater diversity - all these "losses" and many others are the result of one life-form annihilating other life-forms in its immoral confusion of "dominion" with "domination."”

YearsRealFormLossResultsMillionsGreaterPlanetsBedDiversityYears AgoSpeciesEnvironmentalBillionsForestsConfusionReleaseSoilMarchDeclineSevereDominationImmoralExtinctionStewardshipDominionHomo SapiensFertilityCo2ReefsCoral Reefs
Author:Leonard Sweet
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“Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens - ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come.”

WayLifeLife IsOrderNaturalLinesGenerationsParticularDemandSpeciesCurrentsRecognitionEvolveBiologyAncestorHomo SapiensDescendantsFluxNatural Order
Author:Sam Harris
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“We became Homo sapiens not that long ago, from the scientific perspective, and we've retained a lot of our beast nature. We've done all these amazing things in terms of our knowledge base and technology, and now we're flying around and using the internet. But we're still very animalistic. So, I think about hierarchies. I think about evolution. I think about how we stack up, how we sit on top of each other. How we pray that we know what we're up to.”

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Author:Wangechi Mutu
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“Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness ot to answer any question we are capable of asking.”

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Author:Steven Pinker
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“I firmly believe that contemporary spiritual use of entheogenic drugs is one of humankind's brightest hopes for overcoming the ecological crisis from which we threaten the biosphere and jeopardize our own survival, for Homo sapiens is close to the head of the list of endangered species.”

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Author:Jonathan Ott
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“There are definitely recurring themes in humanity's relationship with our environment. The biggest is probably adaptation, because humans are incredibly good at adapting to new environments in relatively short periods of time. The ancestors of Homo sapiens started leaving Africa over one million years ago, moving from warm, tropical climates into the freezing wilderness of Europe and the desert ecosystems of the Middle East.”

YearsHumansMovingHumanityMillionsEnvironmentMiddlePeriodsEuropeYears AgoClimateLeavingWarmEastDesertThemeWildernessAncestorMiddle EastAdaptationOur EnvironmentHomo SapiensEcosystemsAdaptingFreezingTropicalRecurringNew EnvironmentRecurring Themes
Author:Annalee Newitz
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