A Quote by Keith Henson
Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environmen.
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Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environment.
Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion - a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint - ...and Mr. Gish is but one of many to make it - the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution today.
I appreciate having been promoted for merit, on merit. And then bringing to bear whatever those extra special characteristics that all of us have.
The puzzling thing is that there is really a curious coincidence between astrological and psychological facts, so that one can isolate time from the characteristics of an individual, and also, one can deduce characteristics from a certain time.
Killing is fundamentally in our nature because over the eons of human evolution murder was so surprisingly beneficial in the intense game of reproductive competition.
Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.
The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions, that they have just those characteristics which are wholly incompatible with being an intellectual. This is a real internal psychological contradiction. People have to suppress the very questions which reading books raises.
We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis. Our genomes are catalogues of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature, filed for all kinds of contingencies.
People repeat behaviour that leads to flooding their brains with pleasurable chemicals. The short-term reward loop acts over hours to years, and the long-term reproductive success loop over generations.
Most of what we know about human evolution comes from these: the fossilized bones of our ancestors. With their help, we've traced our evolution from small furry creatures to the big-brained beings we've become today. But bones can't tell us everything.
If any value is deeply evolutionarily familiar, it is reproductive success. If any value is truly unnatural, if there is one thing that humans (and all other species in nature) are decisively not designed for, it is voluntary childlessness. All living organisms in nature, including humans, are evolutionarily designed to reproduce. Reproductive success is the ultimate end of all biological existence.
Our success will not come from the acts of our forefathers, but can come alone from what we are doing now. Those who have inherited rich blood can use that richness in building greatness in themselves, but those who have not the privilege of such inheritance need not be discouraged. They can create their own rich blood and make it as rich as they like.
Something like 'Psycho,' which is this psychological thing that slowly, slowly, slowly builds, and actually it's a much more powerful reaction you have when it assumes that you're intelligent as you're watching it. I want them to make me believe that whatever's happening could really happen, and then it becomes much more frightening.
One of the reasons that Thatcher promoted home ownership is that it promoted responsible citizens with a stake in society. But another reason was that those people would tend to be Conservative.
I have been exposed to a great deal of the issues surrounding PTSD, but what I have learned that is most relevant to my work on Mercy Street is that this illness is timeless. We didn't have a diagnosis for PTSD in the Civil War like we do today, but those men and women definitely suffered from similar psychological wounds as our men and women in uniform do today.
Evolution does not necessarily favor the longest-lived. It doesn't necessarily favor the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, and not even the smartest. Evolution favors those creatures best adapted to their environment. That is the sole test of survival and success.
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