Evolutionary Anthropology Quotes

“Today, most people "go to work." But back at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "going to work" was a brand new idea. Families had always worked together in their homes.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners

“We do not own the land! Land is like air and water. No one owns it.”
― Tecumseh

“...there were three men for every woman in Australia! Australia needed women. A committee in London was formed to send young women to Australia for only five pounds.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners

“Thanks to cultural evolution and technological progress, humans have gained unprecedented power to alter their social and physical environment but, in doing so, have also created enormous opportunity for evolutionary mismatch.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Evolutionary mismatch may occur when an evolved mechanism encounters a novel environmental context that falls outside of the range that was recently encountered over its evolutionary history (the EEA or environment of evolutionary adaptation). In the new context, a functional mechanism can give rise to maladaptive outcomes or even induce dysfunctions in other mechanisms.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“In modern societies, for example, the media expose people to a relentless stream of images of unrealistically attractive "competitors" -an artificial, evolutionarily novel kind of social stimulus. It has been hypothesized that such exposure hyperactivates the evolved mechanisms that regulate female competition for attractiveness and status, thus contributing to the rising incidence of eating disorders.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“For instance, people who form early representations of the world as dangerous or uncontrollable may become anxious and start avoiding situations that they perceive as threatening. Avoidance is usually an adaptive response to danger; in this case, however, it prevents anxious individuals from learning that the environment is actually safer than they believe, thus locking them in a state of exaggerated anxiety. Even if such catastrophic failures of learning mechanisms are statistically rare, they can be highly maladaptive for the individuals who experience them.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“To the extent that psychological mechanisms rely on information acquired through learning, they are vulnerable to maladaptive outcomes owing to the intrinsic limitations of learning processes. Indeed, the massive capacity for individual and social learning required to exploit the cognitive niche may contribute to explain our species' seemingly unique vulnerability to mental disorders.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Defensive mechanisms can make two symmetric kinds of mistakes: they can fail to activate in the presence of a threat (false negatives) or become activated when no threat is present (false positives). Even when defenses are functional and optimally calibrated, errors cannot be completely avoided; given the tradeoffs between the costs of different types of errors, the smoke detector principle suggests that defensive systems should typically evolve to commit more false positives than false negatives.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“The trials of evolution programme a human race for aggression, not wisdom. And once capitalism gets underway human relationships become regulated by systems that deliver behaviour into a killing zone of selfishness and greed. The Tension Dynamic, p165”
― Art Hardy, The Tension Dynamic: Can Humanity Navigate The Birth Canal?