Wise Words: Charles Darwin
My best guide on human nature
One of the prime tasks for every professional (and for every person) is to decide what they believe to be TRUE. The way to this critical discovery is to read a lot of experts in your field until you find the one(s) who makes perfect sense to you. They will provide you with your paradigm for understanding and practice.
As a behavioral scientist, I learned about psychoanalysis and behaviorism and neuroscience and cognition and motivation and groups and families and child development and mental disorders and … (yes, I was in school for a LONG time!). It was all interesting and everybody claimed to have nailed the whole truth about human nature/behavior and yet … I was not fully persuaded.
And then …
When I discovered evolutionary biology and Charles Darwin, my mind was blown and then reassembled around these simple but profound ideas:
- Life is a struggle for survival
- Living beings differ from each other
- Some beings possess “adaptive” traits that enable them to survive longer within their local environment
- Beings that live longer will procreate more and pass on their adaptive traits to their offspring
- And so on and so on and …
The implications that flow from these ideas for understanding the nature and behavior of human and other beings are wide and deep. Here are some quotes from the architect of the evolutionary paradigm that capture some of that deep wisdom.
As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives … It is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works co-operatively against common threats.
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too), those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.
The world will not be inherited by the strongest, it will be inherited by those most able to change.
Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
As (humanity) advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that (they) ought to extend (their) social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to (them). This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent (their) sympathies extending to the (people) of all nations and races.
How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.
We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.
Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.
(Humans) tend to increase at a greater rate than their means of subsistence.
The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.
The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of (human) ignorance. Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure. (Darwin may be incorrect on this one!)
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
I admit there are no direct proofs of the greater modifications which I believe in. I most fully admit that I by no means explain away all the vast difficulties. I am conscious that I always jump at any theory which groups and explains facts, and attach too little weight to unexplained difficulties. Often a cold shudder has run through me and I have asked myself whether I may not have devoted my life to a fantasy.
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us.
