Annalee Newitz Quotes

The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.

Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

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

I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by evolution than anything else.

The explanatory power of evolutionary psychology is limitless!

Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environmen.

Sometimes things can take a very long time and still not be very good. It took us all of evolutionary history just to get where we are today, for instance, and mostly where we are today is on the couch.

I'm the product of 6 million years of evolution? Come on, man. I crawled out of a swamp yesterday.

Evolution isn't just a take-it-or-leave-it story about where we came from. It's an epic at the centre of life itself. It tells us we are part of nature in every respect.

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?'

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

Already at the origin of the species man was equal to what he was destined to become.

So we can't go backwards, we can only go where the evolutionary trajectory is taking us and attune our ideas about ourselves and our existence to that course.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

As humans become civilized, the survival rate of the lazy, botched and dim-witted grow in inverse proportion to the productive segment since nature can no longer remove them from the species.

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

… the action of natural selection upon Man has ... been essentially diminished through the operation of social conditions

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

Evolutionary psychology offers a parsimonious framework for understanding which domains are likely to yield sex differences and, if so, in which direction.

Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!

Obviously it depends on how you define a word like "evolution," because of course we have been evolving - both biologically and culturally - in relation to the natural world for hundreds of thousands of years.

People are still very uncomfortable with the idea that humans are not specially created species. I believe we are a fantastic species. But we are not created specially. That's very hard for people to accept in their day-to-day routine.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.

Apart from anything else, I am designed by evolution, like we all are: if we see a little thing like that, big eyes, tiny nose, we go 'aaah'. That's what evolution does. We are programmed to do that. So to find babies the most amazing, isn't surprising, I don't think.