Social Evolution Quotes & Sayings

With the evolution of social media that includes blogging, Facebook, and Twitter, who and how information is delivered has changed tremendously. The landscape for news is a different place, and people have to accept that. — Michael Eric Dyson

Planetary Citizenship reveals a vital blueprint for a compassionate and sustainable world. Hazel Henderson and Daisaku Ikeda make a formidable team stepping forward as humanity's guides in this great transition to the next stage of social evolution. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

with rare exceptions (chiefly the social insects), mammals and birds are the only organisms to devote substantial attention to the care of their young; an evolutionary development that, through the long period of plasticity which it permits, takes advantage of the large information-processing capability of the mammalian and primate brains. Love seems to be an invention of the mammals. — Carl Sagan

We must accept the capitalistic stage in social evolution as about on a par with the earlier monkey stage. The human had to pass through those stages in its rise from the mire and slime of low organic life. It was inevitable that much of the mire and slime should cling and be not easily shaken off. — Jack London

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution. — Richard Dawkins

In spite of all these disquieting triumphs in the field of natural science, it's astonishing how little man has learned about himself, and how much there is to learn. How little we know about this brain which made social evolution possible, and of the mind. How little we know of the nature and spirit of man and God. We stand now before this inner frontier of ignorance. If we could pass it, we might well discover the meaning of life and understand man's destiny. — Wilder Penfield

The administrative and hierarchic aspects seem to be crucial in the evolution of belief systems. The truth is first revealed to all men, but very quickly individuals appear claiming sole authority and a duty to interpret, administer and, if need be, alter this truth in the name of the common good. To this end they establish a powerful and potentially repressive organisation. This phenomenon, which biology shows us is common to any social group, soon transforms the doctrine into a means of achieving control and political power. Divisions, wars and break-ups become inevitable. Sooner or later, the word becomes flesh and the flesh bleeds. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Truth about America's Silicon Valley-
Angels in the Silicon

Riveting and insightful regarding progressivism and the social upheavals living in the Silicon Valley.-

John Yoo, UC Berkeley Constitutional Lawyer, novelist, and public servant — Richard Theodor Kusiolek

The evolution of social media into a robust mechanism for social transformation is already visible. Despite many adamant critics who insist that tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are little more than faddish distractions useful only to exchange trivial information, these critics are being proven wrong time and again. — Simon Mainwaring

But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status, (5) attracting a mate, (6) keeping that mate, and (7) caring for family. — Vladas Griskevicius

Patriotism, currently, is nothing but the deadly evolution of narrow minded politics which has distorted language. — Nilantha Ilangamuwa

Evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or hermit. — John Fowles

If man were infinitely malleable, there would have been nor revolutions; there would have been no change because a culture would have succeeded in making man submit to its patterns without resistance. But man, being only relatively malleable, has always reacted with protest against conditions which made the disequilibrium between the social order and his human needs too drastic or unbearable. The attempt to reduce this disequilibrium and the need to establish a more acceptable and desirable solution is at the very core of the dynamism of the evolution of man in history. Man's protest arose not only because of material suffering; specifically human needs ... are an equally strong motivation for revolution and the dynamics of change. — Erich Fromm

An all-out attack on evolutionist thinking is possibly the only real hope our nations have of rescuing themselves from an inevitable social and moral catastrophe. — Ken Ham

The social dynamics of human history, even more than that of biological evolution, illustrate the fundamental principle of ecological evolution - that everything depends on everything else. The nine elements that we have described in societal evolution of the three families of phenotypes - the phyla of things, organizations and people, the genetic bases in knowledge operating through energy and materials to produce phenotypes, and the three bonding relations of threat, integration and exchange - all interact on each other. — Kenneth E. Boulding

If you put on a lousy production with white actors, it's lousy. There is a problem, or can be, at this stage of our social evolution, with mixing the casts. It may not be a question of race so much as class. You would rarely find a black man in a high executive position where he was swinging his weight around. — Howard Schultz

I try to look at the evolution of these utopian claims. In the late '60s there was an assumption that the wealth generated by industry would be taxed and then put into social programs and it would provide a baseline of stability that would allow people to have the time for self-expression; and that social contract has eroded over the last four decades and now it's every person for themselves. — Astra Taylor

Earthmen may even rule at Trantor for a generation, but their children will become Trantorians, and in their turn will look down upon the remnant on Earth. — Isaac Asimov

Her point is that, contrary to the prevailing flatland postmodern view, not only is cultural evolution not an ethnocentric or eurocentric notion, it is the only way out of the hidden ethnocentrism of most "progressive" circles of Western social science, which in fact discourage the cultural evolution that alone would transcend the ethnocentrism. In other words, although they nobly desire to alleviate oppression, the anti-cultural-evolutionists are part of the very disease they so aggressively denounce. But — Ken Wilber

Social evolution may be the result of intention, but it rarely, if ever, produces the result intended. — Rene Dubos

The social web can't exist until you are your real self online. I have to be me. You have to be you. Once we are online as ourselves, connected to each other and our other friends, then you can have the evolution of what becomes the social web. — Sheryl Sandberg

The sensation of "I" as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time - a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. — Alan W. Watts

Existing political philosophies all developed before evolutionary game theory, so they do not take equilibrium selection into account. Socialism pretends that individuals are not selfish sexual competitors, so it ignores equilibria altogether. Conservatism pretends that there is only one possible equilibrium - a nostalgic version of the status quo - that society could play. Libertarianism ignores the possibility of equilibrium selection at the level of rational social discourse, and assumes that decentralized market dynamics will magically lead to equilibria that yield the highest aggregate social benefits. Far from being a scientific front for a particular set of political views, modern evolutionary psychology makes most standard views look simplistic and unimaginitive. — Geoffrey Miller

Pastor Ted and other evangelical pastors I hear about in the media seem to perceive just about everything to be a threat against Christianity. Evolution is a threat. Gay marriage is a threat. A swear word uttered accidentally on television is a threat. Democrats are a threat. And so on.
I don't see how any of these things pose a threat against Christianity. If someone disagrees with you about politics, or social issues, or the matter of origins, isn't that just democracy and free speech in action? How do opposing viewpoints constitute a threat? — Hemant Mehta

If you look at the evolution of games from console to Internet to mobile, and look at social networking from Web to mobile, everything is fragmenting. — Chris DeWolfe

A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other. — William James

Such a social-media environment; it is merely the most recent and most efficient way that humans have found to scratch a prehistoric itch. The compelling nature of social media, then, can be traced back in part to the evolution of the social brain, as — Tom Standage

there is a pervasive assumption among anthropologists that a population's long-standing beliefs and practices - their culture and their social institutions - must play a positive role in their lives or these beliefs and practices would not have persisted. Thus, it is widely thought and written that cannibalism, torture, infanticide, feuding, witchcraft, painful male initiations, female genital mutilation, cermonial rape, headhunting, and other practices that may be abhorrent to many of us must serve some useful function in the societies in which they are traditional practices. Impressed by the wisdom of biological evolution in creating such adaptive miracles as feathers for flight or protective coloration, most scholars have assumed that cultural evolution too has been guided by a process of natural selection that has produced traditional beliefs and practices that meet peoples' needs. — Robert B. Edgerton

Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture. — Peter Singer

In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was a great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality - history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies.
- The French Lieutenant's Woman — John Fowles

YEARS AGO I WORKED ON A GOVERNMENT TASK force studying fatherhood and healthy families. As we met in DC, I learned one of the main causes of the breakdown of the American family was the Industrial Revolution. When men left their homes and farms to work on assembly lines, they disconnected their sense of worth from the well-being of their wives and children and began to associate it with efficiency and productivity in manufacturing. While the Industrial Revolution served the world in terrific ways, it was also a mild tragedy in our social evolution. Raising healthy children became a woman's job. Food was no longer grown in the backyard, it was bought at a store with money earned from the necessary separation of the father. Within a few generations, then, intimacy in family relationships began to be monopolized by females. — Donald Miller

Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself. — Robert Wright

Genuine art and business are the ultimate partnership toward catalyzing social evolution and well-being. — Vanna Bonta

1. Decrease current human population below five hundred million and keep it in perpetual balance with nature. 2. Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity. 3. Unite humanity with a "living" new language. 4. Redistribute global wealth under the more acceptable term "global public goods." 5. Rebalance personal rights with "social duties." 6. Replace passion, faith, and tradition with reason. 7. Make clever use of new technologies to go around national governments and establish direct ties with citizens. 8. Rebrand global governance as equitable, efficient, and the logical next step in human evolution. 9. Discredit, delegitimize, and dismantle the idea of the nation state/national sovereignty. 10. Prepare a mechanism to neutralize any challenges to United Nations' authority. — Brad Thor

In order to survive, all systems must evolve by providing greater and greater access to the currents that flow through them. This applies to all physical, biological and social systems that survive and thrive ... But let's take that one step forward ... the systems just described are ... constantly evolving. This suggests another design principle: ... design for evolution rather than creating a static design optimizing for the present. — John Hagel

If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There's no evolution. Those species that don't suffer don't survive. Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be the precursors of social change. They've taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves and in their struggle to solve their own problems they're solving problems for the culture as well — Robert M. Pirsig

My firm conviction is that if wide-spread Eugenic reforms are not adopted during the next hundred years or so, our Western Civilization is inevitably destined to such a slow and gradual decay as that which has been experienced in the past by every great ancient civilization. The size and the importance of the United States throws on you a special responsibility in your endeavours to safeguard the future of our race. Those who are attending your Congress will be aiding in this endeavour, and though you will gain no thanks from your own generation, posterity will, I believe, learn to realize the great dept it owes to all the workers in this field. — Leonard Darwin

At the heart of this phenomenon, Fourth Generation war,4 lies not a military evolution but a political, social, and moral revolution: a crisis of legitimacy of the state. All over the world, citizens of states are transferring their primary allegiance away from the state to other entities: to tribes, ethnic groups, religions, gangs, ideologies, and "causes." Many people who will no longer fight for their state are willing to fight for their new primary loyalty. — William S Lind

With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears. — Jose Saramago

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

Dedicated to the memory of MY FATHER. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could toward making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book. — Leonard Darwin

The typical, well-meaning liberal approach to solving social tensions is to treat every value as equal, and then try to force a leveling or redistribution of resources (money, rights, goods, land) while leaving the values untouched. The typical conservative approach is take its particular values and try to foist them on everybody else. The developmental approach is to realize that there are many different values and worldviews; that some are more complex than others; that many of the problems at one stage of development can only be defused by evolving to a higher level; and that only by recognizing and facilitating this evolution can social justice be finally served. — Ken Wilber

Carnival is past millennia's way of sensing the world as one great communal performance. This sense of the world, liberating one from fear, bringing the world maximally close to a person and bringing one person maximally close to another (everything is drawn into the zone of free familiar contact), with its joy at change and its joyful relativity, is opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order. From precisely that sort of seriousness did the carnival sense of the world liberate man. — Mikhail Bakhtin

When dealing with Arab society, [we are dealing with] a production system that is in competition with others (and not with a theoretical opposition between specific economic rationalities), a social structure that must at all times prove its viability in the world arena (and not with its inner logic, which is theoretically as total, as elegant, and plausible as that of any other society whatever), a practical politics that is in perpetual disequilibrium (and not with elaborate theories about the best form of government), a language that must constantly prove its creativity and capacity for adaptation in competition with other languages in an accelerating evolutionary situation (and not with a theory of the language at a given moment of its evolution). — Abdallah Laroui

Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counter-productive but trivial. — Tom Robbins

Of all the problems which will have to be faced in the future, in my opinion, the most difficult will be those concerning the treatment of the inferior races of mankind. — Leonard Darwin

There is a great deal more to evolutionary biology than survival of the fittest - although that's all anyone seems to remember. One of Darwin's contemporaries was Alfred Russel Wallace, who had even more profound lessons about evolution - that humans are social creatures. That we coevolve with other species as part of a fabric of interwoven and interdependent life-forms. The world isn't entirely about competition and dominance. And species that cooperate with others succeed better than those who do not. That's what civilization is, cooperation." "And — Daniel Suarez

It should soon be possible dramatically to increase the intelligence and life span of a few individuals [with the help of genetic engineering]. They and their offspring could become a master race. Evolution pays no regard to social justice. It was not fair on the Neanderthals they were replaced by modern humans. — Stephen Hawking

Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of social evolution. — Craig Venter

I got involved early on in social media - I created one of the first social networks - and for me, social gaming was a natural evolution of that. — Mark Pincus

In a way, it's odd that the greatest sympathy for evolutionism is found among scholars who study the distant past. For events of this century, and especially of the last few decades, suggest that the arrow of history identified by some social scientists of the nineteenth century is roughly on target. Lewis Morgan's essential point was right: the endless impetus of cultural evolution has pushed society through several thresholds over the past 20,000 years. And now it is pushing society through another one. A magnificent new social structure - our future home - is being built before our eyes. — Robert Wright

Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity. — Rudolf Rocker

Give us but the chance and a new generation of Earthmen would grow to maturity, lacking insularity and believing wholeheartedly in the oneness of Man. — Isaac Asimov

And so we see the paradox that evolution has handed us. If man is the only animal whose consciousness of self gives him an unusual dignity in the animal kingdom, he also pays a tragic price for it. The fact that the child has to identify -first- means that his very first identity is a social product. His habitation of his own body is built from the outside in; not from the inside out. He doesn't unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him. As the child responds to the vocal symbols learned from his object, he often gives the pathetic impression of being a true social puppet, jerked by alien symbols and sounds. What sensitive parent does not have his satisfaction tinged with sadness as the child repeats with such vital earnestness the little symbols that are taught him? — Ernest Becker

Trade has played a vital role in the social evolution of humankind. It allowed people to specialise, which raises both skill levels and efficiency. It brought people from different lands together, co-operating rather than competing over resources. — Julian Baggini

But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it's not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It's the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones. — Steven Pinker

The long, slow turn of world-time as the geologist has known it, and the invisibly moving hour hand of evolution perceived only yesterday by the biologist, have given way in the human realm to a fantastically accelerated social evolution induced by industrial technology. So fast does this change progress that a growing child strives to master the institutional customs of a society which, compared with the pace of past history, compresses centuries of change into his lifetime. I myself, like others of my generation, was born in an age which has already perished. At my death I will look my last upon a nation which, save for some linguistic continuity, will seem increasingly alien and remote. It will be as though I peered upon my youth through misty centuries. I will not be merely old; I will be a genuine fossil embedded in onrushing man-made time before my actual death. — Loren Eiseley

What makes the existence and the evolution of society possible is precisely the fact that peaceful cooperation under the social division of labor in the long run best serves the selfish concerns of all individuals. The eminence of the market society is that its whole functioning and operation is the consummation of this principle. — Ludwig Von Mises

Evolution is always the work of pioneers, and their followers are always small in number. This following is not a clique; it is the result of all the existing social forces; it is composed of all those who through innate or acquired capacity are ready to represent the existing degree of human revolution. — Piet Mondrian

In the ensuing chapters, we will look in some detail at particular manifestations of the modern scientific ideology and the false paths down which it has led us. We will consider how biological determinism has been used to explain and justify inequalities within and between societies and to claim that those inequalities can never be changed. We will see how a theory of human nature has been developed using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to claim that social organization is also unchangeable because it is natural. We will see how problems of health and disease have been located within the individual so that the individual becomes a problem for society to cope with rather than society becoming a problem for the individual. And we will see how simple economic relationships masquerading as facts of nature can drive the entire direction of biological research and technology. — Richard C. Lewontin

It's not the 'nice' guy who brings about real social change. 'Nice' guys look nice because they're conforming. It's the 'bad' guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution. — Robert M. Pirsig

Social intelligence was therefore always at a high premium. A sharp sense of empathy can make a huge difference, and with it in an ability to manipulate, to gain cooperation, and to deceive. — Edward O. Wilson

In the next 30 years we can destroy our world. With the very same powers - spiritual, social, scientific - we can evolve our world. Our mission is to serve as catalysts for a planetary awakening in our lifetime, to take a non-violent path to the next stage of our evolution. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

All social animals, including people, live under constant pressure from two competing interests: protecting themselves from others and aligning themselves with others. When these two interests are balanced, the result is dynamic social homeostasis. — Mystery

In the course of social evolution, usage precedes law; and that when usage has been well established it becomes law by receiving authoritative endorsement and defined form. — Herbert Spencer

Alas, our technology has marched ahead of our spiritual and social evolution, making us, frankly, a dangerous people. — Steven M. Greer

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical ... There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A ... difference between most system-building in the social sciences and systems of thought and classification of the natural sciences is to be seen in their evolution. In the natural sciences both theories and descriptive systems grow by adaptation to the increasing knowledge and experience of the scientists. In the social sciences, systems often issue fully formed from the mind of one man. Then they may be much discussed if they attract attention, but progressive adaptive modification as a result of the concerted efforts of great numbers of men is rare. — Lawrence Joseph Henderson

The rise of the Oligarchy will always remain a cause of secret wonder to the historian and the philosopher. Other great historical events have their place in social evolution. They were inevitable. Their coming could have been predicted with the same certitude that astronomers to-day predict the outcome of the movements of stars. Without — Jack London

MacLean has shown that the R-complex plays an important role in aggressive behavior, territoriality, ritual and the establishment of social hierarchies. Despite occasional welcome exceptions, this seems to me to characterize a great deal of modern human bureaucratic and political behavior. — Carl Sagan

It may sound peculiar coming from an old punk rocker, but I strongly believe that governmental policies are the only viable way to administer our long-term success as a species. I guess you could say that my attitude of 'fuck the government' is still intact. But it's more a criticism of lousy government than a statement of nihilism. The truth is, when it comes to environmental protection, the government is the best way to enact a new social awareness by establishing laws by which industries have to abide. — Greg Graffin

A man can control only what he comprehends, and comprehend only what he is able to put into words. The inexpressible therefore is unknowable. By examining future stages in the evolution of language we come to learn what discoveries, changes and social revolutions the language will be capable, some day, of reflecting. — Stanislaw Lem

With the passing of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we are verbally trying to deny. — Jose Saramago

Since the universe is stupid, it's no wonder that social Darwinism tends to support, promote and finance the evolution of fools. — William C. Brown

Through our evolution, we're so specialized for social interaction. So, if you can really design robots that can interact with people, in this very natural, interpersonal way, I think that would be great. You wouldn't have to have people read manuals, in order to operate them. — Cynthia Breazeal

We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and "history" took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists. — Robert Neelly Bellah

Stop talking about "rape" and start talking about "sex", and within a few decades India will attain the true mindset to prevent sexual assaults. — Abhijit Naskar

Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, 'we' and 'they'. — Yuval Noah Harari

But if the ants are not despondent because they have failed to produce a new social invention or convention in 65 million years, why should we be discouraged because some of our institutions and castes have not been able to evolve a new idea in the past fifty centuries? — William Morton Wheeler

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written' ... It evolves in the minds of a thinking community. — Aldo Leopold

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught? — Robert J. Sawyer

So again and again we see how under the prevailing paradigm our real past - and the original thrust of our cultural evolution - can only be seen as through a glass darkly. But once we are face to face with the full import of what this past foreshadowed - what we, at our level of technological and social development, could have been and still can be - we confront a haunting question. What brought about the radical change in cultural direction, the shift that plunged us from a social order upheld by the Chalice to one dominated by the Blade? When and how did this happen? And what does this cataclysmic change tell us about our past - and our future? — Riane Eisler

On the one hand, it is in and through creative minds that the community fulfils itself at its best and reaches its highest forms; and on the other, it is from them that the community recovers the social substance with which it had nourished them, transfigured by their creative alchemy into a still higher social substance. The creative evolution of his community and his own creative evolution must always be the two earnest purposes of the individual. Its own creative evolution and that of the individuals in its midst must always be the two earnest purposes of the community. — Salvador De Madariaga

Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist. — Joseph McCabe

But the problem becomes even worse. For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong. All we're confronted with is, in Sartre's words, "the bare, valueless fact of existence." Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of biological evolution and social conditioning. — William Lane Craig

Nevertheless, an iron rule exists in genetic social evolution. It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. The victory can never be complete; the balance of selection pressures cannot move to either extreme. If individual selection were to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selection were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies. — Edward O. Wilson

Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control. — Robert M. Pirsig

Social evolution is demonstrated by movement towards unity, not separatism. — Neale Donald Walsch

In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence. — Herbert Read

In the past our glorious visions of the future - heaven, paradise, nirvana - were thought to happen after death. The newer thought is that we do not have to die to get there. We are not speaking here of life after death in some mythical heaven, but life more abundant in real time in history. We are speaking of the next stage of our social evolution. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism ... neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy. — Richard Weikart

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable - namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. — Charles Darwin

A knowledge both of the factors of evolution and how they operate in human society becomes necessary if we are to develop a sound social order. — Conway Zirkle

The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment. — Muhammad Iqbal

Certain barriers do require a critical mass of action at the right time to overcome the inertia that is greater than incremental change. — David Jaber

What's to stop the populace from decrying you as a witch and rising against you?"
"I don't know. A couple hundred years of social evolution, combined with a general failure to believe in anything that doesn't have a Wikipedia entry? — Seanan McGuire

Those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured that the course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity. — Havelock Ellis

And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself. — Ken Wilber

In the age of arms, a super warhead might be the most powerful for its destructiveness. In the age of farms, an irrigation system is most powerful, for it feeds lives. But how do you define power and advancement in the age of social engineering? It is the one that mimics human the best, isn't it? We don't need a warhead when there has been a drought. We don't point at our enemy with sprinklers. It is about evolving. (Douglas Parsley) — Alan Chains

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views
even the awful ones
improve with age. — Chuck Klosterman