41 quotes
Natural selection has designed all parts of our bodies to last just long enough to see our children into independence, no more.
Genome (1999)
In other words, a record of our past is etched into our genes.
Genome (1999)
But the astonishing result (of IQ testing) is the correlation between the scores of adopted children reared together: zero. Being in the same family has no discernible effect on IQ at all.
Genome (1999)
At its birth eugenics was not a politicised science; it was a science-ised political creed.
Genome (1999)
The politicisation of the issue has had absurd results.
Genome (1999)
Genes do indeed behave as if they have selfish goals, not consciously, but retrospectively: genes that behave in this way thrive and genes that don’t don’t.
Genome (1999)
Just as we underestimate the degree to which human brains rely upon instincts, so we have generally underestimated the degree to which other animals are capable of learning.
Genome (1999)
Sexual relations are driven not by what is good, in evolutionary terms, for men or for women, but for their chromosomes. The ability to seduce a woman was good for Y chromosomes in the past; the ability to resist seduction by a man was good for X chromosomes in the past.
Genome (1999)
Judges were never very good at science.
Genome (1999)
The subject of learning lies in the provinces of neuroscience and psychology. It is the opposite of instinct. Instinct is generically-determined behaviour; learning is behaviour modified by experience.
Genome (1999)
Freedom lies in expressing your own determinism, not somebody else’s. It is not the determinism that makes a difference, but the ownership. If freedom is what we prefer, then it is preferable to be determined by forces that originate in ourselves and not in others.
Genome (1999)
The evolutionary implication is that we are descended from a common ancestor with flies which used the same way of defining the pattern of the embryo more than 530 million years ago, and that the mechanism was so good that all this dead creature’s descendants have hung on to it.
Genome (1999)
Human beings are of course unique. They have, perched between their ears, the most complicated biological machine on the planet. But complexity is not everything, and it is not the goal of evolution. Every species on the planet is unique. Uniqueness is a commodity in oversupply.
Genome (1999)
It was this division of labour among specialists, unique to our species, that was the key to our ecological success, because it allowed the growth of technology.
Genome (1999)
This led to a neat generalization, which is so tidy it ought to be true and probably would be if physicists ran the world: every animal has roughly the same number of heartbeats per lifetime. An elephant lives longer than a mouse, but its pulse rate is so much slower that, measured in heartbeats, they both live lives of the same length.
Genome (1999)
In Sigmund Freud’s psychology, John Watson’s behaviourism and Margaret Mead’s anthropology, nurture-determinism by parents was never tested, only assumed. Yet the evidence, from twin studies, from the children of immigrants and from adoption studies, is now staring us in the face: people get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not from their parents.
Genome (1999)
The genome is littered, one might almost say clogged, with the equivalent of computer viruses, selfish, parasitic stretches of letters which exist for the pure and simple reason that they are good at getting themselves duplicated. We are full of digital chain letters and warnings about marmalade.
Genome (1999)
Full responsibility for one’s actions is a necessary fiction without which the law would flounder, but it is a fiction all the same. To the extent that you act in character you are responsible for your actions; yet acting in character is merely expressing the many determinisms that caused your character.
Genome (1999)
The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.
Genome (1999)
There is no bone in the chimpanzee body that I do not share. There is no known chemical in the chimpanzee brain that cannot be found in the human brain. There is no known part of the immune system, the digestive system, the vascular system, the lymph system or the nervous system that we have and chimpanzees do not, or vice versa.
Genome (1999)