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"Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics."
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"The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the generations. [I]t is widely distributed in space among different individuals, and widely distributed in time over many generations. [A] successful gene will be one that does well in the environments provided by these other genes that it is likely to meet in lots of different bodies."
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Personal Development
"Aliens are within the human genes."
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Personal Development
"Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics."
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Personal Development
"During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project."
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Personal Development
"I have all these great genes, but they're recessive. That's the problem here."
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Personal Development
"Don't tell me from genetics. What've they got to do with it?" said Crowley. "Look at Satan. Created as an angel, grows up to be the Great Adversary. Hey, if you're going to go on about genetics, you might as well say the kid will grow up to be an angel. After all, his father was really big in Heaven in the old days. Saying he'll grow up to be a demon just because his dad _became_ one is like saying a mouse with its tail cut off will give birth to tailless mice. No. Upbringing is everything. Take it from me."
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"Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights."
Ethics
"States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one."
History
"Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature."
Art
"Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to be true. You can really understand something when you know what it is not."
Learning
"Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with."
Society
"The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions."
Science
"People today think of the world as a uniquely dangerous place. It’s hard to follow the news without feeling a mounting dread of terrorist attacks, a clash of civilizations, and the use of weapons of mass destruction. But we often forget the dangers that filled the news a few decades ago and become blasé about the good fortune that so many of them have fizzled out."
Awareness
"Can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste?"
Philosophy
"Many people implicitly believe in the Hydraulic Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or thirst for blood), which builds up inside us and must periodically be discharged. Nothing could be further from a contemporary scientific understanding of the psychology of violence. Aggression is not a single motive, let alone a mounting urge. It is the output of several psychological systems that differ in their environmental triggers, their internal logic, their neurobiological basis, and their social distribution."
Science
"I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis."
Science
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