Cognitive Evolution Quotes

[D]umb evolutionary processes have dramatically amplified the intelligence in the human lineage even compared with our close relatives the great apes and our own humanoid ancestors; and there is no reason to suppose Homo sapiens to have reached the apex of cognitive effectiveness attainable in a biological system. ~ Nick Bostrom

Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our 'noble' traits as well? ~ Stephen Jay Gould

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution. ~ Franz Kafka

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case. ~ Charles Darwin

This week, Georgia's board of education approved a plan that allows teachers to keep using the word Evolution when teaching biology. Though, as a compromise, dinosaurs are now called Jesus Horses. ~ Jimmy Fallon

The theory of evolution explains to us what our ancestry has been. It does not explain away our worth. Why should we be afraid to learn more about what we are? ~ Philip Kitcher

You're right: if there's sentient life behind the border, it probably won't share my goals. Unlike the people in this room, who all want exactly the same things in life as I do, and have precisely the same tastes in food, art, music, and sex. Unlike the people of Schur, and Cartan, and Zapata - who I came here in the hope of protecting, after losing my own home - who doubtless celebrate all the same festivals, delight in the same songs and stories, and gather every fortieth night to watch actors perform the same plays, in the same language, from the same undisputed canon, as the people I left behind.

"If there's sentient life behind the border, of course we couldn't empathize with it. These creatures are unlikely to possess cute mammalian neonate faces, or anything else we might mistake for human features. None of us could have the imagination to get over such insurmountable barriers, or the wit to apply such difficult abstractions as the General Intelligence theorem - though since every twelve-year-old on my home world was required to master that result, it must be universally known on this side of the border.

"You're right: we should give up responsibility for making any difficult moral judgments, and surrender to the dictates of natural selection. Evolution cares so much about our happiness that no one who's obeyed an inherited urge has ever suffered a moment's regret for it. History is full of joyful case studies of people who followed their na ~ Greg Egan

There are four key pillars holding you up that you can re-ground yourself to. Your responsibility. Your power. Your Compassion. And your sense of unity. This, is your foundation. ~ Emma Mildon

Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system. ~ Grant Morrison

evolution is not progress, that there is no 'goal' or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution 'succeeds' if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe. ~ Dan Simmons

Free will was not created for fun; there was a reason that evolution handed our ancestors the ability to take initiatives (...) eventually to be in a better position to reproduce and rear children than human beings who do not reproduce. ~ Matt Ridley

In the first case it emerges that the evidence that might refute a theory can often be unearthed only with the help of an incompatible alternative: the advice (which goes back to Newton and which is still popular today) to use alternatives only when refutations have already discredited the orthodox theory puts the cart before the horse. Also, some of the most important formal properties of a theory are found by contrast, and not by analysis. A scientist who wishes to maximize the empirical content of the views he holds and who wants to understand them as clearly as he possibly can must therefore introduce other views; that is, he must adopt a pluralistic methodology. He must compare ideas with other ideas rather than with 'experience' and he must try to improve rather than discard the views that have failed in the competition. Proceeding in this way he will retain the theories of man and cosmos that are found in Genesis, or in the Pimander, he will elaborate them and use them to measure the success of evolution and other 'modern' views. He may then discover that the theory of evolution is not as good as is generally assumed and that it must be supplemented, or entirely replaced, by an improved version of Genesis. Knowledge so conceived is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to truth. It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth ~ Paul Karl Feyerabend

Natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous actions, no plans for the future, or underlying purpose. ~ Henry Gee

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. ~ Frederick Winslow Taylor

We have won the time lottery of the last 4 billion years. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio, and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody's high! ~ Stephen Colbert

The last decade of Internet evolution has been marked by innovation. That innovation has been a consequence of the open and neutral access that the Internet has afforded up until now. ~ Vinton Cerf

I've had a lot of cognitive behavioural therapy, and am having a family now. ~ Trisha Goddard

Reincarnation is the evolution of spirit through matter. Over thousands and millions of lifetimes, the soul evolves. It comes into the light. The growth is slow. ~ Frederick Lenz

The evolution of cultures appears to follow the pattern of the evolution of species. The many different forms of culture which arise correspond to the "mutations" of genetic theory. Some forms prove to be effective under prevailing circumstances and others not, and the perpetuation of the culture is determined accordingly. ~ B.F. Skinner

If you put on a lousy production with white actors, it's lousy. There is a problem, or can be, at this stage of our social evolution, with mixing the casts. It may not be a question of race so much as class. You would rarely find a black man in a high executive position where he was swinging his weight around. ~ Howard Schultz

The thought of both East and West (philosophies) can indeed be integrated into a higher truth. They show us that the West is correct in maintaining that life is about progress about evolving toward something higher. Yet the East is also correct in emphasizing that we must let go of control with the ego. We can't progress by using logic alone. We have to attain a fuller consciousness, an inner connection with God, because only then can our evolution toward something better be guided by a higher part of ourselves. ~ James Redfield

One glance and I knew exactly who and what he was. The classic alpha male, the kind who had spurred evolution forward about five million years ago by nailing every female in sight. They charmed, seduced, and behaved like bastards, and yet women were biologically incapable of resisting their magic DNA. ~ Lisa Kleypas

The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity, and meaningfulness of ordinary experiences becomes the basis of a passionate spirituality. An ineffable God becomes vital through metaphor: The Supreme Being. The Prime Mover. The Creator. The Almighty. The Father. The King of Kings. Shepherd. Potter. Lawgiver. Judge. Mother. Lover. Breath.
The vehicle by which we are moved in passionate spirituality is metaphor. The mechanism of such metaphor is bodily. It is a neural mechanism that recruits our abilities to perceive, to move, to feel, and to envision in the service not only of theoretical and philosophical thought, but of spiritual experience. ~ George Lakoff

I see psychoanalysis, art and biology ultimately coming together, just like cognitive psychology and neuroscience have merged. ~ Eric Kandel

Owing to the imperfection of language the offspring is termed a new animal, but it is in truth a branch or elongation of the parent; since a part of the embryon-animal is, or was, a part of the parent; and therefore in strict language it cannot be said to be entirely new at the time of its production; and therefore it may retain some of the habits of the parent-system. (1794) ~ Erasmus Darwin

Christ did not come to civilize. He came to save. Civilization is not the solution; it does not destroy the works of the devil. All civilization aims at world improvement, at the gradual elimination of the curse; it is a process of evolution. It is like a man who is suffering from a terrible disease, and the physician who comes to help him gives him a salve to apply. He treats the skin symptoms but the source of the disease he never considers and never touches. Such is a boasted and progressive civilization. It is a delusion. ~ Arno C. Gaebelein

Meditation is the study of making the mind still. As your mind becomes still, a power enters you. This power transmogrifies your mind, it escalates your evolution and you begin to cycle through many incarnations in one lifetime. ~ Frederick Lenz

If you have the time to give time some time, won't be a time that you will curse the time. ~ Soman Gouda

Spiritual evolution occurs as the result of removing obstacles and not actually acquiring anything new. ~ David R. Hawkins

Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we - we were the flukes and the fossils. We ~ Peter Watts

The fact - not theory - that evolution has occurred and the Darwinian theory as to how it occurred have become so confused in popular opinion that the distinction must be stressed. ~ George Gaylord Simpson

Among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilisation ... there has been only one - the triumph of Christianity - that can be called in the fullest sense a "revolution": a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity's prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as to actually have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good. ~ David Bentley Hart

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 and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process. ~ William A. Dembski

We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution. ~ Bill Hicks

Basically, attention follows attachment. The stronger the attachment, the easier it is to secure the child's attention. When attachment is weak, the attention of the child will be correspondingly difficult to engage. One of the telltale signs of a child who isn't paying attention is a parent having continually to raise his voice or repeat things. Some of our most persistent demands as parents have to do with their attention: "Listen to me," "Look at me when I'm talking," "Now look here," "What did I just say?" or most simply, "Pay attention."

When children become peer-oriented, their attention instinctively turns toward peers. It goes against the natural instincts of a peer-oriented child to attend to parents or teachers. The sounds emanating from adults are regarded by the child's attention mechanisms as so much noise and interference, lacking in meaning and relevance to the attachment needs that dominate his emotional life. Peer orientation creates deficits in the child's attention to adults because adults are not top priority in the attention hierarchy of peer-oriented children.

It is no accident that attention deficit disorder was initially considered a school problem, a child's failing to pay attention to the teacher. It is also no accident that the explosion in the number of diagnosed cases of attention deficit disorder has paralleled the evolution of peer orientation in our society and is worse where peer orientation is most predominant - urba ~ Gabor Mate

Play begins as a major feature of mammalian evolution and remains as a major method of becoming reconciled with our present universe. ~ Brian Sutton-Smith