Quotes

Though seemingly remote from human sexuality, shorebird sexuality is instructive because it illustrates the main message of this book: a species’ sexuality is molded by other aspects of the species’ biology. It’s easier for us to acknowledge this conclusion about shorebirds, to which we don’t apply moral standards, than about ourselves.

In particular, while natural selection favors both males and females that leave many offspring, the best strategy for doing so may be different for fathers and mothers. That generates a built-in conflict between the parents, a conclusion that all too many humans don’t need scientists to reveal to them. We make jokes about the battle of the sexes, but the battle is neither a joke nor an aberrant accident of how individual fathers or mothers behave on particular occasions. It is indeed perfectly true that behavior that is in a male’s genetic interests may not necessarily be in the interests of his female co-parent, and vice versa. That cruel fact is one of the fundamental causes of human misery.

The answer comes from the realization that genes for behavior, as well as for malaria resistance and teeth, are subject to natural selection.

How can we explain simultaneously this general pattern of female parental care and also its numerous exceptions?

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing’s main function was to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.

Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history. Until World War II, more victims of war died of war-borne microbes than of battle wounds.

As we shall see, the prerequisites for those developments consisted of several features of human society that determined whether a society would find writing useful, and whether the society could support the necessary specialist scribes.

Why, within Eurasia, were European societies, rather than those of the Fertile Crescent or China or India, the ones that colonized America and Australia, took the lead in technology, and became politically and economically dominant in the modern world?

Before the spread of alphabetic writing, systems making much use of logograms were more common and included Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya glyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform.

Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation.

Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own.

Naturally, what makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.

African and European skulls of half a million years ago were sufficiently similar to skulls of us moderns that they are classified in our species, Homo sapiens, instead.

Nearly half of all New Guinea languages have fewer than 500 speakers.

People with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A.

Thus, Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment. They committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base.

A suitable starting point from which to compare historical developments on the different continents is around 11,000 B.C.

Food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates.

Yes, world history is indeed such an onion!

The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes.