Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.
Interpretation
Humans have the ability to make choices that can go against natural evolutionary trends.
In this quote, Jared Diamond suggests that unlike other animals, humans possess a remarkable capability to make decisions and take actions that do not follow the dictates of natural evolution. This ability allows us to challenge and alter the course of our development, for better or worse, through conscious choices, ethics, culture, and technology, which can lead to both progress and potential pitfalls.
In practice
During a lecture on human evolution, you might cite this quote to discuss the unique decision-making abilities of humans.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean β once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
I have always grappled with the fact that the truth cannot be packaged into one soul or one mind alone. It is something fragmented: there is so much to it; the truth is varied and scattered across the world.
why does what was beautiful shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?
Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling.
Some people take the view that the universe is simply there, and it runs along - it's a bit as though it just sort of computes, and we happen by accident to find ourselves in this thing. I don't think that's a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe.
Even such isTime, which takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with age and dust, Who in the dark and silent grave When we have wandered all our ways Shuts up the story of our days, And from which earth, and grave, and dust The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.
A man is as much affected pleasurably or painfully by the image of a thing past or future as by the image of a thing present.
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