37 quotes
The rules followed are tight enough to produce a broad overlap in the decisions taken by all individuals and hence a convergence powerful enough to be labelled human nature.
On Human Nature (1978)
The genius of human society is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute.
On Human Nature (1978)
In early history phobias might have provided the extra margin needed to insure survival...
On Human Nature (1978)
Cultural change is the statistical product of the separate behavioral responses of large numbers of human beings who cope as best they can with social existence.
On Human Nature (1978)
Although the capacity to become schizophrenic may well be within all of us, there is no question that certain persons have distinctive genes predisposing them to the condition.
On Human Nature (1978)
There is no such thing as a typically "schizophrenogenic" (schizophrenia-producing) family arrangement, one most likely to produce a mentally ill adult from a child with the potential for the disease.
On Human Nature (1978)
At the apogee of the state's evolution, architecture was monumental, and the ruling class were exalted as a pseudospecies. The sacred rites of statehood became the central focus of religion.
On Human Nature (1978)
The channels of human mental development... are circuitous and variable. Rather than specify a single trait, human genes prescribe the capacity to develop a certain array of traits.
On Human Nature (1978)
Evidence has... been adduced that schizophrenia is widespread in other kinds of human societies. ...and they form a substantial fraction of the clientele of the tribal shamans and healers.
On Human Nature (1978)
Because it is... far slower than Lamarckian evolution, biological evolution is always quickly outrun by cultural change.
On Human Nature (1978)
Genetic determinism... On its interpretation depends the entire relation between biology and the social sciences.
On Human Nature (1978)
The theory of population genetics and experiments on other organisms show that substantial changes can occur in the span of less than 100 generations, which for man reaches back to the time of the Roman Empire.
On Human Nature (1978)
The three extreme kinds of schizophrenia are unmistakable: the haunted paranoid surrounded by his imaginary community of spies and assassins, the clownish, sometimes incontinent hebephrenic, and the frozen catatonic.
On Human Nature (1978)
Are human beings innately aggressive? ...The answer to it is yes. ...Only by redefining the words "innateness" and "aggression" to the point of uselessness might we correctly say that human aggressiveness is not innate.
On Human Nature (1978)
The only other mammalian carnivores that take outsized prey are lions, hyenas, wolves, and African wild dogs. Each... has an exceptionally advanced social life, prominently featuring the pursuit of prey in coordinated packs.
On Human Nature (1978)
Because the brain can be guided by rational calculation only in a limited degree, it must fall back on the nuances of pleasure and pain mediated by the limbic system and other lower centers of the brain.
On Human Nature (1978)
Daily life is a compromised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined, as Erving Goffman observes. ...Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism, and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence.
On Human Nature (1978)