Steve Stewart-Williams Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

Most effects in psychology are relatively unimportant. That is, most variables, considered in isolation, have relatively little impact on behavior. This doesn't mean... that we should all abandon psychology and become plumbers instead. The small magnitude of most effects in psychology is itself a discovery of psychology. One might argue, in fact, that it is one of the great metadiscoveries of the field. Most variables have little impact, and thus most of the phenomena studied by psychologists are products of a multiplicity of variables.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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.

Steve Stewart-Williams
It is therefore a curious fact that our dominant mating system is more like the typical mating system of birds than that of most mammals, including our nearest relatives, the Great Apes.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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.

Steve Stewart-Williams
To the extent that we accept this view, we effectively mistake ourselves for highly dimorphic animals such as peacocks or deer.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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
Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, mind is not the cause of the order in nature; mind is an example of the order in nature - something to be explained rather than the explanation for everything else.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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
Bertrand Russell once pointed out that 'People are more unwilling to give up the word God than to give up the idea for which the word has hitherto stood'. Evolutionary theory may not persuade everyone to give up the word. However, to the extent that it encourages people to alter its meaning beyond recognition, it could be argued that God has nonetheless been a casualty of Darwin's theory.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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
The idea that humans form pair bonds, and that males often invest in their young, has a long history in biological anthropology. Early incarnations of the idea were criticized for painting an overly simplistic picture, according to which Man the Hunter provisioned his dependent wife and children with meat in a stable nuclear family, suspiciously reminiscent of a 1950s-style Western family. However, with appropriate amendments and qualifications, the idea that pair bonding and biparental care are a central part of our evolutionary endowment appears to be viable.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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
In some domains, women are more sexually selected than men; one could say in these cases that women have the larger peacock's tail. An example can be found in the domain of physical attractiveness. Women are typically rated as better looking than men, by both men and women. The difference is plausibly a consequence of the fact that, although both sexes care about good looks in a mate, on average, men care somewhat more. This means that, since this sex difference first evolved, there has been a somewhat stronger selection pressure on women than men for physical attractiveness — the opposite of what we find in peacocks.

Steve Stewart-Williams
If men in our evolutionary past did not invest in offspring, they would not have evolved strict mate preferences and thus women would be as drab as peahens. The fact that women are not as drab as peahens suggests a long history of male mate choice, which in turn suggests a long history of pair bonding and high male parental investment.

Steve Stewart-Williams
However, the absence of perfect concealment does not imply the presence of active advertisement, and if fertility were advertised in humans, we would presumably not need to employ sophisticated experimental methods to demonstrate its detectability.

Steve Stewart-Williams
Most male gorillas either have a harem or do not have a mate; in contrast, most men who have more than zero mates have only one. This means that, whereas only harem-holding male gorillas contribute to the gene pool of the next generation, most human males who contribute to the gene pool do so in the context of a pair bond. Consequently, our evolved sexual nature has been shaped more by pair bonding than by harem polygyny.

Steve Stewart-Williams
The reproductive benefits of polygyny were so great for genes located in male bodies that the male mind might still have evolved to take advantage of those opportunities, if and when they did arise. As a result, men may harbor strong polygamous desires — much stronger than women's — even if these desires are frustrated for most men throughout most of their lives.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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.

Steve Stewart-Williams
Our claim is not that pair bonding is humanity's singular mating pattern. Our claim instead is simply that the pair bond is the most common setting for sex and reproduction in our species, that it has been for a long time, and that this has left a deep imprint on our evolved nature.

Steve Stewart-Williams
A Ku Klux Klan member would be mortified to learn that he was actually a Black man. Many people's reaction to learning that they are actually animals, or actually apes, is the same.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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
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.

Steve Stewart-Williams
When you contemplate the universe, part of the universe becomes conscious of itself.

Steve Stewart-Williams
Given that sociobiological theories offer an explanation for the cross-species trend [in sex differences], whereas SRT [Social Role Theory] does not, it would be rash to accept Wood and Eagly's conclusion that sociobiological theories are outmoded or outdated.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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
A truly integrative model of sex differences would weave together sociobiological theories and sociocultural theories. SRT [Social Role Theory] simply rejects the sociobiological theories. Indeed, to a large extent, the theory is a reaction against those theories — an attempt to frame an alternative explanation for the findings of evolutionary psychology. It seems reasonable to conclude, then, that Wood and Eagly's biosocial theory is essentially a traditional social theory disguised as a biosocial theory.

Steve Stewart-Williams
It is not clear that people have fully taken on board the idea that humans are animals. If they had, then perhaps academic disciplines such as sociology and anthropology would be viewed as specialist branches of zoology; medical doctors would be viewed as a subtype of veterinarians (one that specializes in tending to the health needs of just one species); human rights would be viewed as a subset of animal rights; and the socialization of children would be viewed as one example of the training or domestication of animals (making parents and teachers a subtype of animal trainers).

Steve Stewart-Williams