David Sloan Wilson > Quotes

“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”
― David Sloan Wilson Edward O. Wilson

“It is always necessary to jump up and down on the scaffold of knowledge to make sure it is solid. If you are skeptical about a scientific claim, then jump up and down on it as hard as you can until you expose a weakness or convince yourself that it is solid.”
― David Sloan Wilson, The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time

“Page 43:
Natural selection is a multilevel process that operates among groups in addition to among individuals within groups. Any unit becomes endowed with the properties inherent in the word organism to the degree that it is a unit of selection. The history of life on earth has been marked by many transitions from groups of organisms to groups as organisms. Organismic groups achieve their unity with mechanisms that suppress selection within without themselves being overtly altruistic. Human evolution falls within the paradigm of multilevel selection and the major transitions of life. Moral systems provide many of the mechanisms that enable human groups to function as adaptive units.”
― David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society

“Art is the essential medium for the communication of a moral ideal.”
― David Sloan Wilson

“I only do what only I can do.”
― David Sloan Wilson, Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time

“Representation is a principle which is fundamentally just and vital to the successful conduct of industry…Surely it is not consistent for us as Americans to demand democracy in government and practice autocracy in industry…With the developments of industry what they are today there is sure to come a progressive evolution from autocratic single control, whether by capital, labor, or the state,”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

“The regulatory mechanisms that operate in small human groups are pretty good at weeding out learned behaviors that are parasitic or benefit some individuals at the expense of others within the same group. However, these mechanisms were not designed to work on a larger scale. The first agricultural societies therefore became despotic, ironically more like many animal societies than small-scale human societies.”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

“Changing the world begins with adopting a whole earth ethic for ourselves and translating it into what we can do locally.”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

“We therefore need to work with what evolution has provided us to cultivate a moral society that works for the benefit of all, in the same way that we cultivate a garden.”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

“Stress-adapted birds are more likely to discount behaviors learned from their parents in favor of behaviors learned from conspecifics or from personal experience. If your mother is stressed, maybe it’s because she doesn’t know things that other birds know or that you can learn for yourself!”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

“In Christian thought, the belief that the universe was created by a benign and all-powerful god leads to a conundrum: If true, how can we explain the existence of evil? This is called the problem of evil and much ink has been spilled by theologians trying to resolve it—including Thomas Malthus’s belief that famine and disease are divinely imposed to teach virtuous behavior. The evolutionary worldview turns the problem of evil on its head. The behaviors that we associate with evil are easy to explain from an evolutionary perspective, because they typically benefit the evildoer at the expense of others. The problem is to explain how the behaviors that people associate with goodness, which typically benefit others and society as a whole, can evolve by a Darwinian process.”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

“Research shows that too much disparity in the salaries of members of professional sports teams undermines their cohesion as a group.”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

“The eternal struggle between good and evil takes place within our own bodies and has since the origin of multicellular organisms roughly a billion years ago.”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

“Many people (including myself) are willing to pay more for eggs from hens that are allowed to range more freely, but free-range social environments have their own problems. Fighting still takes place and dominant birds prevent subordinate birds from accessing food, water, and nesting sites, resulting in low productivity for the group as a whole.”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

“One key adaptation of a malignant cancer is to increase the rate of mutations. A fast-growing tumor isn’t just one type of cancer cell that is rapidly proliferating. It is a boiling cauldron of hyper-mutating cell lines that compete against each other. Another adaptive strategy for a cancer cell is to disperse so that it can compete against normal cells rather than against other cancer cells—metastasis.”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

“In one study that capitalized on a natural experiment, a genetically homogeneous human population straddles the national boundaries of Finland and Russia. The prevalence of type 1 diabetes is four times greater on the Finnish side than on the Russian side. This difference is accompanied by a striking difference in microbial diversity sampled from homes.”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

“must”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution

“small groups are a fundamental unit of human social organization. Individuals cannot be understood except in the context of small groups, and large-scale societies need to be seen as a kind of multicellular organism comprising small groups.”
― David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution