Steve Stewart-Williams - People 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
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?

Steve Stewart-Williams
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.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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.

Steve Stewart-Williams
This is especially important when addressing less statistically savvy audiences. Such audiences could perhaps be encouraged to think of two normal distributions, one representing males and the other females. Instead of imagining that natural selection creates two distinct psychological types — a male type and a female type, described by the mean values for each group — they could be encouraged to imagine that natural selection pushes the male and female distributions closer together or further apart. This simple expedient may help people to visualize the effects of natural selection on average sex differences without at the same time losing sight of the variation within each sex.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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.

Steve Stewart-Williams
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.

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
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
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