Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

Man is a predatory animal, and this aspect of his nature is nowhere better suited by environment than in the world of politics.

Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger's life to be a total head-scratcher.

I say you don't need religion, or political ideology, to understand human nature. Science reveals that human nature is greedy and selfish, altruistic and helpful.

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?'

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

Selective memory is surely one of nature's most effective ways of ensuring the survival of our species.

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

I think the default position of humans is to be terrible, and we have to train it out of our children. That's just part of survival, right? Predator animals don't survive by being nice; humans are basically predator animals.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race.

As humans, we have evolved to compete... it is in our genes, and we love to watch a competition.

Because I believe that humans are computers, I conjectured that computers, like people, can have left- and right-handed versions.

Human nature is such that people are born with a love of profit If they follow these inclinations, they will struggle and snatch from each other, and inclinations to defer or yield will die.

Natural selection shaped the human brain to be drawn toward aspects of nature that enhance our survival and reproduction, like verdant landscapes and docile creatures. There is no payoff to getting the warm fuzzies in the presence of rats, snakes, mosquitoes, cockroaches, herpes simplex and the rabies virus.

I think that genetically we're programmed to battle each other.

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

No matter how civilized we are and how much society has curbed violent behavior. Human beings still have the same genes they had 10,000 years ago. Our bodies are designed to have a certain amount of physical stress and violence in them. We're designed to run from jaguars and fight to defend our territory.

Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.

Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating. It means nothing.

It is actually the neuroscientists and evolutionists who do the best job of explaining the reasons behind the most unreasonable behavior.

Without game, men prey on each other.

If a cat does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can't be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.