Jonathan Haidt Quotes

Darwinian man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.

My point of view is that men are basically animals, and I'm okay with that.

There is indeed the possibility that the evolutionary process has, in gray antiquity, bred into us an excess of aggression.

Normally for me, it's not interesting. When do you see in the jungle, female fighters fighting each other? I mean it's not human nature.

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.

People are violent by nature. That’s why we rule the earth; we beat the crap out of everyone else.

If there were no Adam and Eve and we’re all evolved from apelike ancestors and there’s homosexuality in the animal world and if Genesis is mythology, then you can justify any behavior you want.

The laws of animality govern almost the whole of history.

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.

Self-preservation, nature's first great law, all the creatures, except man, doth awe.

If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed.

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

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?'

When most of us hear the phrase, 'survival of the fittest,' we assume it originated with Charles Darwin. It did not. The phrase doesn't exist anywhere in Darwin's first edition of 'Origin of the Species.'

Darwin wasn't just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes - he didn't go far enough. We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament.

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

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

Unless one is a religious fundamentalist and believes that man was created in the image and likeness of God, it is foolish to believe that human beings are exempt from biological classification and the laws of evolution that apply to all other life forms.

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.

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.

One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigor of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.

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.

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

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