When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success.
From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.
Capitalism is not so much an aberration as a step on an evolutionary path, and one that contains within it some of the answers to its own contradictions.
There may be an evolutionary advantage for schizophrenia genes during famine.
There is no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary theory.
Evolutionary science kind of bears that out: When species are rivals and competing for space and resources, the superior one wins. Nature has no compunction about that; it just is.
Ever since Darwin, we’ve been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.
So we can’t go backwards, we can only go where the evolutionary trajectory is taking us and attune our ideas about ourselves and our existence to that course.
Most of them are doomed to rapid extinction, but a few may make evolutionary inventions, such as physiological, ecological, or behavioral innovations that give these species improved competitive potential.
I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don’t come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.
Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
The monopoly of science in the realm of knowledge explains why evolutionary biologists do not find it meaningful to address the question whether the Darwinian theory is true.
By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan… In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.
The genomics revolution, proteomics, metabolomics, all of these ‘omics’ that sound so terrific on grants and on business plans. What we’re doing is we are seizing control of our evolutionary future. I mean we’re essentially using technology to just jam evolution into fast-forward.
Like funny men, skilled diners are apparently perceived to have an evolutionary advantage.
There’s a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it’s fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, ‘Why even try to work toward peace if we’re just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?’
