The most extraordinary thing about trying to piece together the missing links in the evolutionary story is that when you do find a missing link and put it in the story, you suddenly need all these other missing links to connect to the new discovery. The gaps and questions actually increase - it's extraordinary.
Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.
One of the things I say is from an evolutionary point of view: probably the ideal rich environment for a baby includes more mud, livestock, and relatives than most of us could tolerate nowadays.
Evolutionary psychology has often been a field whose most prominent practitioners get embroiled in controversy - witness the 2010 case of Harvard professor Marc Hauser, whose graduate students came forward to say he'd been faking evidence for years.
The construction of an airplane is simple compared with the evolutionary achievement of a bird. If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.
We're interested in things that have big teeth, and you can see the evolutionary value of that, and you can also see the practical consequences by watching 'Animal Planet.' You notice they make very few programs about gerbils. It's mostly about things that have big teeth.
I remember my first lecture on my first day in evolutionary biology, how populations and species change. I sat thinking, 'Why doesn't everyone know this?' I look back on it almost in horror: I came so close to not knowing how exciting our world is.
Capitalism is not so much an aberration as a step on an evolutionary path, and one that contains within it some of the answers to its own contradictions.
It is a matter of common knowledge among mystics that the evolutionary career of mankind is indissolubly bound up with the divine hierarchies, who rule the planets and the signs of the Zodiac, and that the passage of the Sun and the planets through the twelve signs of the Zodiac, marks man's progress in time and in space.
It turns out that viruses evolve from each other, like everything else. So if you look at the evolutionary tree of viruses, you can find parts of their genome that haven't changed over evolutionary time. You can recognize what may be a new virus by identifying this little piece of their genome that hasn't changed and is represented on the chip.
The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who, in the name of science, think they can explain everything in terms of our early hominid ancestors or our genes, with their combination of high-handed tone and disregard for history. Such reductive speculation encourages a really empty scientism.
I was never raised with the traditional story of creation in religion, and because of that I think I had a lot of questions. And evolution, the evolutionary narrative, helped provide some of that for me.
Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.
Pope Benedict is an amazingly visionary person. What he has done is establish an evolutionary process that will help undo the Reformation. The Anglican Church has been hijacked by modernism, with synods trying to amend the faith and this process will allow traditional Anglicans to be themselves.
As for memes, the word 'meme' is a cliche, which is to say it's already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene.
At once I feel that comedy is this amazing sort of transcendent thing, and I'm also open to the fact that maybe it's just an evolutionary hiccup, something that upright apes do in their free time.
I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don't come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.
Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.
To be honest, what I struggled with in my degree is what's so helpful when it comes to social media in that I lack focus. I'll start reading about evolutionary biology and end up on quantum physics. While that makes writing your dissertation very difficult, for a page like IFLS, that's amazing because I get a wide range of everything.
If you go back and look at the early promos for Gears 1, you'll see just how different the characters were from the actual first game, both in appearance and background. And it's an evolutionary process.
