#evolution

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

#darwinism #evolution #infidelity #macro-evolution #macroevolution

Perhaps the most legitimately dispiriting thing about reciprocal altruism is that it is a misnomer. Whereas with kin selection the "goal" of our genes is to actually help another organism, with reciprocal altruism the goal is that the organism be left under the impression that we've helped; the impression alone is enough to bring the reciprocation. ↗

— Robert Wright

#evolution #natural-selection #reciprocity #nature

It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation). ↗

— Steven Pinker

#evolution #natural-selection #teleology #nature

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists. ↗

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

#history #immigration #politics #revolution #united-states

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. ↗

— Adam Smith

#democracy #freedom #history #hope #individualism

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#conclusion-before-evidence #darwinism #evolution #fossil-record #fossils

Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks. ↗

— Malcolm X

#non-violence #racism #revolution #racism

But one way or another competing and weeding takes place . . . or a race goes downhill. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#sociology #sociology

So long as we are driven by the need to make up for our needs; by the restless sense that we are not yet fully assured of our place in the world and our hold on its swarming phenomena; so long as there is more to be discovered and made, more to grasp for and make real, we must go on inventing ourselves. ↗

— David Malouf

#life

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#evolution #love