Sonny Davidson

“A common adage in Japan goes as follows: the Japanese marry as per Shinto faith, live their lives based on Confucian ethics, and are buried as per Buddhist rites.”
― Vincent Miller, Shinto - The Way of the Gods: Introduction to the Traditional Religion of Japan

“Memes, like genes, are selected against the background of other memes in the meme pool. The result is that gangs of mutually compatible memes – coadapted meme complexes or memeplexes – are found cohabiting in individual brains. This is not because selection has chosen them as a group, but because each separate member of the group tends to be favoured when its environment happens to be dominated by the others.”
― Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine

“The explicit rejection of a role for biology in the social sciences occurred from the end of the nineteenth through the beginning of the twentieth centuries, with the leading roles played by Émile Durkheim in sociology, Franz Boas in anthropology, and John Watson in psychology.3”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“Under those conditions, first-wave feminists were too busy to say much about questions of inborn differences between men and women. An exception was Kate Austin, who compared the plight of women to those of Chinese women with bound feet: “We know that at birth the feet of the little baby girl were straight and beautiful like her brothers, but a cruel and artificial custom restrained the growth. Likewise it is just as foolish to assert that woman is mentally inferior to man, when it is plain to be seen her brain in a majority of cases receives the same treatment accorded the feet of Chinese girls.”4 As Helena Swanwick put it, “There does not seem much that can be profitably said about [the alleged inferiority of women]… until the incubus of brute force is removed.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class