Great Throughts Treasury

"Although this book will cover many of the behavioral sciences - anthropology, psychiatry, sociology, political science, evolutionary psychology is at its center. It is a young and yet not strong discipline, partially fulfilling the promise to create a new science of thinking allows us to now ask the question that it would be useless to ask, and in 1859, after the publication of The Origin, and in 1959 - the theory of natural selection may be useful to ordinary people? For example, can an evolutionary understanding of human nature to help people achieve their goals in life? Whether it can help them to select these targets? Will it distinguish between attainable and unattainable goals? More precisely, if it will help in determining what goals are worthy? That is, is whether the knowledge of how evolution has shaped our basic moral impulses, decide which impulses we have to consider legal?"

"Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice-all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis. That's the good news. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, they did not evolve for the good of the species and are not reliably employed to that end. Quite the contrary: it is now clearer than ever how (and precisely why) the moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility, switched on and off in keeping with self-interest; and how naturally oblivious we often are to this switching. In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse. The title of this book is not wholly without irony."

"Being a person's true friend means endorsing the untruths he holds dearest."

"Canada and the U.S. are violating the international laws designed to protect our shared lakes and rivers from pollution. An independent inquiry by the CEC (North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation) will uncover why Canada and the U.S. have failed to resolve the dispute by not enforcing the century-old treaty."

"Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, a sense of justice - all that binds society, and gives people a reason for the high self-esteem. And all this, as you can now confidently believe, has a solid genetic basis. This is good news. The bad news is that although these qualities in some way, and bless humanity as a whole, but they did not man a good view and not too reliably serve the people to the end. Rather, and now it is clearer than ever, as (more precisely - why?) Moral feelings are used with the hideous flexibility switched on or off depending on personal interest, and how at ease we are often not aware of such change. A new look at people believe their view, has a great set of moral tools, but tragically inclined to use them for other purposes, and are in a pathetic institutional ignorance about these abuses."

"An appraisal of the state of things from a scientific standpoint, yields more evidence of divinity than you might expect. Moreover, I?m agnostic on the question of whether there?s even a deistic sort of God. But, you may ask, if I?m agnostic, then how can Coyne quote me saying things like this: ?God was so wise that he set up a world in which the rational pursuit of self-interest leads people to wisdom.??"

"Even though one driving force behind monotheism?s emergence seems to have been hostility, the God that emerged needn?t remain hostile toward Israel?s neighbors. Even if the ?universalism? so often attributed to the God of the exile is partly a euphemism for far-flung retribution, this God was capable of moving toward moral universalism, toward universal compassion? What?s more, even if there is backsliding, every burst of moral growth God exhibits, once etched in scripture, can be revived later, even amplified, when circumstances are conducive."

"Every image tells a story. They pilfered each other's tribes. They fought the cavalry. They fought disease. They fought trappers."

"Edward Tylor noted in 1874 that the religions of savage societies were almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainstream of practical religion. Tylor was not saying that savages lack morality. He stressed that the moral standards of savages are generally well-defined and praiseworthy. It's just that these ethical laws stand on their own ground of tradition and public opinion, rather than on a religious foundation."

"For the psychologist may seem obvious that the evolution of a reflexive, self-aware brain will free us from the basic dictates of our evolutionary past. For an evolutionary biologist is obvious quite the opposite - that the human brain has evolved not to isolate us from the rules of survival and reproduction, but in order to follow them more efficiently, more accurately. We are descended from species, the males of which force seize females; Now the males of our species whisper females different pleasant nonsense, and whispering may well obey the same logic as the violence - the logic of manipulation in the interests of the male by the female, and this form of manipulation serves the same function."

"Even before there were homo sapiens, feelings like compassion and love and sympathy had earned their way into the gene pool."

"Fuel efficiency is reducing the fund?s income per mile driven and the average number of miles driven per person has declined."

"Human nature consists of knobs and of mechanisms for tuning the knobs, and both are in invisible their own way."

"Human beings are a splendid species in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse."

"Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values ??we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence - legitimately - our choice of basic values ??in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here does not violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature - by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse - we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature - natural selection - gets us to uncritically accept its values. Once this hits Revelation norm, we are less likely to obey this Aura, and THUS less likely to commit the Fallacy."

"I don?t argue that religious belief is a pre-requisite for this moral progress; atheists are presumably just as responsive to the underlying dynamic as believers. The values system in question?religious or secular?is a kind of ?neutral medium? through which underlying social dynamics find their moral manifestation."

"If there?s one thing I can encourage everyone to do: ? Expand the moral imagination."

"If it be any part of religion to believe that man was made ??by a good being, it is more consistent with that faith to believe, that this being gave all human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded, not rooted out and consumed, and he that takes delight in every nearer approach made by his creatures to the ideal conception embodied in them, every increase in any of their capabilities of comprehension, of action, or of enjoyment."

"Humans have various ways of coping with extended stress, and one is the anticipation of a better time. Here, as with retribution, there is often a kind of symmetry: the more intense the stress and the more hopeless the situation, the more the coming fabulous times that are anticipated."

"If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-Zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it."

"If you watched evolution on this planet unfold from a distance (and on fast-forward), you would find it strikingly like watching the maturation of an organism: there would be directional movement toward functional integration. So why can?t the part of Paley?s argument that can be validly applied to an organism?s maturation?the idea that it suggests a designer of some sort?be applied to the whole system of life on Earth?"

"If Trivers is right, if the formation of the conscience of a young man partially includes instruction on favorable fraud (and the best protection against fraud), it can be expected that young children will easily learn the practice of deception. And this is perhaps an understatement. Jean Piaget, in his study of moral development in 1932, wrote that the tendency to lie - a natural tendency ... casual and versatile. Subsequent studies have confirmed this? The point here is that these children of iniquity - is not only a stage harmless offense, which we close our eyes, but the first of a series of tests on the self-serving dishonesty. Through positive reinforcement (for undetected and fruitful untruths) and negative reinforcement (for wrongs that open teammates or imply reprimand family) we learn where you can and where you cannot escape the consequences, and that our family is considering (or not) as a legitimate deception. The fact that the parents of the children rarely read a lecture about the lies and virtue, does not mean that they do not teach them to lie. Children obviously continue to lie, if it is not strongly suppressed. And not only those children whose parents are lying more often than the average, have a chance to become chronic liars; but also children who grow up without proper parental supervision. If parents do not prevent injustice children obviously beneficial to them, and if they say such untruth in their presence, they give them an advanced course of lies."

"If you?re in a position where you can?t remove yourself, do you really hold those kids responsible?"

"It was both difficult and it was contentious. But that wasn't the point. When it all came down it was a 5-0 approval with the conditions. In this way, I think everyone was able to take their egos, their biases, and their prejudices and leave them at the door."

"It's an unpredictable runaway chemical reaction no one predicted."

"Is there something? Is there anything? Is there any evidence of something? Any signs that there's more to life that the sum of its subatomic particles - some larger purpose, some deeper meaning, maybe even something that would qualify as divine in some sense of the word?"

"Narrow-minded way of approaching the relationship between thoughts and feelings on the one hand and the pursuit of the objectives of the other - not only backward, but also wrong. We tend to believe that our solutions begin with to make judgments, in accordance with which our actions are carried out and we decide who is pleasant and therefore render him friendly support, we decide who is frank, and we welcome it, we calculate who is wrong, and resist him, we calculate what is the truth, and follow it. This picture Freud would add that we often have goals that we do not realize objectives that can be pursued indirectly, even counter-productive way, and that our perception of the world may be deformed in the process. But how evolutionary psychology can be trusted, so this picture should be turned inside out. We trust anything - the value of personal ethics and even objective truth - just because it's exciting behavior, transmitting our genes to the next generation (or, at least, pass on our genes in an ancient setting). These behavioral goals - status, sex, effective coalition, parental investment, and so on - remain unchanged, while our perception of reality is adjusted to adapt to this constancy. Everything that is in our genetic interests, seems to us the right moral law, objective law, whatever tension it may require. In short, if Freud stressed the difficulties in observing the people the truth about themselves, new Darwinists emphasize the difficulties and see and understand the truth. Darwinism comes close to that, to question the very meaning of the word truth. Above the small talk that could possibly reveal the truth - talking about morality, political conversations and sometimes even academic talking - Darwinism includes light elemental struggle for power. Someone will win in these discussions, but often there is no reason to expect that this will be the winner though. It is possible that Freud's deeper cynicism is hard to imagine, but there it is."

"Nature has gone to great lengths to hide our subconscious from ourselves. Why?"

"Once you the forces that govern behavior, it's harder to blame the behaver."

"Lasting love is something A person has to Decide to Experience. Lifelong monogamous devotion is just not natural-not for women even, and emphatically not for men. It requires what, for lack of a better term, we can call an act of will? This is not to say that a young man cannot hope to be seized by love? But whether the sheer fury of a man's feelings accurately gauges their likely endurance is another question. The ardor will surely fade, sooner or later, and the marriage will then live or die on respect, practical compatibility, simple affection, and (these days, especially) determination. With the help of these things, something worthy of the label 'love' can last until death. But it will be a different kind of love from the kind that began the marriage. Will it be a richer love, a deeper love, a more spiritual love? Opinions vary. But it's Certainly A more impressive love."

"Perhaps the most legitimately dispiriting thing about reciprocal altruism is that it is a misnomer. Whereas with kin selection the goal of our genes is to actually help another organism, with reciprocal altruism the goal is that the organism be left under the impression that we've helped; the impression alone is enough to Bring the reciprocation."

"Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps social change keep safe from itself."

"The Chukchee, a people indigenous to Siberia, had their own special way of dealing with unruly winds. A Chukchee man would chant, Western Wind, look here! Look down on my buttocks. We are going to give you some fat. Cease blowing! The nineteenth-century European visitor who reported this ritual described it as follows: The man pronouncing the incantation lets his breeches fall down, and bucks leeward, exposing his bare buttocks to the wind. At every word he claps his hands."

"The main goal is to give young people hope ... to give them skills."

"Sensual pleasures are the Whip natural selection uses to control US, US to Keep in the Thrall of ITS Warped values ??system."

"The sages may have been self-serving, like the rest of us, but that does not mean they were not sages."

"There are many verses in the Koran suggesting that Jews and Christians are eligible for salvation. Three of those verses add Sabeans to the list, and of the three, this one verse adds Zoroastrians as well. . . It?s possible that all three verses carrying salvation beyond the Abrahamic compass were indeed uttered by Muhammad. Maybe near the end of his career he found small pockets of Sabeans and Zoroastrians within the ambit of his conquests, or maybe he found himself in alliance with towns populated by these non-Abrahamics. But, regardless of whether these verses come from Muhammad?s time or later, the best explanation for them is an expanded scope of non-zero-sumness. Whether by allying with non-Abrahamics or governing them, Islamic leadership seems to have acquired an incentive to stay on cooperative terms with them. This is reminiscent of the growing inclusiveness we saw in the Hebrew Bible."

"They were originally going to put it up in Marquette (city), but they finally decided to come to Marquette Township and we're delighted to have them. It should be a nice addition to Marquette Township."

"The idea is that human culture as broadly defined - art, politics, technology, religion, and so on - evolves in much the way biological species evolve: new cultural traits arise and may flourish or perish, and as a result whole institutions can form and belief Systems Change."

"This is going to be a profitable transaction... This one we could afford on a modest budget."

"This is the moral irony of the Koran. On the one hand, it is vengeful; people who read it after hearing only whitewashed summaries are often surprised at the recurring air of retribution. Yet most of the retributive passages don?t encourage retribution; almost always, it is God, not any Muslim, who is to punish the infidels. And if we confine ourselves to the Meccan years ? most of the Koran ?Muslims are encouraged to resist the impulse of vengeance."

"There is in the world today a great and mysterious force that shapes the fortunes of millions of people. It is called the stock market."

"To the extent that we can tell, the one true God?the God of Jews, then of Christians, and then of Muslims ? was originally a god of vengeance. Fortunately, the previous sentence has an asterisk: but it doesn?t matter. The salvation of the world in the twenty-first century may well hinge on how peaceful and tolerant Abrahamic monotheism is. But it doesn?t hinge on whether these attributes were built in at monotheism?s birth. That?s because monotheism turns out to be, morally speaking, a very malleable thing, something that, when circumstances are auspicious can be a fount of tolerance and compassion."

"This view of marriage - a textbook example of how Darwinism can and it cannot reasonably be involved in the discussion on the topic of morality. What it cannot do - so it's to provide us with basic moral values. For example, if we want to live in a society of equality or not - the choice is ours; indifference to the suffering of natural selection, the weak - it's not something that we should follow. And we should not care whether the murder, robbery and violence natural in the evolutionary coordinates. It is only our job to decide how disgusting we find such phenomena, and how hard we want to fight with them."

"Various people had long had the feeling that gain through pain was nature's way"

"We don't have any plans to make acquisitions at this scale, but we will look at smaller acquisitions of tools or other things that enhance the site."

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

"Today's investment is another step in our effort to seek out new platforms for NBC programming and content,"

"What you'll learn tonight is it doesn't stop with technical solutions, but that relationships really matter. If we can do anything, it would be to encourage you to develop strong, healthy, deep relationships with your children."

"Understanding the often unconscious nature of genetic control is the first step toward understanding that?in many realms, not just sex?we?re all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer."