Best Evolutionary Psychology Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, "Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.”

“Although we suffer from many of our ancestors' bad habits, they also evolved a motivational system that continues to reward us when we get it right. This is happiness.”

“We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favour and we persuaded ourselves along the way. Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed societal strategy. We're descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half truths who in order to convince others, simultaneously convinced themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track – when it didn't suit us we couldn't agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. That's why there are divorces, border disputes and wars, and why the statue of the Virgin Mary weeps blood and the one of Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and science were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature. Disinterested truth. But it couldn't save us from ourselves, the ruts were too deep. There could be no private redemption in objectivity.”

“Violence is a social and political problem, not just a biological and psychological one. Nonetheless, the phenomena we call ‘social’ and ‘political’ are not external happenings that mysteriously affect human affairs… they are shared understandings among individuals at a given time and place.”