“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.”

—  Dan Flores

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

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Dan Flores 19
American historian 1948

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“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?”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

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

“Deconstructing the concept of race not only goes against the tendency of virtually every known culture to classify and build family histories according to some measure of common descent, it also ignores the work of biologists studying non-human species.”

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“Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.”

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“… We cannot get big grants to do field work anymore. … Will the next generation of conservation biologists be nothing but a bunch of computer nerds with no firsthand knowledge of natural history? … The naturalists are dying off and have few heirs.”

Reed Noss (1952)

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“It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. […] Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. […] The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions—for these are our issues, not nature's.”

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“Though I have usually posed as a Catholic, I have not done my duty for 15 years, and have not the slightest tincture of faith left…”

James Connolly (1868–1916) Irish republican and socialist leader

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“Evolutionary theory answers one of the most profound and fundamental questions human beings have ever asked themselves, a question that has plagued reflective minds for as long as reflective minds have existed in the universe: why are we here?”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 1

“True change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It is futile for political systems to force human beings to cooperate or construct social bonding structures. People already do that, naturally; it is evident in our evolutionary history.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

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“A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

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“An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.”

Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist

Source: Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (1949)
Context: Experimenters are the schocktroops of science… An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer. But before an experiment can be performed, it must be planned – the question to nature must be formulated before being posed. Before the result of a measurement can be used, it must be interpreted – Nature’s answer must be understood properly. These two tasks are those of theorists, who find himself always more and more dependent on the tools of abstract mathematics.

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