Evolution

Milton Berle - If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?

Derek Bickerton (in Adam's Tongue, 2009) - Animals, including us, are not agents of their own destiny, but automatically throw off random genetic recombinations and occasional mutations from which the environment selects.

Howard Bloom (in The Genius of the Beast, 2010) - Makeup came long before basics like fishing hooks, sewing needles, plows, and trade. We invented rouge and powders two hundred thousand years before we devised these seemingly far more basic tools of food, clothing, and shelter.

Gurwinder Bhogal  - The brain is commonly regarded as a thinking machine, but it’s more often the opposite: a machine that tries to circumvent thinking. This is because cognition costs time and calories, which in our evolutionary history were scant resources.

Samuel Butler - A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. Common modern paraphrase: The chicken is only an egg’s way of making another egg.

Croatian proverb - All mushrooms are edible, some only once.

Richard Dawkins (in The selfish gene, 1976) - Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. 

Richard Dawkins - Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.

Richard Dawkins - A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees; a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water.

Richard Dawkins - Long-term planning . . . is something utterly new on the planet, even alien. It exists only in human brains. The future is a new invention in evolution.

Marco Del Giudice (in Evolutionary Psychopathology, 2018) - Biological adaptation is a historical concept (...) All claims about adaptation are about the past. Traits that promote fitness in a certain environment may become neutral or maladaptive if the environment changes. 

Jean Delumeau - Aucune espèce animale n’aurait survécu sans la peur.

Daniel Dennett (in From Bacteria to Bach and Back, 2017) - Evolution is a process that depends on amplifying things that almost never happen. For instance, mutation in DNA almost never occurs—not once in a billion copyings—but evolution depends on it.

Azar Gat (in War in Human Civilization, 2006) - Contrary to popular ideas, herbivores fight among themselves no less, and sometimes more, viciously and frequently than carnivores. 

Gilbert & Sullivan - Darwinian man, though well behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.

Robin Hanson (2019) - To a useful approximation, humans want to be comfy, healthy, fed, warm, respected, and loved. But I think a better approximation is that humans try to avoid being open to criticism. They work harder at blocking others' criticisms than they do at any other goal.

Yuval Noah Harari - Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. (...) Myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

Tim Harford - Negativity makes evolutionary sense: the secret of happiness may be to focus on what’s going well, but the secret of survival is to pay attention to what’s going badly.

Joseph Heath - It is common now to talk about “superbugs,” which have an evolved resistance to antibiotics. But it is important to realize that almost all of the diseases in circulation are already a type of superbug, selected from among thousands of variants for their ability to exploit us in just the right way, not just dodging our immune system, but getting themselves reproduced without burning out. The problem is that once these extremely well-adapted bugs get added to the population, they very seldom go away, and so we wind up carrying along with ourselves an ever-expanding pool of viruses.

Joseph Heath - One of the most unnatural features of modern urban environments is that we are constantly surrounded by strangers. This is not at all like the environment of evolutionary adaptation, and it can have all sorts of untoward effects.

Rob Henderson (2020) - Some people interpret behavior genetics findings to mean environment is unimportant. I interpret them to mean certain aspects of environment matter even more. Norms and customs constrain differences between individuals. The absence of norms magnifies them.

Steven Johnson - Every now and then, a mutation opens up a new wing of the adjacent possible. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s not enough to say “to err is human.” Error is what made humans possible in the first place.

Satoshi Kanazawa - Recent scientific research has shown that there is at least one other species that shares any trait that humans have. [Betzig, 1997]. To the best of my knowledge, there are no traits that only humans have.

Satoshi Kanazawa - According to the basic principles of quantitative genetics, the fact that general intelligence is highly heritable suggests that it is not very important for our survival and reproductive success.

Razib Khan - Evolutionarily one reason males exist is we have higher reproductive variance—more males than females don’t reproduce and die—the idea is those males carry more mutations. Males are basically the garbage collectors of negative mutations in the species.

David Lahti (2013) - Most philosophers and social scientists still practice their arts as though humans are not a product of evolution. This is astonishing and becomes more so with each passing decade

Konrad Lorenz - The fight between the eater and the eaten never goes so far that the predator causes extinction of the prey: a state of equilibrium is always established between them, endurable by both species.

Konrad Lorenz - What directly threatens the existence of an animal species is never the ‘eating enemy’ but the competitor.

Konrad Lorenz - The danger of too dense a population of an animal species settling in one part of the available biotope and exhausting all its sources of nutrition and so starving can be obviated by a mutual repulsion acting on the animals of the same species, effecting their regular spacing out (...). This is the most important survival value of intra-specific aggression.

Alan Mann (Anthropologist) - Evolution doesn’t produce perfection, it produces function.

Ian Morris - If our babies stayed in the womb until they were almost self-sufficient (like other mammals), their heads would be too big for them to get out.

Randolph Nesse & George Williams (in Why we get sick, 1994) - The cost of getting killed even once is enormously higher than the cost of responding to a hundred false alarms.

Randolph Nesse (in Good reasons for bad feelings, 2019) - All organisms are shaped to behave in ways that increase fitness even if that decreases health and happiness (...) Our emotions benefit our genes far more than they do us.

Leslie Orgel (Biochemist) - Evolution is cleverer than you are.

Steven Pinker (in How the mind works, 1997) - Behavior itself did not evolve; what evolved was the mind.

Steven Pinker (in How the mind works, 1997) -  There is nothing particularly healthy about natural foods. Your cabbage, a Darwinian creature, has no more desire to be eaten than you do, and since it can’t very well defend itself through behavior, it resorts to chemical warfare. Most plants have evolved dozens of toxins in their tissues: insecticides, insect repellents, irritants, paralytics, poisons, and other sand to throw in herbivores’ gears. Herbivores have in turn evolved countermeasures, such as a liver to detoxify the poisons and the taste sensation we call bitterness to deter any further desire to ingest them.

David Pinsof - If natural selection—our only ally against entropy—is indifferent to the long-term wellbeing of humanity, then our prospects are grim.

Judith Shklar (in The Liberalism of Fear, 1989) - To be alive is to be afraid.

Thomas Sowell - There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.

Steve Stewart-Williams - Natural selection creates an illusion of intelligent design: it creates adaptations that look as if they were designed to perform a particular function, despite having no designer.

Steve Stewart-Williams (in The ape that understood the universe, 2018) - Our basic drives and motivations led our ancestors to act in ways that typically propagated their genes in the environment in which our species evolved. These motivations may or may not accomplish this goal in our current environment.

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (in On Growth and Form, 1917) - Everything is the way it is because it got that way.

Traditionnel - L'homme descend du singe, mais certains ont pris un raccourci.

Edward Osborne Wilson (2009) What we have in human nature is our inheritance from a prehistoric past going back millions of years. We do have strong predispositions—you can call them instincts—that become dangerous in modern society. So, what we should do is conduct the best research we can, in biology and the social sciences, and find out what it is to be human. And then recognize that these are particular flaws in our nature in a modern techno-scientific world, and work with that knowledge to pull us on through. 

David Sloan Wilson & Edward Osborne Wilson (in Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology, 2007) - Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.