Journalists From England

"Sexual selection theory suggests that much of the behavior and some of the appearance of an animal is adapted not to help it survive but to help it to acquire the best or the most mates."

"The process of choosing somebody to have sex with, which used to be known as falling in love, is mysterious, cerebral, and highly selective."

"The sex that invests the least has time to spare to seek other mates. Therefore, broadly speaking, males invest less and seek quantity of mates, while females invest more and seek quality of mates."

"In species where the females get nothing useful from their mates, they seem to choose on aesthetic criteria alone."

"As every bird-watcher knows, the beauty of a bird’s song is inversely correlated with the colorfulness of its plumage."

"Parasites invent new keys; hosts change the locks. There is an obvious group-selectionist argument here for sex: At any one time a sexual species will have lots of different locks; members of an asexual one will all have the same locks. So the parasite with the right key will quickly exterminate the asexual species but not the sexual one. Hence the well-known fact: By turning our fields over to monocultures of increasingly inbred strains of wheat and maize, we are inviting the very epidemics of disease that can only be fought by the pesticides we are forced to use in ever larger quantities."

"Sex keeps the parasite guessing."

"A gene is by definition the descendant of a gene that was good at getting into future generations."

"The longer your generation time, the more genetic mixing you need to combat your parasites."

"Wherever you look in the historical record, the elites favored sons more than other classes….Lower down the social scale, daughters are preferred even today."

"Computer viruses have since become a worldwide problem. It begins to look as if parasites are inevitable in any system of life."

"Such “habituation” is just a property of the way brains work; our senses, and those of grackles, notice novelty and change, not steady states. The female preference did not evolve: it just is that way."

"He (Thomas Ray) had discovered that the notion of a host-parasite arms race is one of the most basic and unavoidable consequences of evolution."

"Evolving is not a goal but a means to solving a problem."

"Psychologists sometimes wonder why people are endowed with the ability to learn the part of Hamlet or understand calculus when neither skill was of much use to mankind in the primitive conditions where his intellect was shaped. Einstein would probably have been as hopeless as anybody in working out how to catch a woolly rhinoceros. Nicholas Humphrey, a Cambridge psychologist, was the first to see clearly the solution to this puzzle. We use our intellects not to solve practical problems, but to outwit each other. Deceiving people, detecting deceit, understanding people’s motives, manipulating people—these are what the intellect is used for. So what matters is not how clever and crafty you are, but how much cleverer and craftier than other people. The value of intellect is infinite. Selection within the species is always going to be more important than selection between the species."

"But as we shall see, the appearance is misleading. Animal altruism is a myth. Even in the most spectacular cases of selflessness it turns out that animals are serving the selfies interests of their own genes—if sometimes being careless with their bodies."

"Evolution is something that happens to organisms. It is a directionless process that sometimes make’s an animal’s descendants more complicated, sometimes simpler, and sometimes changes them not at all. We are so steeped in notions of progress and self-improvement that we find it strangely hard to accept this. But nobody has told the coelacanth, a fish that lives off Madagascar and looks exactly like its ancestors of 300 million years ago, that it has broken some law by not “evolving.”"

"Below the surface of every banality and cliché there lies irony, cynicism, and profundity."

"I asked John Maynard Smith, one of the first people to pose the question “Why sex?,” whether he still thought some new explanation was needed. “No. We have the answers. We cannot agree on them, that is all.”"

"Sex is recombination plus outcrossing; their mixing of genes is its principal feature….So sex equals genetic mixing."

"The things that kill animals or prevent them from reproducing are only rarely physical factors. Far more often other creatures are involved—parasites, predators, and competitors."

"One of the peculiar features of history is that time always erodes advantage. Every invention sooner or later leads to a counterinvention. Every success contains the seeds of its own overthrow. Every hegemony comes to an end. Evolutionary history is no different."

"In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago."

"Breeding, in sexual species, consists of finding an appropriate partner and persuading it to part with a package of genes. This goal is so central to life that it has influenced the design not only of the body but of the psyche. Simply put, anything that increases reproductive success will spread at the expense of anything that does not—even if it threatens survival."

"The more competitive nature of men is a consequence of sexual selection. Men have evolved to live dangerously because success in competition or battle used to lead to more or better sexual conquests and more surviving children. Women who live dangerously merely put at risk those children they already have. Likewise, the intimate connection between female beauty and female reproductive potential (beautiful women are almost by definition young and healthy; compared with older women, they are therefore both more fertile and have a longer reproductive life ahead of them) is a consequence of sexual selection acting on both men’s psyches and women’s bodies. Each sex shapes the other. Women have hourglass-shaped bodies because men have preferred them that way. Men have an aggressive nature because women have preferred them that way (or have allowed aggressive men to defeat other men in contests over women—it amounts to the same thing)."

"When a neo-Darwinian asks, “Why?” he is really asking “How did this come about?” He is a historian."

"People are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential—the healthy, the fit, and the powerful. The consequences of this fact, which goes under the name of sexual selection, are bizarre in the extreme."

"Parasites provide exactly the incentive to change genes every generation that sex seems to demand. The success of the genes that defended you so well in the last generation may be the best of reasons to abandon the same gene combinations in the next. By the time the next generation comes around, the parasites will have surely evolved an answer to the defense that worked best in the last generation. It is a bit like sport. In chess or in football, the tactic that proves most effective is soon the one that people learn easily to block. Every innovation in attack is soon countered by another in defense."

"If females have an existing aesthetic preference, it is only logical that males will evolve to exploit that preference."

"I have gradually come to realize that almost all of social science proceeds as if 1859, the year of the publication of the Origin of Species, had never happened; it does so quite deliberately, for it insists that human culture is a product of our own free will and invention. Society is not the product of human psychology, it asserts, but vice versa. That sounds reasonable enough, and it would be splendid for those who believe in social engineering if it were true, but is is simply not true."

"We assume, and rightly that a Russian is just as human after two generations of oppressive totalitarianism as his grandfather was before him. But why, then, does social science proceed as if it were not the case, as if people’s natures are the products of their societies?"

"There is, therefore, such a thing as a universal human nature, common to all people."

"Just as human nature is the same everywhere, so it is recognizably the same as it was in the past."

"In behavior, as in appearance, every human individual is unique."

"It is no harder to explain than a game of cards. There are aces and kings and twos and threes in any deck of cards. A lucky player is dealt a high-scoring hand, but none of his cards is unique. Elsewhere in the room are others with the same kinds of cards in their hands. But even with just thirteen kinds of cards, every hand is different and some are spectacularly better than others. Sex is merely the dealer, generating unique hands from the same monotonous deck of genetic cards shared by the whole species."

"Human beings are a product of evolution as much as any slime mold, and the revolution of the last two decades in the way scientists now think about evolution has immense implications for mankind as will. To summarize the argument so far, evolution is more about reproduction of the fittest than survival of the fittest; every creature on earth is the product of a series of historical battles between parasites and hosts, between genes and other genes, between members of the same species, between members of one gender in competitions for members of the other gender. Those battles include psychological ones, to manipulate and exploit other members of the species; they are never won, for success in one generation only ensures that the foes of the next generation are fitter to fight harder. Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race."

"There is no nature that exists devoid of nurture; there is no nurture that develops without nature. To say otherwise is like saying that the area of a field is determined by its length but not its width. Every behavior is the product of an instinct trained by experience."

"The fifth method (that is, of analyzing human mating systems) is to compare mankind with other animals that share our highly social habits: with colonial birds, monkeys, and dolphins. As we shall see, the lesson they teach is that we are designed for a system of monogamy plagued by adultery."

"This interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined."

"Freedom lies in expressing your own determinism, not somebody else’s. It is not the determinism that makes a difference, but the ownership. If freedom is what we prefer, then it is preferable to be determined by forces that originate in ourselves and not in others."

"Rational optimism holds that the world will pull out of the current crisis because of the way that markets in goods, services and ideas allow human beings to exchange and specialise honestly for the betterment of all. So this is not a book of unthinking praise or condemnation of all markets, but it is an inquiry into how the market process of exchange and specialisation is older and fairer than many think and gives a vast reason for optimism about the future of the human race. Above all, it is a book about the benefits of change. I find that my disagreement is mostly with reactionaries of all political colours: blue ones who dislike cultural change, red ones who dislike economic change and green ones who dislike technological change."

"Full responsibility for one’s actions is a necessary fiction without which the law would flounder, but it is a fiction all the same. To the extent that you act in character you are responsible for your actions; yet acting in character is merely expressing the many determinisms that caused your character."

"I have a hard time imagining how my memory of the meaning of the word ‘volado’ consists of some strengthened synaptic connections between a few neurons. It is distinctly mind-boggling. Yet far from having removed the mystery from the problem by reducing it to the molecular level, I feel that scientists have opened before me a new and intriguing mystery, the mystery of trying to imagine how connections between nerve cells not only provide the mechanism of memory but are memory. It is every bit as thrilling a mystery as quantum physics, and a great deal more thrilling than Ouija boards and flying saucers."

"The story of p53 and the oncogenes, like much of my book, challenges the argument that genetic research is necessarily dangerous and should be curtailed. The story also strongly challenges the view that ‘reductionist’ science, which takes systems apart to understand them, is flawed and futile. Oncology, the medical study of whole cancers, diligent, brilliant and massively endowed though it was, achieved terribly little in comparison with what has already been achieved in a few years by a reductionist, genetic approach."

"In Sigmund Freud’s psychology, John Watson’s behaviourism and Margaret Mead’s anthropology, nurture-determinism by parents was never tested, only assumed. Yet the evidence, from twin studies, from the children of immigrants and from adoption studies, is now staring us in the face: people get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not from their parents."

"The politicisation of the issue has had absurd results."

"The question is not whether nurture has a role to play, because nobody of any sense has ever gone on record as denying that it does, but whether nature has a role to play at all. When my one-year-old daughter discovered a plastic baby in a toy pram one day while I was writing this chapter, she let out the kinds of delighted squeals that her brother had reserved at the same age for passing tractors. Like many parents, I found it hard to believe that this was purely because of some unconscious social conditioning that we had imposed. Boys and girls have systematically different interests from the very beginning of autonomous behaviour."

"Natural selection has designed all parts of our bodies to last just long enough to see our children into independence, no more."

"The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view."

"Culture is transmitted autonomously from each children’s peer group to the next and not from parent to child—which is why, for example, the move towards greater adult sexual equality has had zero effect on willing sexual segregation in the playground. As every parent knows, children prefer to imitate peers than parents. Psychology, like sociology and anthropology, has been dominated by those with a strong antipathy to genetic explanations; it can no longer sustain such ignorance."