Heather E. Heying > Quotes

“Seek authorities who are willing to both show you how they arrived at their conclusions and admit when they have made mistakes.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“The differences between the sexes are found in babies, and across cultures, too -so this is not some weird WEIRD phenomenom. Given a choice, neonate girls spend more time looking at faces, while neonate boys spend more time looking at things.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Everyone can and should learn to be a better observer... Observing your world carefully, becoming aware of your own bias, of your own previously held beliefs and how they limit what you can see — it’s utterly necessary if you are to have independence of thought. And if you don’t have independence of thought, what do you have?”
― Heather E. Heying

“We work side by side, and some of us imagine that because we are equal under the law, we are also the same. We are and should be equal under the law. But we are not the same - despite what some activists and politicians, journalists and academics would have us believe.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Gestation and lactation are anatomically, physiologically mandated features of being a female mammal.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Men will never ovulate, gestate, lactate, menstruate, or go through menopause. Women who identify as men might, but that thing is different.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“When we say that men are taller than women, the words -on average- are implied. Pointing to the existence of your friend Rhonda, who really is quite tall, does not negate the statistical truth that, on average, men are still taller than women.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Either way, modernity is doing something to us at a deeply fundamental level, and the fact that we don’t understand it is alarming.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Pretending that we are identical, rather than ensuring that we are equal under the law, is a fool's game.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“It is important to know what the group thinks, but that is not the same as believing or reinforcing what the group thinks. In a time of rapid change in particular, then, it is important to be willing to be the lone voice. Be the person who never conforms to patently wrong statements in order to fit in with the crowd. Be Asch-Negative.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Humans are antifragile; exposure to discomfort and uncertainty -physical, emotional and intellectual- is necessary.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“We are told that Louis Pasteur, in the days before he was renowned, would walk in the park, pondering the nature of the “invisible enemy … the Rabies germs,” in order to find a way to kill them. But Pasteur’s idea was not compelling to his contemporaries. We are shown children pointing fingers at him and mocking him, and adults yelling at him that what he attempted was impossible. Pasteur soldiered on, though, and we are all the beneficiaries of that. ...

For every Pasteur, there must be thousands of people who have had an idea that didn’t pan out, as well as countless others whose ideas were good, but never got traction. Science depends on the tenacity of the person with the new idea, even when others take pleasure in mocking it.”
― Heather E. Heying

“Science functions best when all hypotheses are on the table. Some will be easily dismissed. Others will prove recalcitrant to falsification, even if we eventually come to understand that they are not true. But what science needs, above all else, is the freedom to discuss the possibilities. Without that, there will be no new discoveries.”
― Heather E. Heying

“Those who advocate for a raw diet suggest that it is the healthiest, "most natural" way to eat. Cooking, they say, is a modern bastardization of the human diet. This is simply wrong.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Chesterton wrote this of a “fence or gate erected across a road”: The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“The best, most all-encompassing way to describe our world is hyper-novel. As we will show throughout the book, humans are extraordinarily well adapted to, and equipped for, change. But the rate of change itself is so rapid now that our brains, bodies, and social systems are perpetually out of sync. For millions of years we lived among friends and extended family, but today many people don’t even know their neighbors’ names. Some of the most fundamental truths—like the fact of two sexes—are increasingly dismissed as lies. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society that is changing faster than we can accommodate is turning us into people who cannot fend for ourselves. Simply put, it’s killing us.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Like all social, long-lived organisms with long childhoods and overlap between our generations, we need to learn how to be adults. That is different, however, from needing to be taught.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Keep an eye out for other things that we moderns might be trying to rid ourselves of without sufficiently understanding their function—not only Chesterton’s organs, but his gods and his breast milk, his cuisine and his play.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“While actually intersex individuals are real and incredibly rare, and actually transgendered people are also real and very rare, much of modern "gender ideology" is dangerous and contagious, and many of the interventions (hormonal, surgical) are not reversible.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“humans deserve a night sky, a sky full of possibilities—sometimes of clouds, often the moon, occasionally planets, nearly always stars and the Milky Way in which we live.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Dogs are in many ways a human construct. We have co-evolved with them for so long that they are now attuned to human behavior, language, and emotion.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“In the moment, an anticipated rush of sugar, or of dopamine, or sinking into a couch to be entertained by a screen, can seem like the best thing in the world. But it is not those moments that we remember, and it is not those moments that we treasure. They are not rich with meaning. Fleeting, easy satisfaction does not a meaningful life make.

[...]

Consider how you know about speed, for instance. When driving on a warm Spring day with the windows open, you can understand how fast you are going by feeling the wind in and around the car; by recognizing the road’s surface and cant and your car’s responsiveness to it; by observing other vehicles and how they are moving, and how they respond to you. Or you can read the number on the speedometer. The first provides an understanding of speed that is embodied and holistic; the second way of knowing how fast you are going, in contrast, is a much thinner kind of knowledge. That number that you glean from a glance at the speedometer tells you something, but it is both far less meaningful than having an embodied sense of speed, and far easier to communicate when you get pulled over.”
― Heather E. Heying

“they are, as a country, starving? It’s yet another paradox, which is, we argue, a kind of treasure map. When you see a paradox, keep digging.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“We should also not expect that men and women will make identical choices, or be driven to excel at identical things, or even, perhaps, be motivated by the same goals. To ignore our differences and demand uniformity is a different kind of sexism. Differences between the sexes are a reality, and while they can be cause for concern, they are also very often a strength, and we ignore them at our peril.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Some of us find meaning in creation—of building things that have never existed before, be they made of words or pigment or wood. Some of us find meaning in exploration and discovery—of finding new places, or new ways of looking at known places; of looking so close, or so far, that we see things that have not been seen before. Some of us find meaning in healing, in touch and insight that results in betterment, which allows the person on the receiving end to become more functional. Others in helping in other ways, or in elucidating—in teaching, for instance. Others in communication or interpretation, in building teams, or in leading them.”
― Heather E. Heying

“Happiness is an adaptation which, in times past, motivated us to seek that which was good for us. Our happiness-seeking circuitry, long evolved in situations where sugar, comfort, abundance, and safe thrills were rare, is now on overdrive, helping us find that which markets have made ubiquitous. So we need to reschool our happiness-seeking circuitry, train it to find and appreciate legitimately rare or valuable things. Sugar, comfort, abundance, and safe thrills are no longer legitimately rare or valuable. Love and relationship, and the time and space to exist in ways not dictated by external forces—these are increasingly rare, and have always been valuable.”
― Heather E. Heying

“It is likely that our highly geometric homes and playgrounds, which make up so much of what we see during early childhood, calibrate our eyes such that we suffer from such illusions far more than do those in the rest of the world.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“Our differences are fascinating, but our similarities make us human.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“We’d mistaken our few experiences swimming in the river for the wisdom of actually knowing a place. How could we have been so wrong?”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“The more you move, therefore, within whatever your particular limits are, the more integrated, whole, and accurate your perception of the world is likely to be.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life