590) Between us and the australopithecine [...] stand a few million years: 100,000, maybe 200,000 generations. That may not sound like much. But it has taken only around 5,000 generations to turn a wolf into a chihuahua - and, at the same time, along a separate line, into a Saint Bernard.

Robert Wright
The Moral Animal (1994)

591) If utilitarians ran the world [...] [t]he courts would ask two questions: (a) Did the defendant commit the crime? and (b) What is the practical effect of punishment - on the criminal's own future behavior, and on the behavior of other would-be criminals?

Robert Wright
The Moral Animal (1994)

592) The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like [in discussions of crime and punishment] is the attribution to higher, detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil.

Martin Daly and Margo Wilson
Homicide (1988)
quoted by Robert Wright in
The Moral Animal (1994)

593) In games where chance plays a role, we tend to chalk up our losses to the luck of the draw and our victories to cleverness.

Robert Wright
The Moral Animal (1994)

594) No one who actively seeks power is to be trusted. Leaders arise out of example and emulation. If someone is successful at growing corn, he is emulated and to that extent is a leader. If someone knows many verses to a curing chant, he is respected for that accomplishment and his high status as a "singer" is considerable. Politicking, handshaking [...] have no place in traditional Navajo society.

Daniel G. Freedman
"Cross-Cultural Notes on Status Hierarchies" in
Dominance Relations: An Ethological View of Human
Social Conflicts and Social Intercourse (1980),
Donald R. Omark, F.F. Strayer, and D.G. Freedman, eds.
quoted by Robert Wright in
The Moral Animal (1994)

595) Theories are a dime a dozen. Even strikingly elegant theories, which, like the theory of parental investment, seem able to explain much with little, often turn out to be worthless. There is justice in the complaint (from creationists, among others) that some theories about the evolution of animal traits are "just so stories" - plausible, but nothing more. Still, it is possible to separate the merely plausible from the compelling. In some sciences, testing theories is so straightforward that it is only a slight exaggeration (though it is always, in a certain strict sense, an exaggeration) to talk of theories being "proved." In others, corroboration is roundabout - an ongoing, gradual process by which confidence approaches the threshold of consensus, or fails to. Studying the evolutionary roots of human nature, or of anything else, is a science of the second sort. About each theory we ask questions, and the answers nourish belief or doubt or ambivalence.

Robert Wright
The Moral Animal (1994)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 705 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.