Evolutionarily Quotes & Sayings

for religious parents, passing on their own beliefs and values is generally an uncomplicated, straightforward endeavor. Religious parents typically find it a joy and duty to simply pass on their own religious beliefs and traditions. They don't worry about unduly influencing their children's belief system. Quite the opposite - you actively seek to influence your children's beliefs in accordance with your religious faith. But many secular parents see this very process of passing on one's religion to one's kids as a form of indoctrination. They see religious faith as something that is directly and unfairly imposed on kids. They view young children as intellectually vulnerable, willing and perhaps even evolutionarily designed to believe almost anything their parents teach them about the nature of the world. — Phil Zuckerman

TV always wants more people to be watching. — Aisha Tyler

Evolutionarily speaking, love is all about procreation. — Abhijit Naskar

Having a gut instinct that told me how to be a moral person might be evolutionarily handy. On the other hand, emotional moral judgment also enables people to do really horrible things to each other, like lynching or "honor" killings, and justify them by calling them "moral." Because sociopaths don't experience morality emotionally, I would argue that we are freed to be more rational and more tolerant. There is something to be said for the impartiality of pure reason - religion-created mass hysteria among the supposedly mentally healthy populace has resulted in much worse damage and carnage in the world than anything sociopaths have caused. (Although I imagine that there may sometimes be sociopaths at the head of it all, whipping up the masses to do their bidding.) — M.E. Thomas

It's Thursday and it really feels like a Thursday. Sometimes things just work out. — Demetri Martin

Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid, — Satoshi Kanazawa

Women take a much larger risk, evolutionarily speaking, when they have sex. Sex is also a much larger investment for women than it is for men. For this reason, women have emotional circuitry designed to take this into account. For example, women tend to experience much more anxiety just prior to sex with a new lover. — Mystery

A faerie heart is different from a human heart. Human hearts are elastic. They have room for all sorts of passions, and they can break and heal and love again and again. Faerie hearts are evolutionarily less sophisticated. They are small and hard, like tiny grains of sand. Our hearts are too small to love more than one person in a lifetime. — Jodi Lynn Anderson

Only a swine thinks size and strength are the same thing. Remember that. — Fredrik Backman

Look into the mouth of a person and you will find lies, wiggling there like maggots waiting to grow wings. — Max

As a female, you are often being asked by directors to be warmer, softer, flirt more, smile more etc ... None of those things are bad, and obviously we are capable of a variety of human behavior, but it gets really old having to play into somebody's stereotype or ideal. — Trieste Kelly Dunn

The pineal gland of evolutionarily older animals, such as lizards and amphibians, is also called the 'third' eye. Just like the two seeing eyes, the third eye possesses a lens, cornea, and retina. It is light-sensitive and helps regulate body temperature and skin coloration-two basic survival functions related to environmental light. — Rick Strassman

In a sentence: Nature beatified the neurotic. A tendency to make quick albeit mostly false associations was deemed more evolutionarily beneficial than more reliable but equally more time-consuming rational cynicism. — John Zande

Now the leatherback turtle overcame the heat issue via a simple, but evolutionarily impossible solution; it is the only reptile that possesses fatty insulation known as brown adipose tissue, and the only reptile that regulates a high body temperature. This brown adipose tissue is the expression of the UCP1 gene, and, aside from the leatherbacks, is found only in mammals, amphibians, and fishes. Not one other reptile has UCP1. — B.C. Chase

All their teeth are yellow. No tooth-brush ever entered that convent. Brushing one's teeth is at the top of a ladder at whose bottom is the loss of one's soul. — Victor Hugo

It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others. Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war. It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionarily adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme. — Jon Krakauer

Dying of grief is the ultimate sacrifice, but it is not evolutionarily feasible. If grief were that overwhelming, a species would simply be erased. — Jodi Picoult

Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable
and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way. — Daniel Quinn

We have a fractured understanding of how the body exists in physical space and also a deeper internal sense of the body and its purposes. We are, in a way, disconnected from equations of reproduction, or our sexuality has evolutionarily been tilted in a different direction. It begs the scientific question: to what purpose? It doesn't feel accidental to me that throughout history queer people have been magical, holy, and artistic. — Kazim Ali

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,
imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,
the dreamed as well as the lived
what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death? — Louise Gluck

Dancing with life is moving into the flow of our experiences - good or bad - with a feeling of harmony, trust, guidance and love. — Susan Jeffers

Because six billion of us are pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy, we're fundamentally attacking the very ecological systems that keep us alive. Just like the goat that refuses to suckle its kids, we're in the process of eliminating ourselves. Think about the time line Charles drew in his talk about the boiling frog. For the first six thousand years, the impact of our evolutionarily unstable strategy was minimal and confined to the Near East. Over the next two thousand years, the strategy spread to Eastern Europe and the Far East. In the next fifteen hundred years, the strategy spread throughout the Old World. In the next three hundred years, it became global. By the end of the next two hundred years - which is now - so many people were following the strategy that the impact was becoming catastrophic. We're now about two generations away from finishing the job of making this unstable strategy extinct. — Daniel Quinn

Conscience is the still small voice that has been trying since the infancy of our species to tell us that we are evolutionarily, emotionally, and spiritually One, and that if we seek peace and happiness, we must behave that way. — Martha Stout

Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek - why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish. — Steven Pinker

Realize this, though. Half my genes run through your body, and my selfish genome is heavily evolutionarily pre-programmed to look out for its copies. The other half is copied from the man I admire most in all the worlds and time, so my interest is doubly riveted. The artistic combination of the two, shall we say, arrests my attention. — Lois McMaster Bujold

What Darwinian theory shows us is that all human races are extremely close to each other. None of them is in any sense ancestral to any other; none of them is more primitive than any other. We are all modern races of exactly equal status, evolutionarily speaking. — Richard Dawkins

Because, we're evolutionarily programmed to over eat if possible. — Andrew Ferreira

If any value is deeply evolutionarily familiar, it is reproductive success. If any value is truly unnatural, if there is one thing that humans (and all other species in nature) are decisively not designed for, it is voluntary childlessness. All living organisms in nature, including humans, are evolutionarily designed to reproduce. Reproductive success is the ultimate end of all biological existence. — Satoshi Kanazawa

We should finally note a more radical challenge to the concept of Platonic utility that arises from nascent work in the reinforcement learning field under the rubric of intrinsic motivation. One idea is that the "true" evolutionarily appropriate metric for behavior is the extremely sparse one of propagating ones genes. What we think of as a Platonic utility over immediate rewards such as food or water, would merely be a surrogate that helps overcome the otherwise insurmountable credit assignment path associated with procreation. In these terms, even the Platonic utility is the same sort of heuristic expedient as the Pavlovian controller itself, with evolutionary optimality molding approximate economic rationality to its own ends. It as a sober thought that understanding values may be less important as a way of unearthing the foundations of choice that we might have expected. — Tali Sharot

If you go to the octopus, and if you're not too squeamish, dissect it. You'll find that it has a camera eye which is remarkable similar to our own. And yet we know that the octopus belongs to an invertebrate group called cephalopod mulluses, evolutionarily very distant indeed from the chordates to which we belong. — Simon Conway Morris

It is more than enough to be ethically and evolutionarily developed human being. All other titles and identities of man are inferior to this fact! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

It seemed that the time would come evolutionarily when humans might have acquired enough knowledge of generalized principles to permit a graduation from class-two (entropically selfish) evolution into class-one (syntropically cooperative) evolution, thereafter making all the right moves for all the right reasons. — R. Buckminster Fuller

I wish I had more time to read. I do love books. — Carnie Wilson

Two a.m.' He swallowed, then said, You know. The person you can call at two a.m. and, no matter what, you can count on them. Even if they're asleep or it's cold or you need to be bailed out of jail ... they'll come for you. It's like, the highest level of friendship. — Sarah Dessen

We found evolution will punish you if you're selfish and mean. For a short time and against a specific set of opponents, some selfish organisms may come out ahead. But selfishness isn't evolutionarily sustainable. — Chris Adami