All social animals, including people, live under constant pressure from two competing interests: protecting themselves from others and aligning themselves with others. When these two interests are balanced, the result is dynamic social homeostasis.

All of today’s DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.

Evolution… is the most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on Earth.

Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism… neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds...

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal...

Evolution isn’t true, because if we evolved from monkeys, how can they still be here?

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we’ve always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn’t. It is by...

We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.

Theory of Evolution (Summary)First, there were some amoebas. Deviant amoebas adapted better to the environment, thus becoming monkeys. Then came Total Quality Management.

Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of...

But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status,...

The world doesn’t change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.

And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women – except, of course —those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own...

My body lies within the strings and myths of reality with a purpose of evolution and adapted by gravity but for my conscious’s matrix is without any doubt has adapted to other’s consciousness and that...

There are natural phases to all life and wherever you are in life, you are perfectly becoming.

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light...

Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.

If we were truly created by God, then why do we still occasionally bite the insides of our own mouths?

[E]very major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.

In Paley’s famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function, or purpose, of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that...

Saying of the ProphetInk and BloodThe ink of the learned is holier than the blood of the martyr.

Greed harms you: generosity helps you. This is why it has been said: ‘Greed is the mother of incapacity’.

like all other living creatures, I am the descendant of survivors, so the fear in my head is the voice of my ancestors whispering their accumulated wisdom.

But the Sufis work IN the world, and therefore WITH ‘things of the world’.

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he...

Whenever man comes up with a better mousetrap, nature immediately comes up with a better mouse.

I heard that Jesus had a pet dinosaur. Evolution must be a myth then.

Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.

We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.

When it comes to society and human consciousness, Darwinism still exists in its primal message.

Readers of Darwin’s life, for instance, and particularly of the published correspondence of Darwin, are henceforth naturalists in the making. Ever afterwards they are Darwins on a small scale, seeing animals and plants in an...

It is not a matter of whether one is biased or not. It is really a question of which bias is the best bias with which to be biased.

As Karl Marx once noted: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’ William Jennings...

If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender’s words. But since it could not be, we ask only this: that you remember us, not as enemies, but as a tragic...

Nature is a hanging judge,” goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and...

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence...

My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends...

What shall it profit a male if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his immortal genes?

You know you are truly alive, when you care for every living thing. One day soon, it will be the norm to view others not as competition, but gifts to share this gorgeous planet with,...

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

One of the most important discoveries from studying ancient mitochondrial DNA is the estimate of when humans diverged in evolution from the Neanderthals – around half a million years ago,

Remember meditation is an active, deep remembrance, and that is discernment. Wherever you go, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, remember to utilize discernment so that you can hear and sense and feel the vibration...

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

We do not know how life began.

But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment.

The other day, a friend of a friend said that everyone started out as girls, but boys evolved… But don’t worry girls, I hit him.

As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of...

Constantinople had been changing for sometime before the Young Turks got hold of it. It would continue to change long after they had gone.

Offering shares to the public is a natural next step in the evolution of Nasdaq,

The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel’s definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and...