Stephen Hawking Quotes

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

The explanatory power of evolutionary psychology is limitless!

It would be really worrying if, as a Darwinian, it was impossible to think of ways in which our behavior could be explained.

The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.

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.

Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.

Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision.

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 think the whole world's going to change, and forget that human beings are still human beings; we have the same five senses, we still interact the same way, we still love and hate the same way, but marketers lose track of that. But then it comes down to earth.

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

Many people, whether religious believers or not, were repelled by the idea that we humans are nothing more special than a species of mammal directly descended from the higher primates, and that we achieved that status by winning a long struggle, shockingly red, as Tennyson famously put it, “in tooth and claw

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

I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.

Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.

[Evolution Theory] is the motivating factor for guys like Hitler and Stalin and George Bush, by the way, who is a Satan worshipper, like we don't know that.

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.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.

Politics is applied biology.

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.

Humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it's unlikely that humans' early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating or the willpower to complete a dissertation.

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

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.