40 quotes found
"In a strange way, Marcion understood the situation better than the more conventional followers of the church, for Lucifer is merely one of the faces of a larger force. Evil is a by-product, a component, of creation."
"From our best qualities come our worst. From our urge to pull together comes our tendency to pull apart. From our devotion to higher good comes our propensity to the foulest atrocities. From our commitment to ideals come our excuse to hate. Since the beginning of history, we have been blinded by evil's ability to don a selfless disguise. We have failed to see that our finest qualities often lead us to the actions we most abhor—murder, torture, genocide, and war."
"We must build a picture of the human soul that works. ...a recognition that the enemy is within us and that Nature has placed it there. ...for a reason. And we must understand that reason to outwit her."
"Men and animals do not merely struggle to maintain their individual existence; they are members of larger social groups. And, all too often, it is the social unit, not the individual, whose survival comes first."
"The greatest human evils are not those that individuals perform in private, the tiny transgressions against some arbitrary social standard we call sins. The ultimate evils are the mass murders that occur in revolution and war, the large-scale savageries that arise when one agglomeration of humans tries to dominate another: the deeds of the social group. ...only group efforts can save us from the sporadic insanities of the group."
"In our preoccupations with sex, our submission to gods and leaders, our sometimes suicidal commitment to ideas, religions, and trivial details of cultural style, we become the unconscious creators of the social organism's exploits."
"Primordial communities of bacteria were elaborately interwoven by communication links. ...These turned a colony into a collective processor... The resulting learning machine was so ingenious that Eshel Ben-Jacob has called its modern bacterial counterpart a "creative web.""
"The microbial brain—gifted with long-range transport, data trading, genetic variants... and the ability to reinvent genomes—began its operations some 91 trillion bacterial generations before the birth of the Internet. Ancient bacteria, if they functioned like those today, had mastered the art of worldwide information exchange. ...The earliest microorganisms would have used planet-sweeping currents of wind and water to carry the scraps of genetic code..."
"The notion that individualism came first runs against the very grain of cosmic history. ...grouping has been inherent in evolution since the first quarks joined to form neutrons and protons. Similarly, replicators—RNA, DNA, and genes—have always worked in teams... The bacteria of 3.5 billion years ago were creatures of the crowd. So were the trilobites and echinoderms of the Cambrian age."
"If entemologists have things backward, their errors have spawned a host of others central to modern evolutionary science. ...E. O. Wilson is... the founder of a rich and fruitful discipline—sociobiology. And sociobiology has... helped lay the groundwork for the dogma of the "selfish gene.""
"A collective learning machine achieves its feats by using five elements... (1) conformity enforcers; (2) diversity generators; (3) inner-judges; (4) resource shifters; and (5) intergroup tournaments."
"By 1999, over 880 studies suggested that some mutations might... be genetic alterations "custom tailored" to overcome emergencies."
"When Richard Dawkins first published his idea of a meme, he made it clear he was speaking of "a unit of imitation"… Memes were supposed to be exclusive triumphs of humanity. But memes come in two different kinds—behavioral and verbal. ...behavioral memes began brain-hopping long before there were such things as human minds."
"In the Vienna of the late 1020s and 1930s there throve an internationally famous philosophical bunch called the logical positivists. ...They said that a key ingredient of knowledge was "sense data," and proclaimed emphatically, in the words of... J.S.L. Gilmour, that sense data are "objective and unalterable." …Good guess, but no cigar!"
"Reality is a fabrication slapped together by an often bumbling inner team. ...The proclamation that "there can be no such thing as an objective fact" has a great deal of validity."
"Individual perception untainted by others' influence does not exist."
"Almost every reality you "know" at any given second is a mere ghost held in memory."
"Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. Some are those of childhood authorities and heroes; others come from family and peers. The strangest emerge from beyond the grave."
"The ultimate repository of herd influence is language—a device which not only condenses the opinions of those with whom we share a common vocabulary, but sums up the perceptual approach of swarms who have passed on."
"Through our sentences and paragraphs long-gone ghosts still have their say within the collective mind."
"Remember a networked learning machine's most basic rule: strengthen the connections to those who succeed, weaken them to those who fail."
"Sociological researchers maintain a mask of objectivity. But... when students in these movements report facts that contradict the tenets of their group's creed, they are... punished for their heresy. ...forcing them "to leave the movement." A similar mechanism of repression is at work in every scientific discipline that I know."
"Humor is a conformity enforcer clothed in the garb of congeniality. It focuses on others' weaknesses, disasters, stupiidities, and abnormalities."
"By the nineteenth century... new circumstances called for new conformity enforcers... The government locked you in a house of penitence—a penetentiary—where your feelings of remorse would theoretically pummel you without cease."
"Conformity-enforcing packs of viscious children and adults gradually shape the social complexes we know as religion, science, corporations, ethnic groups, and even nations. The tools of our cohesion include ridicule, rejection, snobbery, self-righteousness, assault, torture, and death by stoning, lethal injection, or the noose. A collective brain may sound warm and fuzzily New Age, but one force lashing it together is abuse."
"The first two rules of science are: 1. The truth at any price including the price of your life. 2. Look at things right under your nose as if you've never seen them before, then proceed from there."
"When you and I were born, only one thing was certain about the rest of our lives: that you and I would someday die. Just as a trillion, trillion, trillion (1036) microorganisms, animals and plants have died before us. ...A God who slaughters is no God at all. Or if he is... He is a God who must be stopped."
"One plus one does not equal two."
"The real core of communication is what information theory's founder, Claude Shannon calls "meaning." And meaning is not covered in information theory."
"When you repeat an old pattern in a new location, you sometimes make something new."
"From a few basic rules you can generate a cosmos."
"Opposites work together in the very opposite of the way they seem... They work together in teams."
"If A is A, a philosopher should equal a philosopher. But that's not the way the cosmos works. Similar things set themselves apart from one another. ...What's more, opposites are joined at the hip. Einstein says that most creative acts come from opposition. They come from pitting yourself against someone with another point of view. They come from the law of differentiation. And that was true of Aristotle and his law of identity, his law of noncontradiction, his construction for the base for A is A. Aristotle came up with his idea... to fling a finger in the face of another philosopher [Heraclitus]..."
"The "most extreme" followers of Heraclitus said that it is impossible to fix a name to anything."
"A does not equal A because of location. For example, location in time."
"Is A=A useful? Does logic come in handy? Is math a magnificent symbolic system with which to comprehend what's around us? And is math based on A=A? Yes. Absolutely. But math and logic are... very, very simplified representations."
"Aristotle and Heraclitus were both right. A equals A. But A does not equal A."
"Where did the second law of thermodynamics come from? ...The steam engine. ...The cosmos is not a steam engine."
"The particles of this cosmos rock and roll to their own self-generated beat. They defy the rules of arithmetic. Protons plus neutrons... equals music. Is this harmony... entropy? ...No. ...it's social behavior ...riddled with form. And it's so antientropic that those in the scientific world who are trying desparately to rescue entropy... call it "negentropy." …Entropy is a very big assumption."
"His experience "at the center of our culture's mythmaking machinery" may have taught him more about human nature than a university career. Perhaps we should regard him as an anthropologist who has spent many years observing a strange tribe—us."