Dan Flores: Humanity

Dan Flores is American historian. Explore interesting quotes on humanity.

Dan Flores: 38 quotes0 likes

“Across the history of life on Earth, animals and birds of many species have routinely colonized new country. That's enough a marker of adaptive success that biologists apply the term "cosmopolitan" to species that are especially flexible regarding… habitats… Evolving in America, the ancestors of horses spread across Asia, Europe, and Africa, where they became zebras and quaggas. Bovine evolution in Southeast Asia eventually brought bison to North America… But the range expansion of a wild animal [i. e., the coyote] for thousands of miles in every direction, often through dense settlements of humans who in recent history have been committed to that animal's eradication, is truly remarkable. A suite of factors must be involved.”

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

“[T]he truth is that coyotes have never been solely wilderness creatures. …for the 15,000 years since we humans have been in North America, coyotes have always been capable of living among us. …A coyote's primary prey happens to be… the mice and rats that flourish around and among us… By the time Europeans got to America, coyotes had long since sought out the major Indian cities of Mesoamerica.”

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

“The humanities have usually left evolutionary nature to the biologists. But some of the other questions here are… posed by the multidisciplinary field known as environmental history.”

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

“[T]he human past… belongs not only to (say) the Blackfeet or the Mormons, but to all of us. …[W]e humans cannot be considered as separate from the earth of our evolution. We, too, are "natural."”

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

“Like Wilson and a slew of other authors working on what was once called "sociobiology" but is now usually called "evolutionary behavior" or "evolutionary psychology," I am convinced that there is a biological and universal human nature, and that it appears manifest in the human record. The question is, how might that insight… be folded into the narratives that give our immediate history meaning and power?”

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

“Whose natural West has this been all along? Is it evolution's superorganism? Or did the United States inherit a natural stage actually shaped by the very long human inhabitation? …Why do places like Hispanic New Mexico, Mormon Utah, and Montana seem so different when nature would seem so similar in all three? Or are they actually all that different? …[I]s there something else more universal that our richly layered cultures disguise, perhaps something as essential as an evolutionarily derived "human nature" that influences the way that we—all of us—see and interact with the flux we call the natural world?”

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

“In one of the myriad ways humans and coyotes eerily mimic each one another, like us coyotes are cosmopolitan species, able to live in a remarkable range of habitats.”

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Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)