35 quotes
We build theologies around violence, elect leaders who excel at it, and in the case of so many women, preferentially mate with champions of human combat. When it’s the "right" type of aggression, we love it.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)
Ecosystems majorly shape culture — but then that culture can be exported and persist in radically different places for millennia. Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017)
When you study science, and especially these realms of the biology of what makes us human, what's clear is that every time you find out something, that brings up ten new questions, and half of those are better questions than you started with.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
What's the punch line here? Physiologically, it doesn't come cheap being a bastard 24 hours a day.
Stress, Neurodegeneration and Individual Differences (2001)
There is a need for this subtype — but not too many.
The critical thing with schizotypal shamanism is, it is not uncontrolled the way it is in the schizophrenic.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
I think it will require an enormous reshaping of how we think we deal with the most damaging of human behaviours, because none of it can be thought of outside the context of biology.
The Neuroscience Behind Behavior (2017)
Shamans are not evolutionarily unfit.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Why do we have schizophrenia in every culture on this planet? From an evolutionary perspective, schizophrenia is not a cool thing to have. ... Schizophrenia is not an adaptive trait.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
The amazing thing is, nobody knows what the rules are! Talmudic rabbis have been scratching each others' eyes out for centuries arguing over which rules go into the 613. The numbers are more important than the content.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
I want to wean people off the knee-jerk reaction to the notion that without free will, we will run amok because we can’t be held responsible for things. That we have no societal mechanisms for having dangerous people not be dangerous, or for having gifted people do the things society needs to function. It’s not the case that in a deterministic world, nothing can change.
The ones who I train to become scientists go at it like the warriors they should be, overturning existing knowledge and reigning paradigms, each discovery a murder of their scientific ancestors. And if I have trained them well, I must derive whatever satisfaction I can from the inevitability of becoming their Oedipal target someday.
The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997)
This is a classic case of what is often called physics envy, the disease among scientists where the behavioral biologists fear their discipline lacks the rigor of physiology, the physiologists wish for the techniques of the biochemists, the biochemists covet the clarity of the answers revealed by molecular biologists, all the way down the down until you get to the physicists, who confer only with God.
The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997)
The purpose of science in understanding who we are as humans is not to rob us of our sense of mystery, not to cure us of our sense of mystery. The purpose of science is to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate that mystery.
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
We are a fine species with some potential. Yet we are racked by sickening amounts of violence. Unless we are hermits, we feel the threat of it, often as a daily shadow. And regardless of where we hide, should our leaders push the button, we will all be lost in a final global violence.
The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (1997)