Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and pol...itical discrimination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although there is no universal agreement as to a definition of life, its biological manifestations are generally considered to be ...organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The purpose of ritual for men is to learn the rules of power and competition. Watching sports together, for example, they see the ...formal enactment of ritual, become loyal to a team, learn to conceal their vulnerability. The purpose of ritual for women (going to lunch together, sharing a favorite salon, etc.) is to learn how to make human connections. They are often more intimate and vulnerable with one another than they are with their men, and taking care of other women teaches them to take care of themselves. In these formal ways, men and women domesticate their emotional lives. But their strategies are different, their biological itineraries are different. His sperm needs to travel, her egg needs to settle down. It's astonishing that they survive happily at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is... to make a hole in one with you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Because humans are not alone in exhibiting such behavior--bees stockpile royal jelly, birds feather their nests, mice shred paper-...-it's possible that a pregnant woman who scrubs her house from floor to ceiling [just before her baby is born] is responding to a biological imperative . . . . Of course there are those who believe that . . . the burst of energy that propels a pregnant woman to clean her house is a perfectly natural response to their mother's impending visit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then t...he best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say tha...t evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature--for instance in a biological survey of evolution--we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are no black conservatives. Oh, there are neoconservatives with black skin, but they lack any claim to blackness other than ...the biological. They have forgotten their roots.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent commit...tee who sit on each other's affairs, who "come out" together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »