Passing on rituals seems to be as important in cultural evolution as passing on technologies. In fact, you might argue that rituals are technologies.
Studies by the neuroscientist B. J. Casey suggest that adolescents are reckless not because they underestimate risks but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do.
The evolutionary theorist Eva Jablonka has suggested that the human mind is more like a hand than a Swiss Army knife. A human hand isn’t designed to do any one thing in particular. But it is an exceptionally flexible and effective device for doing many things, including things we might never have imagined.
The fact that the children were so sensitive to the teacher’s intentions made them stupid, or at least stupider than they would have been otherwise. Or to put it another way, their intelligence about teaching, and their cleverness in figuring out just what the teacher wanted, made them worse at actually learning.
The new generation, in turn, will consciously alter those earlier practices and invent new ones. They can take the entire past for granted as they move toward the future.
There is good reason to think that letting children play—spontaneously, randomly, and by themselves—helps allow them to learn. But another part of the evolutionary story is that play is a satisfying good in itself—a source of joy, laughter, and fun for parents as well as children. If it had no other rationale, the sheer pleasure of play would be justification enough.
Virginia Woolf, who chose not to have children, wisely said, “Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.”
We parents, and grandparents even more, have to watch our beloved children glide irretrievably into the future we can never reach ourselves.
What makes us love a child isn’t something about the child—it’s something about us. We don’t care for children because we love them; we love them because we care for them.
What Yeats called “perfection of the life or of the work”—these values can’t simply be weighed in some single objective scale.
When we say that preschoolers are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they’re bad at not paying attention—they have difficulty keeping themselves from being drawn to distractions.
The regime uses biblical symbols, as any authoritarian regime taking over America doubtless would: they wouldn’t be Communists or Muslims.
As foresters like to say, the forest creates its own ideal habitat.
If you read the professional literature, you quickly get the impression that the well-being of the forest is only of interest insofar as it is necessary for optimizing the lumber industry.
The overall form of the tree, with its many upward thrusting branches, is like the shape of any one of its leaves.
It was only with the advent of words, with the illusion that he could name the whole world, every last corner of it labeled and known, that the unknown became an enemy, became a threat.
Prescriptive technologies eliminate the occasions for decision-making and judgement in general and especially for the making of principled decisions.
Because life is short, human beings must cram into the years the highest possible amount of consciousness, alertness, and chronic insomnia so as to be sure not to miss the last fragment of startling pleasure.
For the animal to be happy it is enough that this moment be enjoyable.
For the perishability and changefulness of the world is part and parcel of its liveliness and loveliness. This is why the poets are so often at their best when speaking of change.
He was finally about to find himself. But he would do it in the strangest way, by declaring that there was no self to find.
If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing.
If psychic phenomena exist, there is no reason to suppose that they cannot be studied scientifically, and that they are not simply another aspect of “nature.”
Part of man’s frustration is that he has become accustomed to expect language and thought to offer explanations which they cannot give. To want life to be “intelligible” in this sense is to want it to be something other than life.
Plucking chrysanthemums along the East fence; Gazing in silence at the southern hills; The birds flying home in pairs Through the soft mountain air of dusk— In these things there is a deep meaning, But when we are about to express it, We suddenly forget the words.