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"Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that "animals try to spread their genes. That misstates the facts and it misstates the theory. Animals, including most people, know nothing about genetics and care even less. People love their children not because they want to spread their genes (consciously or unconsciously) but because they can't help it. That love makes them try to keep their children warm, fed, and safe. What is selfish is not the real motives of the person but the metaphorical motives of the genes that built the person. Genes "try to spread themselves by wiring animals' brains so the animals love their kin and try to keep warm, fed, and safe."
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Explore more quotes by Steven Pinker
"The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call "self-help."
"My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries."
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"The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned."
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"Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs."
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