Survival Value Quotes

For the person and for the species love is the form of behavior having the highest survival value.

If you can't eat it, can't sleep under it, can't wear it or make something from it, it's not worth anything.

It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.

We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.

Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.

Survival is not important. What matters is how you survive.

The arts, like language, emerged spontaneously and universally in similar forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that had clear survival value.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.

Seventy is wormwood, Seventy is gall But its better to be seventy, Than not alive at all.

Music has got to be useful for survival, or we would have gotten rid of it years ago.

Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.

A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.

Exploration is an oft-lauded human activity, and one that resonates in the same way that music and good stories do. It's hard-wired into our species (and into many others), no doubt because it has survival value. Exploration occasionally rewards those who accept its risks, usually with new resources.

Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.

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

I could easily believe that religion could enhance health and hence survival, and that therefore there could be indeed be literally Darwinian survival value, Darwinian selection in favor of religion. None of that of course bears at all upon the truth value of the claims made by religions.

In fact, one of the arguments for searching for intelligent life in space, elsewhere, is that we have no evidence that intelligence has any survival value. The most successful creatures on this planet are the cockroaches. They've been around, what is it, 100 million years or so and I suspect they'll still be there 100 million years in the future. Maybe intelligence is an evolutionary aberration which dooms its possessors in the way armor may have doomed some of the dinosaurs.