Steve Stewart-Williams - Human Quotes

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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
If we decide – and this is our decision; it's not imposed on us from above – if we decide that reducing the amount of suffering in the world is a good ethical principle to live by, then it becomes entirely unjustified and arbitrary to extend this principle to human beings but not also to extend it to other animals capable of suffering. Why should the suffering of nonhumans be less important than that of humans? Surely a universe with less suffering is better than one with more, regardless of whether the locus of suffering is a human being or not, a rational being or not, a member of the moral community or not. Suffering is suffering, and these other variables are morally irrelevant.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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).

Steve Stewart-Williams
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.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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