Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.
The Bible. Joshua 1:9
1. All human behavioral traits are heritable. [That is, they are affected to some degree by genetic variation.]
2. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
3. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
Turkheimer, E. (2000). Three laws of behavior genetics and what they mean. Current directions in psychological science, 9(5), 160-164.
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: 'Have they discovered evolution yet?' Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin. To be fair, others had had inklings of the truth, but it was Darwin who first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist. Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer to the curious child whose question heads this chapter. We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: 'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.'
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (1976)
Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari
Life under the Markov assumption: The future is independent of the past, given the present. Therefore, life is a Markov chain. We often feel that life takes unexpected and challenging turns; life has a Unit-Root. Then, you meet a person with whom you connect wonderfully; it is cointegrated with another Markov chain. Therefore, both are stationary together, but not separately.
Thus, by understanding how cultural evolution has shaped the basic institutions of family and marriage, and how this in turn drove social and psychological changes, we can more clearly illuminate the origins of the modern world, including the wealth and poverty of nations.
The WEIRDest people in the world - Joseph Henrich
The nations rising to new power are still ones that were incorporated thousands of years ago into the old centers of dominance based on food production, or that have been repopulated by peoples from those centers ... The hand of history's course at 8000 B.C. lies heavily on us.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - Jared Diamond