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...

The conditions necessary for devastating epidemics or pandemics just didn’t exist until the agricultural revolution. The claim that modern medicine and sanitation save us from infectious diseases that ravaged pre-agricultural people (something we hear often)...

We are only fully human when we act as if the life beyond us matters.

A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external...

I take leave to contradict those who say that salvation is an evolution! All that ever can be evolved out of the sinful heart of man is sin-and nothing else! Salvation is the free gift...

[Intelligent design advocates were ebullient Tuesday.] It’s very significant for the students of Kansas, … Instead of just the evidence that supports evolution, they’re going to see all sides.

Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system...

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished.

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.

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’.

The dismaying truth is that birtherism is part of a larger pattern of rejection of reality that has taken hold of intimidating segments of one of the two political parties that alternate in power in...

Mediation – Before you learn how to meditate, you must unlearn what you think meditation might be.

No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!

The material you work with is that which you will come to resemble. That which you work against will always work against you, including yourself.

To list all the great discoveries in the field of science and medicine during the past century, such as aspirin, insulin, penicillin, and the streptomycin drugs would require the undivided attention of a medical historian...

The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things...

The ancestors of the higher animals must be regarded as one-celled beings, similar to the Amoebae which at the present day occur in our rivers, pools, and lakes. The incontrovertible fact that each human individual...

We have to try to control what we can or else we cannot judge progress.