17 quotes
All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
But if it only means "likely to have many descendants," then there is no reason for treating it as an advantage at all.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
Selection does not work by cutthroat competition between individuals, but by favouring whatever behavior is useful to the group.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
They refuse the mere fact of competing, that is, of needing to share out a resource with the motive of competitiveness or readiness to quarrel.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
In a species as emotionally interdependent as man this view of marriage is nonsense. Pair-formation could never have entered anybody's head as a device deliberately designated to promote utility.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
An obsessive creature, constantly dominated by one kind of motive, would not survive.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
And it is in working out these concepts more fully, in trying to extend their usefulness, that moral philosophy begins. Were there no conflict, it [moral philosophy] could never have arisen.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
This would again be like saying that the carburetor had won the race, instead of the car of the driver. Carburators do not even know how to enter races, let alone win them.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
Trying to answer this by collecting information about our own neurones would be no more use than doing it, like the Roman augur, by inspecting the entrails of a goat.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
The trouble with words like "fit" in these discussions is that, if taken in a wide sense they are liable to become vacuous, and if taken more narrowly they easily become tendentious.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
Everybody, including himself is partial in the sense of starting somewhere, of selecting something for emphasis. The fatal thing is not this. It is being confused about ones reasons for doing so.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
Do we find ourselves a species naturally free from conflict? We do not.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
Arguments can always be answered. Moral philosophy, unlike straight moralizing, arises from and trives on plurality of values.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
Every age has its pet contradictions. Thirty years ago we used to accept Marx and Freud together, and then wonder, like the chameleon on the turkey carpet, why life was so confusing.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
(In fact a cost-benefit-conscious gene that really understood its business would, no doubt, have remained on board something like the amoeba; it will probably be amoung the last to go.)
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
"Cognition" cannot be "translated into circuitry." Learning and creativeness cannot be "defined as specific portions of the cognitive machinery." They cannot be because translating and defining are operations performed, not on the mean in any thinker's brain, but on language.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)
Rightly did Darwin pin up a paper warning himself to be careful about using such words as "higher" and "lower." What is downward about the trend that has produced elephants, chimpanzees, wolves, dolphins, and jackdaws by comparison with ants and bees?
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979)