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Frasi di Steve Stewart-Williams
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Steve Stewart-Williams is an associate professor in the school of psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, and author of the books Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life and The Ape That Understood the Universe . He was born in Wellington, New Zealand.

✵ 1971
Steve Stewart-Williams: 63   frasi 0   Mi piace

Steve Stewart-Williams: Frasi in inglese

“To a hypothetical alien with a vastly superior intellect to our own, human minds would be classed as intermediate forms between the mindless and the fully minded.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

Origine: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 151

“It may be the fate of the universe to spend an eternity in darkness, save one brief flash of self-awareness in the middle of nowhere.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

Origine: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 154

“It seems that the evolutionist must conclude, along with the writer Vladimir Nabokov, that ‘our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness’. Brains that think otherwise – brains that deny they are brains and believe instead that they are eternal souls - are brains that hold false beliefs about themselves.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

Origine: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 150

“The amount of suffering and pain caused by the tyranny of human beings over other animals (particularly in food production) far exceeds that caused by sexism, racism, or any other existing form of discrimination, and for this reason, the animal liberation movement is the most important liberation movement on the face of the planet today.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

Origine: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 278

“People often assume that anyone who studies evolution thinks that everything should be about the survival of the fittest. However, this makes no more sense than assuming that anyone who studies glaciers thinks that everything should be done really, really slowly.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

Origine: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 256

“Language, intelligence, and humor, along with art, generosity, and musical ability, are often described as human equivalents of the peacock’s tail. However, peacocks afford a poor analogy for the role of courtship displays in humans. Other animal models offer a better fit. In a number of nonhuman species — species as diverse as sea dragons and grebes — males and females engage in a mutual courtship “dance,” in which the two partners mirror one another’s movements. In Clark’s grebes and Western grebes, for instance, the pair bond ritual culminates in the famous courtship rush: The male and female swim side by side along the top of the water, with their wings back and their heads and necks in a stereotyped posture. If we want a nonhuman analogue for the role of creative intelligence or humor in human courtship, we should think not of ornamented peacocks displaying while drab females evaluate them. We should think instead of grebes engaged in their mating rush or sea dragons engaged in their synchronized mirror dance. Once we have one of these alternative images fixed in our minds, we can then add the proviso that there is a slight skew such that, in the early stages of courtship, men tend to display more vigorously and women tend to be choosier. However, this should be seen as a qualification to the primary message that intelligence, humor, and other forms of sexual display are part of the mutual courtship process in our species.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

Origine: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 160

“People kill nonhuman animals for food, for their skins, and sometimes just for fun. We enslave animals and force them to work for us. We experiment on them and justify their suffering in terms of our advantage. Because most of us want to be able to view ourselves as good people (and, perhaps more importantly, because we want others to view us as good people), we may be motivated to view nonhumans in such a way that these activities are rendered morally unproblematic. One way to do this is to view other animals as utterly different from us.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

Origine: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 111

“Even if we accept the basic logic of the natural law argument against homosexuality, we have to ask just how wicked a sin it could really be. People sometimes use metal coat hangers as impromptu TV aerials, a purpose for which they were not designed. Likewise, children sometimes climb up slides instead of sliding down them. Are these activities heinous infractions of the moral law? Are they an insult to the people who designed the coat hangers or the slides?”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

Origine: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 247

“If this is not what springs immediately to mind as soon as the words “on average” are appended to a description of mean differences, then the words “on average” have not rectified the damage done by the use of means to describe populations of varied individuals.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

Origine: The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013), p. 268

“For much of the 20th century, the blank slate view was the dominant view in the social sciences. With the popularization of sociobiology in the 1970s, however, evolutionary approaches to human behavior became the locus of an academic culture war between biologically minded thinkers and advocates of the traditional social science model.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

Origine: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 141

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

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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?”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

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

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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).”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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?”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“A similar analysis applies within the realm of mate preferences. Several commentators pointed out that sex differences in human mate preferences are generally quite small… As such, the central claim in EP [evolutionary psychology] should probably be "Human beings evolved to put a fair amount of weight on good looks in a mate" rather than "Men evolved to put more weight on good looks than women." Again, the latter statement is true but potentially misleading. This sounds like a contradiction, but it is not; the statement is misleading if it is given undue weight.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

“[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.”

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

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

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Steve Stewart-Williams

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

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