Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics. "

Related Quotes:

" A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock? "

" All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on. "

" The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization. "

" Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate. "

" There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture. "

" There is a correlation between economic inequality and personal violence. The explanation for the correlation isn't completely clear; there are a number of possibilities. "

" The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years. "

" I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties. "

" Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature. "

" However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution. "

" I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs. "

" Why is it surprising that scientists might have long hair and wear cowboy boots? In fields like neuroscience, where the events you are recording are so minute, I suspect scientists cultivate a boring, reliable image. A scientist with a reputation for flamboyance might be suspect. "

" In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons. "

" Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control. "

" We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives. "

" 20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems. "

" Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism. "

" I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game. "

" I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life. "

" Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know. "

" I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. "

" Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person. "

" Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday. "

" Of course, genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. "

" Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance. "

" The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living. "

" One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected. "

" People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections. "

" Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. "

" America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself. "