Joshua Foer Quotes

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

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

I really knew I wanted to be Adam, because Adam was the first man. Ant I chose because, if there's a nuclear explosion, the ants will survive.

Homo Sapiens is a frontier creature. It is what we do; it defines what we are. This has been true from our very beginnings. It is the core reason our progenitors wandered forth from the first primordial valleys in search of more room, better hunting, or more fertile soil.

If you think about evolution, sleep, at some time, was a dangerous undertaking. You lie down in your cave or shelter, and along comes a predator and has you for dinner. Many creatures do not sleep or sleep while standing so they can escape from dangerous situations.

To me it seems that the warm blooded dinosaurs replaced advanced mammal ancestors that were warm blooded, also.

It is part of the fundamental impulse in all living things to reach for light, part of the indomitable will to see.

You and I probably wouldn't be here if our ancestors hadn't been greedy savages.

As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

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.

The law of the survival of the fittest led inevitably to the survival and predominance of the men who were effective in war and who loved it because they were effective.

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

You see, every creature alive on the earth today represents an unbroken line of life that stretches back to the first primitive organism to appear on this planet; and that is about three billion years.

Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.

Photographic memory is often confused with another bizarre - but real - perceptual phenomenon called eidetic memory, which occurs in between 2 and 15 percent of children and very rarely in adults. An eidetic image is essentially a vivid afterimage that lingers in the mind's eye for up to a few minutes before fading away.

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.

Indeed, if our ancestors of millions of years ago hadn't learned how to care for one another and hunt in packs, they'd all have ended up being eaten by leopards.

The mystery is what prompted men to leave caves, to come out of the womb of nature.

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.

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.

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.

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

Nature knows best.

Our retinas and brains have been wired by a hundred million years of evolution to find outlines in a visually complex landscape. This helps us to recognize prey and predators.