Cognitive Evolution Quotes & Sayings

Moreover, like eyes and arms, the fundamental structures of the mind (and the informational capacities they support) aren't acquired through experience: the pioneering ethologists realized that behavior in general must be understood in the light of evolution, and this same conviction is held by the new wave of cognitive ethologists. Whatever else may be said, we expect to find that many (if not all) of the critical properties of animal minds are - like motor patterns - intrinsic traits of an organism that are adaptive consequences of evolution. — Raymond Coppinger

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion. — Zelda Fitzgerald

[D]umb evolutionary processes have dramatically amplified the intelligence in the human lineage even compared with our close relatives the great apes and our own humanoid ancestors; and there is no reason to suppose Homo sapiens to have reached the apex of cognitive effectiveness attainable in a biological system. — Nick Bostrom

There's nothing that's impossible to me. You can ask my parents. — Taylor Wilson

One of the most promising developments since the publication of "The Geek Syndrome" has been the emergence of the concept of neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions. — Steve Silberman

Family farmers are victims of public policy that gives preference to feeding animals over feeding people. This has encouraged the cheap grain policy of this nation and has made the beef cartel the biggest hog at the trough. — Howard Lyman

The food court sat right next to the movie theater. I needed something to drink. But like an idiot, I'd brought no money, not even my purse. Luke insisted that I leave it at home. Blah, blah, blah ... our first night to the movies together ... blah, blah, blah ... he would pay for everything ... blah, blah, blah ... he took me to see the worst movie ever ... — Katie McGarry

The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself. — Thomas Nagel

We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we're very sure. — Julian Assange

Make creativity your religion ... because creating is soulful work. — Eric Maisel

[T]he form that an animal's subjective experience takes will be a property of the internal computer model. That model will be designed, in evolution, for its suitability for useful internal representation, irrespective of the physical stimuli that come to it from outside. Bats and we need the same kind of internal model for representing the position of objects in three-dimensional space. The fact that bats construct their internal model with the aid of echoes, while we construct ours with the aid of light, is irrelevant. — Richard Dawkins

Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance. — Bertrand Russell

I think it's important for an actor to see the work they've done because every time you revisit a work you come up with a new way of improving it. It's a good way to brush up your craft and your skills, so I think it's a good thing to do, keep seeing your films. — Abhishek Bachchan

I love songs because by nature they are concise; they sum up. I try to use as few words as possible. It's usually funnier that way, anyway. — Cass McCombs

In a fascinating study, Barrett (1999) demonstrated that children as young as three
years of age have a sophisticated cognitive understanding of predator-prey encounters. Children from both an industrialized culture and a traditional hunter-horticulturalist culture were
able to spontaneously describe the flow of events in a predator-prey encounter in an ecologically accurate way. Moreover, they understood that after a lion kills a prey, the prey is no longer alive, can no longer eat, and can no longer run and that the dead state is permanent.
This sophisticated understanding of death from encounters with predators appears to be developed by age three to four. — David M. Buss

This is the essential evil of vice, that it debases man. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our 'noble' traits as well? — Stephen Jay Gould

What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination. — Terence McKenna

My wife and I now live in the summers in northern Michigan in an environment which is wonderfully conducive to research, and where most of my work in the last 15 years has been done. — Douglass North

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. — Robin Marantz Henig

Your true family.

But what did that mean? Was family the ones you were born to, or the ones who took you in? Did the first years of his life weigh more than the rest?

Strange thing about forgetting spells.

Rhy was his brother.

They fade on their own.

London was his home.

Unless we don't let go." — V.E Schwab

Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new. — Mark Haddon

Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carry'd one step further, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are deriv'd, must also be resembling. When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc'd to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both. — David Hume

Regarding social order, Francis Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F. A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century. — Douglass North

I got hit a lot. I'm glad I lived through it. — Leon Spinks

Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The — Frans De Waal

Once again, I felt as I needed to flee or I'd die. That was how my life was panning out. — Grace Lozada

Nature is a hanging judge, goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain. — Steven Pinker

The faster you strip cultures down, the more you find contrariness and disputation, rather than a solid core, until eventually you reach the individual, a mammal shaped by evolution, material needs, cognitive biases and historical circumstances no doubt, but still a creature with a better right to state his opinions than kings and clerics have to silence them. — Nick Cohen