Robert Trivers Quotes & Sayings

Revolutionary moments often seem to occur in history when large numbers of individuals have a change in consciousness, regarding themselves and their status — Robert Trivers

The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement. — Robert Trivers

However much we champion freedom of thought, we actually spend much of our time censoring input. We seek out publications that mirror or support our prior views and largely avoid those that don't. — Robert Trivers

A very disturbing feature of overconfidence is that it often appears to be poorly associated with knowledge - that is, the more ignorant the individual, the more confident he or she maybe. — Robert Trivers

If ... deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray - by the subtle signs of self-knowledge - the deception being practiced.' Thus, 'the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution. — Robert Trivers

The chimpanzee and the human share about 99.5 percent of their evolutionary history, yet most human thinkers regard the chimp as a malformed, irrelevant oddity, while seeing themselves as stepping stones to the Almighty. — Robert Trivers

The great sage Thales once put the general matter succinctly "Oh master," he was asked, "what is the most difficult thing to do?" "To know thyself", he replied. "And the easiest?" "To give advice to others. — Robert Trivers