Steve Stewart-Williams: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Even in a pointless universe, pointless happiness and pleasures are surely preferable to pointless suffering.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 307

Pleasure , Suffering , Universe , Happiness

“One could even argue that our creative endeavours and achievements and small acts of kindness are all the more impressive against the backdrop of a purposeless universe.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 196

Universe

“Human beings are an exception to many general rules in biology. In many species, female mate choice alone is important; in our species, male mate choice is important as well. In many species, males alone are showy and ornamented; in our species, females are as well. In many species, males alone compete for mates; in our species, females compete as well. In many species, males invest nothing other than sperm in their offspring; in our species, men typically invest a great deal. Not only are human beings exceptional in these ways, but they all tie together into a cohesive story.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 144

Men , Way

“If religion doesn't make people good, why do people think that it does? Simple: Because religion teaches that it makes people good. It’s part of its sales pitch. But it's also quite possibly untrue.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 290

People , Religion , Thinking , Parting

“Imagine that a zoologist from Mars was sent to Earth to study elephants, and that it had never seen one before. Its initial observation upon seeing a herd of elephants for the first time would presumably not be: “Wow! On average, the males are somewhat larger than the females!” It would be: “Wow! Those are large animals!” A follow-up observation would be the average sex difference in size. However, this would be a qualification to the initial observation — a peripheral rather than a central claim about the morphology of elephants. If, in its subsequent report, the Martian zoologist began by highlighting the sex difference and barely mentioned that elephants are, first and foremost, large animals, we should not be surprised if other Martians got the wrong idea.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

(p. 266)
The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013)

Sex , Imagination , Idea , Study

“The idea that the Biblical stories are symbolic is charitable to the point of absurdity. What would we think of a university professor who, happening upon unambiguous errors in a favourite student’s work, concluded that the student was speaking symbolically and awarded top marks?”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 63

Error , Idea , Thinking , Universe

“Tying morality to religion is a little like transporting a precious cargo on a sinking ship. What happens when the child grows up and starts doubting the factual claims of the religion? The cargo may be lost with the ship.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 287

Religion

“To the extent that we accept this view, we effectively mistake ourselves for highly dimorphic animals such as peacocks or deer.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 153

Animals

“Certainly, the human-animal distinction is still workable; after all, we rarely make errors in assigning entities to one category or the other. But after Darwin, the distinction suddenly seems arbitrary – as arbitrary as the equally workable distinction between, say, turtles and non-turtles.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), pp. 154-155

Error , Animals

“Of course, nothing can be said to argue that people are morally obliged to accept this ethic, for to do so would be inconsistent with the ideas that inspired it in the first place. It is an ethic that will be adopted – if at all – by those who find a certain stark beauty in kindness without reward, joy without purpose, and progress without lasting achievement.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 308

People , Beauty , Idea , Joy

“Some people worry that to say we are nothing but matter is to deny that we think or feel. It’s not. The strange fact is that, when suitably arranged, matter thinks and feels.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 160

People , Feeling , Thinking

“We like to think that reason is the supreme adaptation; that rational animals deserve preferential treatment; and that nonhumans, because they don’t have reason, have no intrinsic moral value. However, after Darwin, this is no different and no more convincing than, say, an elephant thinking that trunks are the supreme adaptation; that animals with trunks deserve preferential treatment; and that non-elephants, because they don’t have trunks, have no intrinsic moral value.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), pp. 263-264

Thinking , Animals

“As a result of high levels of male parental investment, humans evolved into a somewhat “androgynous” species - a species in which human females exhibit traits generally found only in males (e. g., competition for mates) and human males exhibit traits generally found only in females (e. g., the provision of parental care; choosiness about mates).”

Steve Stewart-Williams

(p. 138)
The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013)

Parent

“We are a species in which both sexes have their equivalents of the peacock’s tail. Indeed, when it comes to physical beauty, the usual sex difference has arguably been reversed: Females are the “showier” sex.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 139

Beauty , Sex

“Just as our tools evolved culturally to fit our hands, so too our social roles evolved culturally to fit persisting aspects of the human mind. Roles that jar too violently with human nature are unlikely to persist for long, at least without the application of significant social force. If this is correct, it raises the possibility that some social roles might have evolved culturally to fit traits that, although found in both sexes, are more common in one than the other. This is emphatically not to say that there are some male roles and some female roles. But it is to suggest that there might be some social roles that suit more men than women, and others that suit more women than men — not just because of evolved physical differences but because of evolved psychological differences as well.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013), p. 261

Women , Men , Sex , Nature

“Why would the omnipotent creator of the entire universe be so deeply attached to a bipedal, tropical ape? Why would He take on the bodily form of one of these peculiar tailless primates? Why would such a magnificent being be so obsessively, nit-pickingly preoccupied with trivial matters such as the dress code and sexual behaviour of one mammalian species, especially its female members?”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 4

Universe

Steve Stewart-Williams

(p. 267)
The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013)

Women , Men , Sex

“Human beings are, by nature, the kind of animal that falls in love. The cross-cultural record also suggests that humans are also the kind of animal that commonly provides biparental care for its young. In 95% to 97% of mammalian species, only the females care for the young. We would no more expect males in these species to invest in their offspring than we would expect them to get pregnant or lactate. Humans are not like that.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 147

Love , Nature , Animals

“[I]t is not only men who may be harmed by preferences and quotas. In a number of ways, women could be harmed as well. To begin with, such policies could cast a shadow of doubt over women’s genuine accomplishments.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Men, Women and STEM: Why the Differences and What Should be Done? (with Lewis G. Halsey; 2021), p. 22

Women , Way , Men

“[I]t would be unfortunate if, for all the talk of celebrating differences and diversity, we ultimately came to insist that justice requires sameness.”

Steve Stewart-Williams

Source: Not Biology or Culture Alone: Response to El-Hout et al. (2021) (with Lewis G. Halsey; 2021), p. 5

Justice