Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker... into the game?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To de-animalize human mentality, to purge it of obsolete evolutionary characteristics, in particular of death,... which foreknowledge terrorizes the contents of skulls with, is the fundamental project of technology;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not menstrual blood per se which disturbs the imagination--unstanchable as that red flood may be--but rather the albumen in ...the blood, the uterine shreds, placental jellyfish of the female sea. This is the chthonian matrix from which we rose. We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, our site of biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homag...e to their servile and salivating roots own dogs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The difference between humans and other organisms is that humans, having discerned something of how evolution works, are now able ...to confront their choices consciously. That is not the same as saying that we can now control evolution. I don't know how much of a difference it is in effect: we may be able to perceive our choices and still be unable to choose and act. By overpopulating the planet as we are now doing, for example, we are making an evolutionary choice just as unplanned as that of our hominid ancestors when they began cracking antelope and other hominids over the head with sticks. Nevertheless, we do differ from the first hominids in our having some notion of the implications of our behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, ...cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your brain receives, stores, and processes information, dispenses results, and controls your biological equipment. When properly p...rogrammed, computers can do likewise, except that they control electromechanical rather than biological equipment. Beyond these functional similarities, computers and brains have virtually nothing in common. To begin with, the electronic circuits in a computer are not analogous to brain cells. The two differ in appearance, in structure, and in principles of operation. The key functions of information storage and information processing are served in computers by physically different components. In a typical computer, one finds separate CPU and memory units; but even in computer designs where processing circuits are intermixed, the two functions remain distinct. In the brain they are not distinct; they're distributed throughout the brain and intermixed in ways that we don't understand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Hindu scriptures, like the Buddhist, dwell ... on withdrawal from the realm of pleasure. The spiritually mature man is one who... "abandons desires," who "has lost desires for joys," who "withdraws, as a tortoise his limbs from all sides, his senses from the objects of sense." Hence the ideal man as depicted in the Bhagavad Gita: a man of discipline, who acts without worrying about the fruits of his action, a man who is unmoved by acclaim and by criticism.... That Hinduism and Buddhism sound so much alike is not shocking. The Buddha was born a Hindu. But he carried the theme of sensory indifference further, boiling it down to a severe maxim--life is suffering--and placing it in the center of his philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »