“Although we suffer from many of our ancestors' bad habits, they also e...” — William Von Hippel Quote

“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.”

“Çayırlardan Google'a geçişimiz kuşkusuz epey şiddetli ve son derece verimsiz oldu, ama evrimin doğası da tam olarak böyledir. Bu dünyada devamlı olarak değişimler gerçekleşir ve hayat buna ya uyum sağlar ya da yok olur. Doğrusu, 66 milyon yıl önce devasa bir göktaşı Dünya gezegenini ıskalamış olsaydı insanlar muhtemelen evrimleşmezdi. Meksika Körfezi'ne çarpan ve küresel ateş fırtınalarına ve iklim değişikliğine yol açan bu uzay çöpü 100 milyon yıldan uzun bir süre boyunca gezegenimize hükmetmiş devasa avcıları ortadan kaldırmıştı.”

“When children earn stickers or candies by working as a team, they withhold their goodies from children who didn't help but share with children who did. This might not seem very friendly—it might even seem like behavior you should correct: sharing is caring after all—but from an evolutionary standpoint, it's mission critical.”

“The contents of our mind are a product of our genes, our environment, and our personal choice. Our genes nudge us in certain directions—sometimes this nudge might more aptly be described as a shove—but we make the decisions that determine the trajectory of our lives.”

“You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison.”

“If you ignore science, you cannot call yourself a New Age philosopher, because science is available to you as a tool to understand this world.”

“Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators representing, as they think, the conscience of science act much like those legislators who in 1925 prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. In that case, anti-evolutionists were fearful that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. Today, pro-evolutionists are fearful that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter insufficient confidence in science. The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.”

“Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did.”