Words matter. These are the best Evolutionary Quotes from famous people such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Phillip E. Johnson, Ernst Haeckel, Alison Gopnik, Jonathan Sacks, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Change in my work happens not in revolutions – it’s more evolutionary.
Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.
Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation.
From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.
Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology.
At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation.
In fact, the socialization gives us the tools to fill our evolutionary roles. They are our building blocks.
Meat consumption is a part of our evolutionary heritage; meat production has been a major component of modern food systems. Carnivory should remain, within limits, an important component of a civilization that finally must learn how to maintain the integrity of its only biosphere.
It is hardly plausible to view a whole succession of logics as an evolutionary and functional program of innate wiring, particularly in light of the fact that the most mature logical structures are reached only by some adults.
We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.
Sometimes things can take a very long time and still not be very good. It took us all of evolutionary history just to get where we are today, for instance, and mostly where we are today is on the couch.
Standups always like the room cold, and if you’re shooting a sitcom live you want it a little bit chilly for the audience. I don’t know why – you’d have to ask a combination of an evolutionary psychologist and a building-maintenance man.
Is our desire for partnership just an evolutionary remainder, a Togetherness Delusion, where millions of women only think they need a relationship to be truly happy? Maybe. But you know what? That’s fine with me.
The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.
Evolutionary psychology offers a parsimonious framework for understanding which domains are likely to yield sex differences and, if so, in which direction.
I went through an evolutionary process of learning to have a voice and how to use it, knowing when to step in. I don’t always get it right, for sure. However, it’s better to speak your mind than hold your tongue and wish you had said something.
The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it’s Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.
Some scholars attribute the decline in nicknaming to the evolutionary process that turned folk heroes into entrepreneurs. The truth is: George Herman Ruth, the namely-est guy ever, exhausted our supply of hyperbole.
Tribalism, after all, is part of our evolutionary DNA. The need to identify with a group, to belong and commune with like-minded people is not only biological, it’s what has helped motivate our desire for and devotion to all kinds of important cultural institutions, from organized religion to sports fandom.
When you do men’s wear, it’s less about thinking outside the box than about pushing the walls of the box outward. Men want to be evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.
For humans, gift giving is a universal ritual laden with evolutionary implications.
Modern architecture needed to be part of an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, process.
With the opening of the second decade of the twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in an unquestioned evolutionary drama.
It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.
Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place.
American ballet… is ultimately an evolutionary art form, requiring many voices to creatively carry forward.
Evolutionary psychology has often been a field whose most prominent practitioners get embroiled in controversy – witness the 2010 case of Harvard professor Marc Hauser, whose graduate students came forward to say he’d been faking evidence for years.
The charge frequently leveled against poetry – that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot – indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.
I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change – led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
I think it’s in our nature to try to get beyond that next horizon. I think that when we, as a species, are scratching that itch, we’re actually following an evolutionary compulsion that is wired into us. I think good things come of it.
At once I feel that comedy is this amazing sort of transcendent thing, and I’m also open to the fact that maybe it’s just an evolutionary hiccup, something that upright apes do in their free time.
You must never aspire to ‘finish’ a house, you can merely hope to start it, and from then on it’s an evolutionary process.
I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy – you name it – and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?
I can’t think of anyone who is up on evolutionary psychology and related areas who is deluded enough to be called a utopian.
We’re interested in things that have big teeth, and you can see the evolutionary value of that, and you can also see the practical consequences by watching ‘Animal Planet.’ You notice they make very few programs about gerbils. It’s mostly about things that have big teeth.
What makes us human depends on what place on our evolutionary path we’re talking about. If you go back six million years ago, what makes us human is that we were walking upright. That’s all. If you go to 2.6 million years ago, it’s the fact that we’re designing and making stone tools.
When I went to high school in Australia, I was exposed to textbooks that outlined evolutionary ideas – such as ape-like creatures turning into people. I recognized the conflict between evolutionary ideas and a literal reading of the book of Genesis.
As for memes, the word ‘meme’ is a cliche, which is to say it’s already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene.
The more we learn about life, the less plausible is any evolutionary theory that relies on blind, undirected, piece-by-piece change.
In the animal world, there are all kinds of behaviors that are binary: for example, to flee or to fight. In any evolutionary environment, knowing your opponent’s decision would not be advantageous for long because your opponent would evolve the same recognition mechanism to also know you.
I am a believer in the evolutionary process, and yet I have sympathy for the friends of mine who are creationists. I don’t find the positions incompatible.
A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.
Some theists in evolutionary science acquiesce to these tacit rules and retain a personal faith while accepting a thoroughly naturalistic picture of physical reality.
Design is a series of creative choices – it’s a collaborative effort, an evolutionary process. You choose your fabrics depending upon what you want to say, then you work with mills to get those fabrics. Through the process, you realize what you want it to be.
Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.
