Quotes About Evolutionary Psychology

#1. Evolutionary psychology has often been a field whose most prominent practitioners get embroiled in controversy - witness the 2010 case of Harvard professor Marc Hauser, whose graduate students came forward to say he'd been faking evidence for years.

Annalee Newitz

#2. There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

Steven Pinker

#3. One reasonable reaction to evolutionary psychology is a self-consciousness so acute, and a cynicism so deep, that ironic detachment from the whole human enterprise may provide the only relief.

Robert Wright

#4. Evolutionary psychology tells us that men, especially powerful men, feel invincible and entitled to spread their seed, and that women can't resist the scent of masculine power. Women, by contrast, are said to be more altruistic and collaborative, seeking power so that they can share it with others.

Hanna Rosin

#5. I can't think of anyone who is up on evolutionary psychology and related areas who is deluded enough to be called a utopian.

Keith Henson

#6. Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.

Steven Pinker

#7. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha have written the essential corrective to the evolutionary psychology literature ...

Stanton Peele

#8. I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.

Will Self

#9. Our evolutionary psychology preconditions us not to respond to threats which can be postponed until later.

Mark Lynas

#10. We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

Jack Gilbert

#11. Males of all species are made for wooing females, and females typically choose among their suitors.

Abhijit Naskar

#12. Litterature provides us with the opportunity to escape into fictional worlds that are ultimately rooted in human universals shaped by common biological forces.

Gad Saad

#13. The sages may have been self-serving, like the rest of us, but that doesn't mean they weren't sages.

Robert Wright

#14. Fear or anxiety is a normal part of living. It's the body's way of telling us something isn't right. It keeps us from harm's way and prepares us to act quickly in the face of danger.

Abhijit Naskar

#15. Now I know I am done. Now I know She is done.

~ Aarush Kashyap

Kirtida Gautam

#16. Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek - why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.

Steven Pinker

#17. It's easy to tell the evolutionary level of a group of beings, or an individual being, simply by examining their behavior, their art, their psychology, their thought forms, their lingual structures, their history, their present moment, their future ideas, and the quality of their emotions.

Frederick Lenz

#18. Sometimes, humanity surprises me with all its lack of control over the primordial urges. These innate urges are the biological traits that make us similar to the rest of the animal kingdom. But the modern qualities that make us superior to all the animals are intellect and self-control.

Abhijit Naskar

#19. When it is time for religion to vanish from the face of earth upon having finished its service of psychological reinforcement to humanity, Mother Nature will make that happen one way or another.

Abhijit Naskar

#20. People may chuckle appreciatively at a male turkey that tries to mate with a poor rendition of a female's [suspended] head, but if you then point out that many a human male regularly gets aroused after looking at two-dimensional representations of a nude woman, they don't see the connection.

Robert Wright

#21. If I want to know how we learn and remember and represent the world, I will go to psychology and neuroscience. If I want to know where values come from, I will go to evolutionary biology and neuroscience and psychology, just as Aristotle and Hume would have, were they alive.

Patricia Churchland

#22. We humans are the gods of this planet. And we also have created Superior Gods than us, to have a sense of security.

Abhijit Naskar

#23. Computation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal.

Steven Pinker

#24. The two centrepieces of social intelligence are the possession of extensive social knowledge about other individuals, in terms of knowing who allies and friends are, and the ability to infer the mental states of those individuals.

Steven Mithen

#25. Evolutionarily speaking, love is all about procreation.

Abhijit Naskar

#26. What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.

Robert Charles Wilson

#27. Faith is a natural evolutionary trait of the human mind, selected by Mother Nature as an internal coping-mechanism.

Abhijit Naskar

#28. Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice.
The Nature of Emotions (2001)

Robert Plutchik

#29. Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.

Peter Singer

#30. Regardless of all our pretenses, deep within, we are still unconsciously the same old cave-people.

Abhijit Naskar

#31. There is more to the human mind than its evolutionary heritage.

Kenan Malik

#32. The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt ... ," but "If ... then ... else.

Steven Pinker

#33. Aggression, rage and violence are archetypal foundations of manhood.

Abhijit Naskar

#34. Fear, anxiety, stress and panic, all these are basic evolutionary expression of the human brain. They are part of the normal human condition.

Abhijit Naskar