The Social Conquest of Earth - Edward O. Wilson

"To form groups, drawing visceral comfort and pride from familiar fellowship, and to defend the group enthusiastically against rival groups - these are among the absolute universals of human nature and hence culture."

"prepared learning - the inborn propensity to learn something swiftly and decisively."

"People are prone to ethnocentrism. It is an uncomfortable fact that even when given a guilt-free choice, individuals prefer the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion. They trust them more, relax with them better in business and social events, and prefer them more often that not as marriage partners. They are quick to anger at evidence that an out-group is behaving unfairly or receiving undeserved rewards. And they grow hostile to any out group encroaching upon the territory or resources of their in-group."

"The struggle to control vital resources continues globally, and it is growing worse. The problem arose because humanity failed to seize the great opportunity given it at the dawn of the Neolithic era. It might then have halted population growth below the constraining minimum limit. As a species we did the opposite, however. There was no way for us to foresee the consequences of our initial success. We simply took what was given us and continued to multiply and consume in blind obedience to instincts inherited from our humbler, more brutally constrained Paleolithic ancestors."

"Further, the mind consists not just of this inner world but also of the sensations and messages that flow in and out of it from all other parts of the body. To advance from robot to human would be a task of immense technological difficulty. But why should we even wish to try? Even after our machines far exceed our outer mental capacities, they will not have anything resembling human minds. In any case, we do not need such robots, and we will not want them. The biological human mind is our province. With all its quirks, irrationality, and risky productions, and all its conflict and inefficiency, the biological mind is the essence and the very meaning of the human condition."

"With enough population and wealth, the public services of art, sciences, and education can be added - first for the benefit of the elite, then, trickling down, for the general public. The heads of state sit upon a throne, real or virtual. They ally themselves with the high priests, and clothe their authority with rituals of allegiance to the gods."

"The ascent to civilization, from egalitarian band and village to chiefdom to state, has occurred through cultural evolution, not through changes in genes."

"No statistical genetic differences between entire populations have yet been discovered that affect the amygdala and other controlling circuit centers of emotional response. Not is any genetic change known that prescribes average differences between populations in the deep cognitive processing of language and mathematical reasoning - although such may yet be detected.
The stereotypes by which inhabitants of different nations, cities, and villages are often characterized might also have some hereditary basis in fact. However, the evidence suggests that the differences have a historical and cultural origin rather than a genetic one."

"Human nature is not the genes underlying it. They prescribe the developmental rules of the brain, sensory system and behavior that produce human nature."

"Human  nature is the inherited regularities of mental development common to our species. They are the "epigenetic rules," which evolved by the interaction of genetic and cultural evolution that occurred over a long period in deep prehistory.These rules are the genetic biases in the way our senses perceive the world, the symbolic coding by which we represent the world, the options we automatically open to ourselves, and the responses we find easiest and most rewarding to make."

"As epi in the word "epigenetic" implies, the rules of physiological development are not genetically hardwired. They are not beyond conscious control, like the autonomic "behaviors" of heartbeat and breathing. They are less rigid than pure reflexes such as eyeblinks and knee jerks.

"The behaviors created by epigenetic rules are not hardwired like reflexes. It is the epigenetic rules instead that are hardwired, and hence compose the true core of human nature. The behaviors are learned, but the process is what psychologists call "prepared." In prepared learning, we are innately predisposed to learn and thereby reinforce one option over another. We are "counterprepared" to make alternative choices, or even actively to avoid them."

"Their parallel in medical genetics is the "susceptibility" genes of cancer, alcoholism, chronic depression, and many other of the more than a thousand known inherited diseases. Those who possess the genes are not absolutely condemned to acquire the trait, but in certain environments they are more likely than the average person to do so."

"The epigenetic rules of behavior that affect culture, and have arisen by natural selection, act the same way but have the opposite effect. They are the norm, and strong deviations from them are likely to be scrubbed out by either cultural evolution or genetic evolution, or both.

"As defined broadly by both anthropologists and biologists, culture is the combination of traits that distinguishes one group from another. A culture trait is a behavior that is either first invented within a group or else learned from another group, then transmitted among members of the group."

"The elaboration of culture depends upon long-term memory, and in this capacity humans rank far above all animals. The vast quantity stored in our immensely enlarged forebrains makes us consummate storytellers. We summon dreams and recollections of experience from across a lifetime and use them to create scenarios, past and future. We live in our conscious mind with the consequence of our actions, whether real or imagined. Placed out in alternative versions, our inner stories allow us to override immediate desires in favor of delayed pleasure. By long-range planning we defeat, for a while at least, the urging of our emotions. This inner life is why each person is unique and precious. When one dies, an entire library of both experience and imaginings is extinguished."

"What was the driving force that led to the threshold of complex culture? It appears to have been group selection. A group with members who could read intentions and cooperate among themselves while predicting the actions of competing groups, would have an enormous advantage over others less gifted. There was undoubtedly competition among group members, leading to natural selection of traits that gave advantage of one individual over another. But more important for the species entering new environments and competing with powerful rivals were unity and cooperation within the group. Morality, conformity, religious fervor, and fighting ability combined with imagination and memory to produce the winner."

"The genetic basis of human language acquisition," the researchers conclude, "did not coevolve with language, but primarily predates the emergence of language. As suggested by Darwin, the fit between language and its underlying mechanisms arose because language has evolved to fit the human brain, rather that the reverse."

"What genes prescribe or assist in prescribing is not one trait as opposed to another but the frequency of traits and the pattern they form as cultural innovation made them available. The expression of the genes may be plastic, allowing a society to choose one or more traits from among a multiplicity of choices. Or else it may not be plastic, allowing only one trait to be chosen by all societies."

"Are people innately good, but corruptible by the forces of evil? Or, are they instead innately wicked, and redeemable only by the forces of good? People are both. And so it will forever be unless we change our genes, because the human dilemma was foreordained in the way our species evolved, and therefore an unchangeable part of human nature. Human beings and their social orders are intrinsically imperfectible and fortunately so. In a constantly changing world, we need the flexibility that only imperfection provides."

"Nevertheless, an iron rule exists in genetic social evolution. It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. The victory can never be complete: the balance of selection pressures cannot move to either extreme. If individual selection we to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selections were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies"

"coercive empathy, meaning that unless people are psychopaths, they automatically feel the pain of others."

"Human beings are prone to be moral - do the right thing, hold back, give aid to others, sometimes even at personal risk - because  natural selection has favored those interactions of group members benefitting the group as a whole."

"The learning of complex information and its storage in memory are deliberate, painstaking processes, but the loss of information seems to take place with no trouble at all."

As the seventeenth-century essayist Francois de La Rochefoucauld observed, "Modesty is due to a fear of incurring the well-merited envy and contempt which pursues those who are intoxicated by good fortune. It is a useless display of strength of mind; and the modesty of those who attain the highest eminence is due to a desire to appear even greater that their position."

"indirect reciprocity, by which a reputation for altruism and cooperativeness accrues to an individual, even if the actions that build it are no more than ordinary."

"The power of organized religions is based upon their contribution to social order and personal security, not to the search for truth. The goal of religions is submission to the will and common good of the tribe."

"The illogic of religions is not a weakness in them, but their essential strength.... For outsiders openly to doubt such dogmas is regarded an invasion of privacy and a personal insult. For insiders to raise doubt is punishable heresy."

"Religious faith offers the psychological security that uniquely comes from belonging to a group, and a divinely blessed one at that. At least within the immense throngs of Abrahamic faithful around the world, it promises eternal life after death, and in heaven, not hell - especially if we choose the right denomination within the many available, and pledge to faithfully practice its rituals."

"Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about reality external to our bodies, is pitifully small."

"Humanity is a biological species in a biological world. In every function of our bodies and mind and at every level, we are exquisitely well adapted to live on this particular planet. We belong in the biosphere of our birth. Although exalted in many ways, we remain an animal species of the global fauna. Our lives are restrained by the two laws of biology: all of life's entities and processes are obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry; and all of life's entities and processes have arisen through evolution and by natural selection."

"The more the physical processes of consciousness have been defined by scientific research, the less has been left to any phenomenon that can be intuitively labeled as free will. We are free as independent beings, but our decisions are not free of all the organic processes that created our personal brains and minds. Free will therefore appears to be ultimately biological."