Brain Evolution Quotes

#1. In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.

Arthur Koestler

#2. Throughout the evolution of mankind our very much primordial ancestors had one thing in common, it was ignorance. This ignorance gave birth to fear. Fear of the unknown became a quintessential element of their daily survival. To ace the intensity of the fear, rituals of worship arose.

Abhijit Naskar

#3. Man is still at the learning stage, and mankind is so arrogant to think that he's the highest form of evolution on earth. There's so much of the brain that we still don't use, and that's all I ever try to do - go to the next level

Marilyn Manson

#4. MacLean has shown that the R-complex plays an important role in aggressive behavior, territoriality, ritual and the establishment of social hierarchies. Despite occasional welcome exceptions, this seems to me to characterize a great deal of modern human bureaucratic and political behavior.

Carl Sagan

#5. Such a social-media environment; it is merely the most recent and most efficient way that humans have found to scratch a prehistoric itch. The compelling nature of social media, then, can be traced back in part to the evolution of the social brain, as

Tom Standage

#6. The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed.

William James

#7. Those mothers with hereditary large pelvises were able to bear large-brained babies who because of their superior intelligence were able to compete successfully in adulthood with the smaller-brained offspring of mothers with smaller pelvises.

Carl Sagan

#8. The human brain is still undergoing rapid adaptive evolution,.

Howard Hughes

#9. Don't we introduce time as a means of becoming more evolved? The brain has evolved but is there evolution inwardly? Can the brain dominated by time not be subservient to it?

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#10. If organs as elemental as brain and heart can be persuaded to regenerate, and others, like ears and corneas, can be fashioned from living ink, how will that change us as a species? Will the printing of organs affect our evolution? Could it alter our genes?

Diane Ackerman

#11. The complex organic device that creates and thereafter drives consciousness, is the human brain. Consciousness evolved hand in hand with the evolution of the human brain throughout a time span of six million years.

Abhijit Naskar

#12. The evolution of the brain is directly proportionate to the evolution of humanity. Only when the brain has collected enough data about war, will it move on to collate information about love.

Craig Stone

#13. The brain rewards us for interacting with beautiful things. In this way, evolution wants to encourage us to do what is good for us.

Frank Wilczek

#14. It is not a pumping-in from the outside that gives wisdom; it is the power and extent of your inner receptivity that determines how much you can attain of true knowledge, and how rapidly. You can quicken your evolution by awakening and increasing the receptive power of your brain cells.

Paramahansa Yogananda

#15. People believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance.

Mark Haddon

#16. Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of nature.

Carl Sagan

#17. It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones.

Carl Sagan

#18. Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.

Tom Robbins

#19. Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain.

Corneliu E Giurgea

#20. There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.

Richard Dawkins

#21. I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

Kurt Vonnegut

#22. The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea).

Michael Shermer

#23. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or 'modules') for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs.

Richard Dawkins

#24. In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.

Stanislaw Ulam

#25. The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.

Carl Jung

#26. It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored.

Stephen Batchelor

#27. Some evidence suggests the left-handers are more likely to have problems with such left-hemisphere functions as reading, writing, speaking and arithmetic; and to be more adept at such right -hemisphere functions as imagination, pattern recognition and general creativity.

Carl Sagan

#28. I've always been fascinated with adrenaline; it's saved my life more than once, and it's caused me to need it to save my life more than once. One of the most fascinating responses in human evolution, adrenaline sharpens your brain; it sharpens your responses.

Craig Venter

#29. The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit.

Michael Foley

#30. When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.

Antonio Damasio

#31. Perhaps the locale of the subjunctive mood will
one day be found. Will Latins turn out to be extravagantly endowed and English-speaking peoples significantly short-changed in this minor piece of brain anatomy?

Carl Sagan

#32. As the neo-cortex of the brain keeps getting more complex through further evolution, eventually our far away progeny will born in a world where there will be no more religion to be endowed upon them.

Abhijit Naskar

#33. If (early humans) weren't using and refining language I would like to know what they were doing with their autocatalytically increasing brains.

Dean Falk

#34. The brain is the great factory of thought. To it are directed all the forces of nature, forces which, for thousands of years, have been expending themselves upon it and impressing on it a slow and continuous motion of evolution.

Leonardo Bianchi

#35. Chosen are those artists who penetrate to the region of that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution. There, where the powerhouse of all time and space call it brain or heart of creation activates every function, who is the artist who would not dwell there?

Paul Klee

#36. Our present intricate humanly consciousness evolved after a long journey of struggle. And the beauty of natural selection is that our struggle against nature made us worthy of being rewarded with the 3 lbs. lump of highly advanced biological computer by our Mother Nature herself.

Abhijit Naskar

#37. If you look at the evolution of the brain, the logic centers, they were growing at the same time as the creative centers were expanding. And that creates this really potent illusion that you're not just a bag of chemicals reacting to shit. Which is what you are.

Tim Cannon

#38. It is interesting that it is not the getting of any sort of knowledge that God has forbidden, but, specifically, the knowledge of the difference between good and evil-that is, abstract and moral judgments, which, if they reside anywhere, reside in the neocortex.

Carl Sagan

#39. Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution

Steven Pinker

#40. The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.

Arthur Koestler

#41. If evolution is true, you could not know that it's true because your brain is nothing but chemicals. Think about that.

Kent Hovind

#42. Many humans make the mistake of fighting for race when it's the species driving our genes. And there is only one weapon to fight for species: the brain.

Anthony Marais

#43. Our primate ancestors was the development of a larger cerebral cortex as well as the development of increased volume of gray-matter tissue in certain regions of the brain.32 This change occurred, however, on the very slow timescale of biological evolution and still involves an inherent

Ray Kurzweil

#44. Plasticity is an intrinsic property of the human brain and represents evolution's invention to enable the nervous system to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences.

Philippa Perry