Joseph Franklin Rutherford Quotes

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.

Amongst the minds of animals that of man leads, not as a demigod from another planet, but as a king from the same race.

Humans are an infant species, a mere 150,000 years old. But, armed with a massive brain, we've not only survived, we've used our wits to adapt to and flourish in habitats as varied as deserts, Arctic tundra, tropical rainforests, wetlands and high mountain ranges.

Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man.

I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

Human intelligence may not be the best trick nature has to offer.

I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine.

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

As nature discovered early on, vision is one of the most powerful secret weapons of an intelligent animal to navigate, survive, interact, and change the complex world it lives in.

Intelligence is set by policy.

With highly civilized nations, continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes. Nevertheless the more intelligent members within the same community will succeed better in the long run than the inferior, and leave a more numerous progeny, and this is a form of natural selection.

What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the Earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.

Think about how stupid the average person is and then realize that half of them are stupider than that.

Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness. Only man seems to be endowed with this faculty; he alone develops disinterested intelligence, intelligence that is not primarily concerned with his own safety and well-being but that looks abroad upon things.

What people don't realize is the human body and the brain are so well designed to do - by millions of years of evolution - what we do.

You are just your intelligence.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

If I could have any superpower, I would want hyper-intelligence.

The quantity and quality of consciousness, one may say, have always been growing throughout geological times. In this respect man, in whom nervous organisation and therefore psychological powers have attained an undisputed maximum, may be considered, scientifically, as a natural centre of evolution of the primates.

A computational device is incapable of developing a mind. We got consciousness not just by being clever.

Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.

The most valuable real estate in the world lies between the president's ears.

Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal.