Despite the fact that human beings think that they have escaped the evolutionary paradigm, they’ve done nothing of the kind, and so we should expect the belief systems that people hold to mirror the evolutionary interests that people have.
Evolutionary cosmology formulates theories in which a universe is capable of giving rise to and generating future universes out of itself, within black holes or whatever.
Humankind has mainly evolved in Africa, and we only left Africa very, very late in our evolutionary path. This means that there is very little genetic diversity among those who left Africa and very much genetic diversity among those who stayed.
I think open source is an evolutionary idea for humanity, this idea of transparency. It played out for us in the technology world, but it also played out with the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission and Wikipedia.
A lot of times, we look at jazz in eras. How can we not keep those eras separate and think of the language as one complete continuum? It’s all interrelated, and it’s all evolutionary.
Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.
The culmination of all of that was the decision to start a company, which became Lotus, to do a product, which became 1-2-3. By the time I reached that point it had been four years, and it felt like a lifetime, but really it was kind of evolutionary.
If sleep does not provide a remarkable set of benefits, then it’s the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.
The 21st century has more potential than perhaps any other in our brief evolutionary history. We stand on the cusp of computing, genetic and energy generation breakthroughs that were only recently in the realm of science-fiction. A golden age of humanity is tantalisingly within our grasp.
All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature’s only irreducible essence… I had to place myself amidst the variation.
The evolutionary theory of senescence can be stated as follows: while bodies are not designed to fail, neither are they designed for extended operation.
Probably the single most important evolutionary trait dogs developed was right there at the outset, illuminated by the campfire. It is in those eyebrows and in the way dogs have of tilting their heads. They are warm packages of emotions.
Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process; yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole.
More than two million years ago, mammoths and Asian elephants took different evolutionary paths – and around the same time, according to DNA research, so did their lumbering relatives in Africa.
During half a century of literary work, I have endeavoured to introduce the philosophy of evolution into the sphere of literature, and to inspire my readers to think in evolutionary terms.
Science cannot tell theology how to construct a doctrine of creation, but you can’t construct a doctrine of creation without taking account of the age of the universe and the evolutionary character of cosmic history.
If you go back and look at the early promos for Gears 1, you’ll see just how different the characters were from the actual first game, both in appearance and background. And it’s an evolutionary process.
The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.
Technology is the means by which we have decommissioned natural selection and are seizing control. We are no longer to be victims of some blind evolutionary process where sentient beings are massacred by entropy.
The next evolutionary step is into the screen.
It is interesting that the U.S. has this very strong proportion of the population that rejects scientific conclusions about the age of the Earth and about evolutionary relationships between species, including humans.
It seems to me that for Darwin the pulsing of evolutionary rates was a strictly vertical phenomenon.
We still don’t know what evolutionary significance to attach to it, but it is at the very least interesting that a telomere gene is related to obesity.
In short, it is not that evolutionary naturalists have been less brazen than the scientific creationists in holding science hostage, but rather that they have been infinitely more effective in getting away with it.
The explanatory power of evolutionary psychology is limitless!
We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move forward in an evolutionary way.
One of the things about genetics that has become clearer as we’ve done genomes – as we’ve worked our way through the evolutionary tree, including humans – is that we’re probably much more genetic animals than we want to confess we are.
As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past, those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce.
It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place.
Every film tries to advance the state of the art, at least a little bit. Brand new techniques? A lot of them are just evolutionary: we’re just building on something that’s like something we’ve done before and just trying to do it a little bit better or make it a little bit more realistic.
Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.
Racism is essentially natural, it’s old fashioned it’s an evolutionary phase that we’re going through. Ultimately it wont exist.
Each one of us decides to incarnate upon this planet at a particular point in time and space. We have chosen to come here to learn a particular lesson that will advance us upon our spiritual, evolutionary pathway.
If you look at my body of work, which is not very big, really, it took an evolutionary leap with ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’.
One of the things I say is from an evolutionary point of view: probably the ideal rich environment for a baby includes more mud, livestock, and relatives than most of us could tolerate nowadays.
I’m an anarchist. I’m implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.
Check your testosterone levels. Every study on evolutionary psychology has correlated testosterone levels with dominance.
The evil of slavery and colonialism was that these oppressions kept their victims out of history, disconnected them from the evolutionary struggle.
What’s been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.
Whatever the evolutionary basis of religion, the xenophobia it now generates is clearly maladaptive.
Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.
Moreover, the concern of some that moving DNA among species would breach customary breeding barriers and have profound effects on natural evolutionary processes has substantially disappeared as the science revealed that such exchanges occur in nature.
You don’t just magically flip some evolutionary switch somewhere and transmute a quadruped into an upright-walking bipedal human.
Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested – to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.
As you continue to work on a show, if I still feel inspired, and I feel they are making exciting choices, then our enthusiasm remains. This is not a perfect science. It’s an evolutionary process.
The most extraordinary thing about trying to piece together the missing links in the evolutionary story is that when you do find a missing link and put it in the story, you suddenly need all these other missing links to connect to the new discovery. The gaps and questions actually increase – it’s extraordinary.
I think it’s tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.
We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.
By preventing dangerous asteroid strikes, we can save millions of people, or even our entire species. And, as human beings, we can take responsibility for preserving this amazing evolutionary experiment of which we and all life on Earth are a part.
