Biology Inspirational Quotes

We're so self-important. So arrogant. Everybody's going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save the snails. And the supreme arrogance? Save the planet! Are these people kidding? Save the planet? We don't even know how to take care of ourselves; we haven't learned how to care for one another. We're gonna save the fuckin' planet? . . . And, by the way, there's nothing wrong with the planet in the first place. The planet is fine. The people are fucked! Compared with the people, the planet is doin' great. It's been here over four billion years . . . The planet isn't goin' anywhere, folks. We are! We're goin' away. Pack your shit, we're goin' away. And we won't leave much of a trace. Thank God for that. Nothing left. Maybe a little Styrofoam. The planet will be here, and we'll be gone. Another failed mutation; another closed-end biological mistake.

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.

We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.

Our beliefs control our bodies, our minds, and thus our lives...

In the biological sense, race does not exist.

We are not victims of our genes, but masters of our fates, able to create lives overflowing with peace, happiness, and love.

Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly.

Life is nasty, brutish, and short. Death is easy.

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive. We

Put bluntly, the struggle that so many companies have to differentiate or communicate their true value to the outside world is not a business problem, it's a biology problem. And just like a person struggling to put her emotions into words, we rely on metaphors, imagery and analogies in an attempt to communicate how we feel. Absent the proper language to share our deep emotions, our purpose, cause or belief, we tell stories. We use symbols. We create tangible things for those who believe what we believe to point to and say, "That's why I'm inspired." If done properly, that's what marketing, branding and products and services become; a way for organizations to communicate to the outside world. Communicate clearly and you shall be understood.

Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads. Now, your Honor, you have been a boy; I have been a boy. And we have known other boys. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place. Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows? ...No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is not right. How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They did not reason; they could not reason; they committed the most foolish, most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and they put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads.... Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood. . . . I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain

I think too often we forget that girls can like sport; we are not biologically programmed to detest it, we are - in the main - conditioned against it. But shouldn’t we try to change that?

Second, nothing about adolescence can be understood outside the context of delayed frontocortical maturation. If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the frontal cortex is still working out the assembly instructions, we’ve just explained why adolescents are so frustrating, great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive, self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible, and world changing. Think about this—adolescence and early adulthood are the times when someone is most likely to kill, be killed, leave home forever, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, devote themselves to the needy, become addicted, marry outside their group, transform physics, have hideous fashion taste, break their neck recreationally, commit their life to God, mug an old lady, or be convinced that all of history has converged to make this moment the most consequential, the most fraught with peril and promise, the most demanding that they get involved and make a difference. In other words, it’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex.

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity- its envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.

Contrary to what many of us are told, Israel’s origin stories weren’t designed to answer scientific, twenty-first-century questions about the beginning of the universe or the biological evolution of human beings, but rather were meant to answer then-pressing, ancient questions about the nature of God and God’s relationship to creation.

It seems logical to suppose that history's pattern reflects innate differences among people themselves. Of course, we're taught that it's not polite to say so in public. We see in our daily lives that some of the conquered peoples continue to form an underclass, centuries after the conquests or slave imports took place. We're told that this too is to be attributed not to any biological shortcomings but to social disadvantages and limited opportunities. Nevertheless, we have to wonder. We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in peoples' status. We're assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world's inequalities as of A.D. 1500 is wrong, but we're not told what the correct explanation is. Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book.

For all the accomplishments of molecular biology, we still can't tell a live cat from a dead cat.

She was lionized, canonized, Nobel Prized (and was wonderfully inspirational, as disinterested in acclaim as in her ostracism, working until her nineties).

​Everything that makes you, you, is a biologically existential expression of your entire brain.

Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.

At its heart, Codependency is a set of behaviors developed to manage the anxiety that comes when our primary attachments are formed with people who are inconsistent or unavailable in their response to us. Our anxiety-based responses to life can include over-reactivity, image management, unrealistic beliefs about our limits, and attempts to control the reality of others to the point where we lose our boundaries, self-esteem, and even our own reality. Ultimately, Codependency is a chronic stress disease, which can devastate our immune system and lead to systemic and even life-threatening illness.

Have you ever stopped to contemplate how you might respond biologically, physically, emotionally and spiritually to the various experiences in your life? Is it possible that your thoughts become your biology? I believe wholeheartedly that they can.

I know some very intelligent philosophers, not at all dogmatic, who believe that “science” cannot introduce the concept of finality in the analysis and explanation of vital processes, but that “philosophy” equally cannot arrive at an adequate concept of organic life without introducing finality. It is not a question here of moral or other values, but rather of a concept peculiar to philosophical biology as opposed to biology. Indeed, one such philosopher concluded, drawing inspiration from Merleau-Ponty, that science can “never” give an adequate explanation of the concept of the “whole structure” of the organism.

Belief is not a luxury, it is a biological necessity of the mind.

Struggle was the explanation behind all the most troubling biological mysteries: species differentiation, species extinction, and species transmutation. Struggle explained everything

Trees live in symbiosis with hyphae (fungus/mold roots). A tea spoon of dirt contains kilometers of these roots. One species can spread throughout entire forests over centuries. They exchange nutrients with trees, along with information about insects, drought and other dangers. It's like a 'wood wide web'.

The future of the next generation relies on astronomers obtaining a full understanding of the rapidly changing human environmental conditions and the halting of biologically toxic corporate government policies. The overloading of the electromagnetic environment is one of these disastrous policies that must stop.

Usually the term phobia refers to the psychological fear of the human mind from something that poses a threat. But when a species starts using the term fear against a biological portion of itself, there is nothing more demeaning than this.

History, Geology, Psychology, Philosophy, Chemistry, Physics, Theology, Mathematics, Technology, Sociology, Biology, and the list goes on and on. If all this body of knowledge exist for human consumption, why would I specialize in only one field?

I found myself drawn to biology, with all its frustrating yet fascinating complexities. When I was twelve, I remember reading about axolotls, which are basically a species of salamander that has evolved to remain permanently in the aquatic larval stage. They manage to keep their gills (rather than trading them in for lungs, like salamanders or frogs) by shutting down metamorphosis and becoming sexually mature in the water. I was completely flabbergasted when I read that by simply giving these creatures the “metamorphosis hormone” (thyroid extract) you could make the axolotl revert back into the extinct, land-dwelling, gill-less adult ancestor that it had evolved from. You could go back in time, resurrecting a prehistoric animal that no longer exists anywhere on Earth. I also knew that for some mysterious reason adult salamanders don’t regenerate amputated legs but the tadpoles do. My curiosity took me one step further, to the question of whether an axolotl—which is, after all, an “adult tadpole”—would retain its ability to regenerate a lost leg just as a modern frog tadpole does. And how many other axolotl-like beings exist on Earth, I wondered, that could be restored to their ancestral forms by simply giving them hormones? Could humans—who are after all apes that have evolved to retain many juvenile qualities—be made to revert to an ancestral form, perhaps something resembling Homo erectus, using the appropriate cocktail of hormones? My mind reeled out a stream of questions and speculations, and I was hooked on biology forever. I found mysteries and possibilities everywhere.

Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all 'faith' is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: 'By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.' It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. 'Faith' is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. 'Faith' is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence. But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence. And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence. Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe? Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?

As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children ('as much as they can understand') there are lies-to-bosses ('as much as they need to know') lies-to-patients ('they won't worry about what they don't know') and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. 'Yes, but you needed to understand that,' they are told, 'so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true.' Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored.

The antidote, in so far as it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective. What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos - all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.

I do not write every day. I write to the questions and issues before me. I write to deadlines. I write out of my passions. And I write to make peace with my own contradictory nature. For me, writing is a spiritual practice. A small bowl of water sits on my desk, a reminder that even if nothing is happening on the page, something is happening in the room--evaporation. And I always light a candle when I begin to write, a reminder that I have now entered another realm, call it the realm of the Spirit. I am mindful that when one writes, one leaves this world and enters another. My books are collages made from journals, research, and personal experience. I love the images rendered in journal entries, the immediacy that is captured on the page, the handwritten notes. I love the depth of ideas and perspective that research brings to a story, be it biological or anthropological studies or the insights brought to the page by the scholarly work of art historians. When I go into a library, I feel like I am a sleuth looking to solve a mystery. I am completely inspired by the pursuit of knowledge through various references. I read newpapers voraciously. I love what newspapers say about contemporary culture. And then you go back to your own perceptions, your own words, and weigh them against all you have brought together. I am interested in the kaleidoscope of ideas, how you bring many strands of thought into a book and weave them together as one piece of coherent fabric, while at the same time trying to create beautiful language in the service of the story. This is the blood work of the writer. Writing is also about a life engaged. And so, for me, community work, working in the schools or with grassroots conservation organizations is another critical component of my life as a writer. I cannot separate the writing life from a spiritual life, from a life as a teacher or activist or my life intertwined with family and the responsibilities we carry within our own homes. Writing is daring to feel what nurtures and breaks our hearts. Bearing witness is its own form of advocacy. It is a dance with pain and beauty.

I hope to inspire you to recognize that your reason for existence is to pursue the things that excite you the most. The best thing you can do--for yourself and everyone else--is to act on the things you're most passionate about. When you do, you'll shine, and everyone else will see that brilliance. On a biological level, the mirror neutrons of the people around you will activate. They will recognize that they can also follow their dreams and accomplish things they have always wanted to accomplish. On a spiritual level, their souls will remember their reason for being.

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive. We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have. This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering. So no—our own pain and misery aren’t a bug of human evolution; they’re a feature.

Michael Mendizza and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s inspiring book Magical Parent-Magical Child

All personalities can be measured according to two or three basic biologically determined dimensions.

The work of both Piaget and Kinsey suggests that while biology is always a dominant influence on behavior, environment is critical to its expression. Even

You can’t say you love man as an individual if you have not dealt with the person’s complex personality, his or her unfamiliar habits, disturbing impulses and biological makeup.

Every animal is biologically designed by Nature to do wrong in return. It takes a human being to not do wrong in return.

All our sentiments - religious, romantic or any other - are born in the neurons.

The origin of self is self not wanting to be by itself. The purpose of self is companionship. Love so love.

Biology enables, culture forbids

There are more things in our biology that make us one, than there are to set us apart.

A neural network, also known as an artificial neural network, is a type of machine learning algorithm that is inspired by the biological brain.

Suffering is biologically useful. It is nature's preferred agent for inspiring change.

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.” ― Brené Brown ― The Gifts of Imperfection

Biomimicry is not meant to be taken as an end-all, be-all; it serves as inspiration within a set of limitations. Evolution does not have an inventive mind like engineers, and animals have biological constraints such as the need to eat, reproduce, and defecate—necessities our products and machines can go without. However, biological designs can provide fresh solutions to old paradigms.

Have faith in yourself. All the power is in your biology already. Be conscious of that power and bring it out. Remember, truth is indestructible, virtue is indestructible, purity is indestructible.

Judaism teaches us the sentence, “The Lord is One,” is not exclusive to Adonai, but rather inclusive of everything, everything, everything! Did you get that? Everything is One. This means far more than the teaching we are all connected. That teaching could be speaking biologically, or even atomically. I am talking about more than even the microscopic connection we all share. More than our DNA.

we still have a long way to go in terms of creating a rock-solid science that could match the certainty of, say, physics and biology. In the meantime, we all need a personal theory of what makes people tick.

I’m lying on the ground looking up at the branches of an oak tree. Dappled light is shining through the canopy, the leaves whisper ancient incantations. This tree, in its living stage, rooted in sights and sounds that I’ll never know, has witnessed extinctions and wars, loves and losses. I wish we could translate the language of trees – hear their voices, know their stories. They host such an astonishing amount of life – there are thousands of species harbouring in and on and under this mighty giant. And I believe trees are like us, or they inspire the better parts of human nature. If only we could be connected in the way this oak tree is connected with its ecosystem.

Big Hearted offers a glimpse into the lives of large families of all sorts: blended, biological, foster, adoptive, and inter-generational. These families may lack designer clothing, but they are blessed with a superabundance of people to love.

As the leader of the international Human Genome Project, which had labored mightily over more than a decade to reveal this DNA sequence, I stood beside President Bill Clinton in the East Room of the White House... Clinton's speech began by comparing this human sequence map to the map that Meriwether Lewis had unfolded in front of President Thomas Jefferson in that very room nearly two hundred years earlier. Clinton said, "Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind." But the part of his speech that most attracted public attention jumped from the scientific perspective to the spiritual. "Today," he said, "we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift." Was I, a rigorously trained scientist, taken aback at such a blatantly religious reference by the leader of the free world at a moment such as this? Was I tempted to scowl or look at the floor in embarrassment? No, not at all. In fact I had worked closely with the president's speechwriter in the frantic days just prior to this announcement, and had strongly endorsed the inclusion of this paragraph. When it came time for me to add a few words of my own, I echoed this sentiment: "It's a happy day for the world. It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God." What was going on here? Why would a president and a scientist, charged with announcing a milestone in biology and medicine, feel compelled to invoke a connection with God? Aren't the scientific and spiritual worldviews antithetical, or shouldn't they at least avoid appearing in the East Room together? What were the reasons for invoking God in these two speeches? Was this poetry? Hypocrisy? A cynical attempt to curry favor from believers, or to disarm those who might criticize this study of the human genome as reducing humankind to machinery? No. Not for me. Quite the contrary, for me the experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship.

Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired. Evolution has produced chemical compounds exquisitely organized to accomplish the most complicated and delicate of tasks. Many organic chemists viewing crystal structures of enzyme systems or nucleic acids and knowing the marvels of specificity of the immune systems must dream of designing and synthesizing simpler organic compounds that imitate working features of these naturally occurring compounds.

All the so-called philosophical notion of “love without attachment” or “detached love” are biologically non-existent on this planet. We humans are biologically designed through millions of years of evolution to grow attachment. Love cannot survive without attachment.

There is really no nice way to put it; the average Christian is intellectually lazy and embarrassingly ignorant. The vast majority have never read a single book on Church History, Textual Criticism, Theology, Biology, Psychology, biblical languages, or other religions. Their beliefs are a nice little get-out-of-hell-free card that makes them feel good about death and suffering in this life, and they simple do not care to examine it at any greater depth. They go to church to sing songs, hear an inspiring message, and talk to their friends. That’s about it.

So if you understand this model, then you should agree with me that your new thoughts should lead to new choices. New choices should lead to new behaviors. New behaviors should lead to new experiences. New experiences should create new emotions, and new emotions and feelings should inspire you to think in new ways. That’s called “evolution.” And your personal reality and your biology—your brain circuitry, your internal chemistry, your genetic expression, and ultimately your health—should change as a result of this new personality, this new state of being. And it all seems to start with a thought. A

When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences. The parables of such scientific overreach are well-known: foreign animals, introduced to control pests, become pests in their own right; the raising of smokestacks, meant to alleviate urban pollution, releases particulate effluents higher in the air and exacerbates pollution; stimulating blood formation, meant to prevent heart attacks, thickens the blood and results in an increased risk of blood clots in the heart. But when nonscientists overestimate [italicized, sic] complexity- 'No one can possibly crack this [italicized, sic] code" - they fall into the trap of unanticipated consequences. In the early 1950s , a common trope among some biologists was that the genetic code would be so context dependent- so utterly determined by a particular cell in a particular organism and so horribly convoluted- that deciphering it would be impossible. The truth turned out to be quite the opposite: just one molecule carries the code, and just one code pervades the biological world. If we know the code, we can intentionally alter it in organisms, and ultimately in humans. Similarly, in the 1960s, many doubted that gene-cloning technologies could so easily shuttle genes between species. by 1980, making a mammalian protein in a bacterial cell, or a bacterial protein in a mammalian cell, was not just feasible, it was in Berg's words, rather "ridiculously simple." Species were specious. "Being natural" was often "just a pose.

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity - it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud .

Biological death is only a mechanical problem, it can be solved and man can live millions of years! Do not believe in life after death! Seek for the life within the life! The medusa of Turritopsis nutricula is biologically immortal and this little creature is a big inspiration for us! He who thinks positively reaches his target!

What psychology failed to appreciate, Frankl believed, is the multidimensional nature of human beings. He did not deny that biology or conditioning shapes us, but he also insisted that there is room for free will—to choose to develop certain values or a particular course in life, or to retain our dignity in difficult situations.

How do we learn? Is there a better way? What can we predict? Can we trust what we’ve learned? Rival schools of thought within machine learning have very different answers to these questions. The main ones are five in number, and we’ll devote a chapter to each. Symbolists view learning as the inverse of deduction and take ideas from philosophy, psychology, and logic. Connectionists reverse engineer the brain and are inspired by neuroscience and physics. Evolutionaries simulate evolution on the computer and draw on genetics and evolutionary biology. Bayesians believe learning is a form of probabilistic inference and have their roots in statistics. Analogizers learn by extrapolating from similarity judgments and are influenced by psychology and mathematical optimization.

From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning. From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge. And from mastery of the novel and beautiful world awaiting every child comes self-confidence. The growth of a naturalist is like the growth of a musician or athlete: excellence for the talented, lifelong enjoyment for the rest, benefit for humanity.

Much of the geographical work of the past hundred years... has either explicitly or implicitly taken its inspiration from biology, and in particular Darwin. Many of the original Darwinians, such as Hooker, Wallace, Huxley, Bates, and Darwin himself, were actively concerned with geographical exploration, and it was largely facts of geographical distribution in a spatial setting which provided Darwin with the germ of his theory.

Once, during a concert of cathedral organ music, as I sat getting gooseflesh amid that tsunami of sound, I was struck with a thought: for a medieval peasant, this must have been the loudest human-made sound they ever experienced, awe-inspiring in now-unimaginable ways. No wonder they signed up for the religion being proffered. And now we are constantly pummeled with sounds that dwarf quaint organs. Once, hunter-gatherers might chance upon honey from a beehive and thus briefly satisfy a hardwired food craving. And now we have hundreds of carefully designed commercial foods that supply a burst of sensation unmatched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world.

You are the heirs of infinite love and light. Come out my friend. Come out from the narrow lanes of darkness. Come out into the vivacious light of the day where all the glory resides. Come out, O lions, and shake off the ancient mysticism and prejudices. You are the most fascinating expression of Mother Nature. Your soul is the expression of the whole Universe. All the power in the universe is born with you in your biology. Recognize them, realize them and ultimately utilize them in the pursuit of spreading love, harmony and peace.

... the reason why we find some things intuitively easy to grasp and others hard, is that our brains are themselves evolved organs: on-board computers, evolved to help us survive in a world (...) where the objects that mattered to our survival were neither very large nor very small; a world where things either stood still or moved slowly compared with the speed of light; and where the very improbable could safely be treated as impossible. Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn't need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive.

At a cellular level of the human mind, Islamophobia is not really a matter of social stigma, rather it is a natural biological fear response of the general human mind, conditioned through countless pairings between terrorist attacks (unconditioned stimulus) and their apparent association with Islam (conditioned stimulus). Hence, Islamophobia cannot be eradicated completely, unless that pairing is severed and thereafter the conditioned stimulus of Islam is paired with something optimistic such as the heartwarming works of the 13th century Persian Muslim poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi.

Rest too long after an injury and your system powers down, preparing you for a peaceful exit. Fight your way back to your feet, however, and you trigger that magical ON switch that speeds healing hormones to everything you need to get stronger: your bones, brain, organs, ligaments, immune system, even the digestive bacteria in your belly, all get a molecular upgrade from exercise. For that, you can thank your hunter-gatherer ancestors, who evolved to stay alive by staying on the move. Today, movement-as-medicine is a biological truth for survivors of cancer, surgery, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, brain injuries, depression, you name it.

As Wundt is read today only by those with a specialized interest, he is not included in the list of classics. American philosopher William James (1842–1910), however, also considered a “founding father” of modern psychology, is still widely read. The brother of novelist Henry James, he trained in medicine and then transferred to philosophy, but like Wundt felt that the workings of the mind deserved to be a separate field of study. Building on a theory by German neuroanatomist Franz Gall that all thoughts and mental processes were biological, James helped to spread the remarkable idea that one’s self—with all its hopes, loves, desires, and fears—was contained in the soft gray matter within the walls of the skull.

The educator must be as one inspired by a deep worship of life, and must, through this reverence, respect, while he observes with human interest, the development of the child life. Now, child life is not an abstraction; it is the life of individual children. There exists only one real biological manifestation: the living individual; and toward single individuals, one by one observed, education must direct itself. By education must be understood the active help given to the normal expansion of the life of the child. The child is a body which grows, and a soul which de- develops,–these two forms, physiological and psychic, have one eternal font, life itself. We must neither mar nor stifle the mysterious powers which lie within these two forms of growth, but we must await from them the manifestations which we know will succeed one another.

Scheherazade may lack the mobility and appetites of male cultural heroes, but she transcends the narrow domestic space of the bedroom through her expansive narrative reach and embraces bold defiance as she sets about remaking the values of the culture she inhabits, using words alone. She not only arouses curiosity but also turns herself into a storytelling transvaluation machine, for she understands at the deepest level that words can change you. Behind her transformative art lurks the ruse of the disempowered, and Scheherazade, despite the physical constraints placed on her, uses language in ways that reveal what the philosopher J. L. Austin referred to as its “perlocutionary” power, its ability to persuade, teach, or inspire. Scheherazade operates at a level that is culturally productive and also biologically reproductive. Creative and procreative, she produces children with Shahriyar and also sets the stage in powerful ways for the literary progeny that spring from her story—the many female storytellers whom we will encounter in the chapters that follow.

If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the frontal cortex is still working out the assembly instructions, we’ve just explained why adolescents are so frustrating, great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive, self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible, and world changing. Think about this—adolescence and early adulthood are the times when someone is most likely to kill, be killed, leave home forever, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, devote themselves to the needy, become addicted, marry outside their group, transform physics, have hideous fashion taste, break their neck recreationally, commit their life to God, mug an old lady, or be convinced that all of history has converged to make this moment the most consequential, the most fraught with peril and promise, the most demanding that they get involved and make a difference. In other words, it’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex.

Here’s another example that some overworked mothers might find inspiring. We saw in Chapter 2 that being the one who produces the sperm doesn’t dictate, by universal principle, that parenting is out of the portfolio. However, in the case of the rat (as with most mammals), the balance of trade-offs make it more adaptive for males to leave parenting to the mothers. This might tempt us to take it for granted that males, by virtue of their sex, therefore lack the capacity to care for pups. We might well assume that, through sexual selection, they lost or never acquired the biological capacity to parent: that it isn’t “in” their genes, hormones, or neural circuits. That it isn’t in their male nature. But bear in mind that one reliable feature of a male rat’s developmental system is a female rat that does the child care. So what happens when a scientist, under controlled laboratory conditions, simulates a first-wave feminist rodent movement by placing males in cages with pups but no females? Before too long you will see the male “mothering” the infant, in much the same way that females do. Feminism: 1. Sexual selection: nil.

The essentialist notion of “bad blood” is one of several biological metaphors inspired by a fear of the revenge of the cradle. People anticipate that if they leave even a few of a defeated enemy alive, the remnants will multiply and cause trouble down the line. Human cognition often works by analogy, and the concept of an irksome collection of procreating beings repeatedly calls to mind the concept of vermin.105 Perpetrators of genocide the world over keep rediscovering the same metaphors to the point of cliché. Despised people are rats, snakes, maggots, lice, flies, parasites, cockroaches, or (in parts of the world where they are pests) monkeys, baboons, and dogs.106 “Kill the nits and you will have no lice,” wrote an English commander in Ireland in 1641, justifying an order to kill thousands of Irish Catholics.107 “A nit would make a louse,” recalled a Californian settler leader in 1856 before slaying 240 Yuki in revenge for their killing of a horse.108 “Nits make lice,” said Colonel John Chivington before the Sand Creek Massacre, which killed hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864.109 Cankers, cancers, bacilli, and viruses are other insidious biological agents that lend themselves as figures of speech in the poetics of genocide. When it came to the Jews, Hitler mixed his metaphors, but they were always biological: Jews were viruses; Jews were bloodsucking parasites; Jews were a mongrel race; Jews had poisonous blood.110

What If God Is a Creep? What if God is a creep who wishes He was taller who didn't get the girl who picks on people not His own size? What if God laughed when Jesus had second thoughts? What if His sense of order is no more complex than kids playing King of the Hill or Smear the Queer? What if God is really a creep who beats His wife embezzles when He can and jerks off to violent porn? Perhaps God put Darin on earth to help us understand that the very traits of man which survive the longest and determine the fittest are God's own favorite attributes? Maybe He's a boss who expects favors a professor who makes others feel stupid a witness obstructing justice. What if God is really just a creep? Maybe Machiavelli was His inspired son and The Prince remains our most sacred text. What if Hitler sits at God's right hand tended by a heavenly host of bigots, bullies, soldiers and other serial killers who look to an angel name Manson for advice. A God capable of biological brilliance and genetic genius is no more likely to care about justice and kindness than His creations are. Why assume that God likes women any more than men do? Why imagine He wouldn't hurt His children? God's morality might be just as steeped in struggle as accented by abuse as spiced with exploitation and as baked with brutality as our own common recipes. Drink up. One taste and you are in Heaven. If God really is a creep that certainly would explain a lot.

Once, during a concert of cathedral organ music, as I sat getting gooseflesh amid that tsunami of sound, I was struck with a thought: for a medieval peasant, this must have been the loudest human-made sound they ever experienced, awe-inspiring in now-unimaginable ways. No wonder they signed up for the religion being proffered. And now we are constantly pummeled with sounds that dwarf quaint organs. Once, hunter-gatherers might chance upon honey from a beehive and thus briefly satisfy a hardwired food craving. And now we have hundreds of carefully designed commercial foods that supply a burst of sensation unmatched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world. An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation.90 This has two consequences. First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity. If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.

Certain shapes and patterns hover over different moments in time, haunting and inspiring the individuals living through those periods. The epic clash and subsequent resolution of the dialectic animated the first half of the nineteenth century; the Darwinian and social reform movements scattered web imagery through the second half of the century. The first few decades of the twentieth century found their ultimate expression in the exuberant anarchy of the explosion, while later decades lost themselves in the faceless regimen of the grid. You can see the last ten years or so as a return to those Victorian webs, though I suspect the image that has been burned into our retinas over the past decade is more prosaic: windows piled atop one another on a screen, or perhaps a mouse clicking on an icon. These shapes are shorthand for a moment in time, a way of evoking an era and its peculiar obsessions. For individuals living within these periods, the shapes are cognitive building blocks, tools for thought: Charles Darwin and George Eliot used the web as a way of understanding biological evolution and social struggles; a half century later, the futurists embraced the explosions of machine-gun fire, while Picasso used them to re-create the horrors of war in Guernica. The shapes are a way of interpreting the world, and while no shape completely represents its epoch, they are an undeniable component of the history of thinking. When I imagine the shape that will hover above the first half of the twenty-first century, what comes to mind is not the coiled embrace of the genome, or the etched latticework of the silicon chip. It is instead the pulsing red and green pixels of Mitch Resnick’s slime mold simulation, moving erratically across the screen at first, then slowly coalescing into larger forms. The shape of those clusters—with their lifelike irregularity, and their absent pacemakers—is the shape that will define the coming decades. I see them on the screen, growing and dividing, and I think: That way lies the future.

How about when you feel as if you are at a treacherous crossing, facing an area of life that hasn’t even been on the map until recently. Suddenly there it is, right in front of you. And so the time and space in between while you first get over the shock of it, and you have to figure out WHAT must be done feels excruciating. It’s a nightmare you can’t awaken from. You might remember this time as a kind of personal D-day, as in damage, devastation, destruction, damnation, desolation – maybe a difficult divorce, or even diagnosis of some formidable disease. These are the days of our lives that whole, beautiful chapters of life go up in flames. And all you can do is watch them burn. Until you feel as though you are left only with the ashes of it all. It is at this moment you long for the rescue and relief that only time can provide. It is in this place, you must remember that in just 365 days – you're at least partially healed self will be vastly changed, likely for the better. Perhaps not too unlike a caterpillar’s unimaginable metamorphosis. Better. Stronger. Wiser. Tougher. Kinder. More fragile, more firm, all at the same time as more free. You will have gotten through the worst of it – somehow. And then it will all be different. Life will be different. You will be different. It might or might not ever make sense, but it will be more bearable than it seems when you are first thrown, with no warning, into the kilns of life with the heat stoked up – or when you get wrapped up, inexplicably, through no choice of your own, in a dark, painfully constricting space. Go ahead, remind yourself as someone did earlier, who was trying miserably to console you. It will eventually make you a better, stronger person. How’d they say it? More beautiful on the inside… It really will, though. That’s the kicker. Even if, in the hours of your agony, you would have preferred to be less beautiful, wise, strong, or experienced than apparently life, fate, your merciless ex, or a ruthless, biological, or natural enemy that has attacked silently, and invisibly - has in mind for you. As will that which your God feels you are capable of enduring, while you, in your pitiful anguish, are yet dubious of your own ability to even endure, not alone overcome. I assure you now, you will have joy and beauty, where there was once only ashes. In time. Perhaps even more than before. It’s so hard to imagine and believe it when it’s still fresh, and so, so painful. When it hurts too much to even stand, or think, or feel anything. When you are in the grip of fear, and you remember the old familiar foe, or finally understand, firsthand, in your bones, what that actually means.

I do not believe that we have finished evolving. And by that, I do not mean that we will continue to make ever more sophisticated machines and intelligent computers, even as we unlock our genetic code and use our biotechnologies to reshape the human form as we once bred new strains of cattle and sheep. We have placed much too great a faith in our technology. Although we will always reach out to new technologies, as our hands naturally do toward pebbles and shells by the seashore, the idea that the technologies of our civilized life have put an end to our biological evolution—that “Man” is a finished product—is almost certainly wrong. It seems to be just the opposite. In the 10,000 years since our ancestors settled down to farm the land, in the few thousand years in which they built great civilizations, the pressures of this new way of life have caused human evolution to actually accelerate. The rate at which genes are being positively selected to engender in us new features and forms has increased as much as a hundredfold. Two genes linked to brain size are rapidly evolving. Perhaps others will change the way our brain interconnects with itself, thus changing the way we think, act, and feel. What other natural forces work transformations deep inside us? Humanity keeps discovering whole new worlds. Without, in only five centuries, we have gone from thinking that the earth formed the center of the universe to gazing through our telescopes and identifying countless new galaxies in an unimaginably vast cosmos of which we are only the tiniest speck. Within, the first scientists to peer through microscopes felt shocked to behold bacteria swarming through our blood and other tissues. They later saw viruses infecting those bacteria in entire ecologies of life living inside life. We do not know all there is to know about life. We have not yet marveled deeply enough at life’s essential miracle. How, we should ask ourselves, do the seemingly soulless elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, zinc, iron, and all the others organize themselves into a fully conscious human being? How does matter manage to move itself? Could it be that an indwelling consciousness makes up the stuff of all things? Could this consciousness somehow animate the whole grand ecology of evolution, from the forming of the first stars to the creation of human beings who look out at the universe’s glittering constellations in wonder? Could consciousness somehow embrace itself, folding back on itself, in a new and natural technology of the soul? If it could, this would give new meaning to Nietzsche’s insight that: “The highest art is self–creation.” Could we, really, shape our own evolution with the full force of our consciousness, even as we might exert our will to reach out and mold a lump of clay into a graceful sculpture? What is consciousness, really? What does it mean to be human?

The idea that human-transforming technology that mingles the dna of natural and synthetic beings and merges man with machines could somehow be used or even inspired by evil supernaturalism to foment destruction within the material world is for some people so exotic as to be inconceivable. Yet nothing should be more fundamentally clear, as students of

And maybe it had to do with all the murders lately, but death was on her mind and what she had so far in regard to her graduation talk was not exactly what you would call inspiring. Life in a nutshell: we’re born, we suffer, and then we die. Heartache and grief and loneliness chase us every day, the kind of love we long for is never quite within our reach, justice eludes us, and in the end, meaning is nothing but an illusion. After all, life is an anomaly, the exception, not the norm. Death is the natural state of affairs both here and everywhere else we know of in the universe—and it’s on its way to reasserting itself. All the evidence from evolutionary biology, astrophysics, astronomy, all the theorizing in statistics and probability make it clear there’s no possible way intelligent life exists anywhere else other than on earth. Any other view is either wishful thinking or a carefully cultivated blindness. Death is the default setting of the universe. The end of life on this planet would be the end of life everywhere. And that day is coming.

Contents Introduction: Why Start with Why? PART 1: A WORLD THAT DOESN’T START WITH WHY   1. Assume You Know   2. Carrots and Sticks PART 2: AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE   3. The Golden Circle   4. This Is Not Opinion, This Is Biology   5. Clarity, Discipline and Consistency PART 3: LEADERS NEED A FOLLOWING   6. The Emergence of Trust   7. How a Tipping Point Tips PART 4: HOW TO RALLY THOSE WHO BELIEVE   8. Start with WHY, but Know HOW   9. Know WHY. Know HOW. Then WHAT? 10. Communication Is Not About Speaking, It’s About Listening PART 5: THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IS SUCCESS 11. When WHY Goes Fuzzy 12. Split Happens PART 6: DISCOVER WHY 13. The Origins of a WHY 14. The New Competition

The more you learn the biology behind your every action, emotion and behavior, the better you become at accepting others the way they are.

The curious fact is that biology tells us nothing about desire. And, when you think about it, culture -- novels, movies, opera, and quite a lot of painting -- is about desire, how we manage desire, how we suffer from it, and how it brings us joy when we get things right. A story without desire -- and that means without the insistence of desire -- will be empty, dry, and more or less aimless. That is one reason we read novels, to see how people fall into awkward moral situations and then try to extricate themselves. This is why there is so much anguish in the world: frustrated desire is every bit as miserable as poverty, because desire is no respecter of one’s position in life: everyone goes through it.

Creativity is a basic biological drive to engage in meaningful conversations with ourselves & the world around us.

You’re a biological wonder without precedent.

material/immaterial struggle, which philosopher and theologian Francis Schaeffer once described as always at war “in the thought-world,” is difficult for some to grasp. The idea that human-transforming technology that mingles the dna of natural and synthetic beings and merges man with machines could somehow be used or even inspired by evil supernaturalism to foment destruction within

The human brain is, after all, the best example we have of an intelligent system. If we can learn its methods, we can use these biologically inspired paradigms to build more intelligent machines. This book is the earliest serious examination of the human brain from the perspective of a mathematician and computer pioneer. Prior to von Neumann, the fields of computer science and neuroscience were two islands with no bridge between them.

Recognizing what the left brain does has immense practical benefits. Simply becoming aware of the interpreter and the endless categories it creates through judgment frees you from being tied to the inevitability of these judgments. That is just say, when you become conscious of the interpreter, you are free to choose to no longer take its interpretation so seriously. In other words, when you realize that everyone’s brain is constantly interpreting, in ways that are subjective and often inaccurate or completely incorrect, you might find yourself able to grasp this as “just my opinion “or “the way I see it” rather than “this is the way it is.” You begin to see your judgment as simply a different line in the sand than others. When someone approaches you with a “this is the way it is“ attitude you can appreciate that this person is dominated by the left brain, that they are servant to its master. As a result, there is no need to take their actions or attitudes personally; it’s a biological function that they have not yet recognized. This small perspective shift is enough to change how we live with each other and ourselves.

Watching him reminded me of a principle of engineering: Sending out a sharp impulse—like a dolphin uses echolocation to determine the location of a school of fish—can teach you crucial things about your environment. Steve used aggressive interplay as a kind of biological sonar. It was how he sized up the world.

What defines man us not hp the capacity to create a second nature--economic, social or cultural--beyond biological nature; it is rather the capacity of going beyond created structures in order to create others...These acts of the human dialectic all reveal the same essence: the capacity of orienting oneself in relation to the possible, to the mediate, and not in relation to a limited milieu...Thus, the human dialectic is ambiguous: it is first manifested by the social or cultural structures, the appearance of which it brings about and in which it inspires itself. But it's use - objects and its cultural objects would not be what they are if the activity which brings about their appearance did not also have as its meaning to reject them and to surpass them.

She viewed romance like any other biological process. It was the product of chemical and electrical signaling in her brain, inspired by input from the outside world.

One thing I think this is showing us is that focusing on the brain as the source of inspiration for machine learning is derived from a very specialized architecture. I’ve been suggesting that a true general purpose intelligence is much more likely to arise not from mimicking the structure of the core of the human cortex, or anything like that, but from actually taking seriously the computational principles that life has been applying since the very beginning. CHRISTINA: Paramecia? MICHAEL: Even before that. Bacteria biofilms. All that stuff has been solving problems in ways that we have yet to figure out. They’re able to generalize, they’re able to learn from experience with a small number of examples. They make self-models. It’s amazing what they can do. That should be the inspiration. I think the future of machine learning and AI technologies will not be based on brains, but on this much more ancient, general ability of life to solve problems in novel domains.

Thoughts become biology

The combination of amino acids into proteins and of nucleic acids into strings of RNA established the basic paradigm of biology. Strings of RNA (and later DNA) that self-replicated (Epoch Two) provided a digital method to record the results of evolutionary experiments. Later on, the evolution of a species that combined rational thought (Epoch Three) with an opposable appendage (the thumb) caused a fundamental paradigm shift from biology to technology (Epoch Four). The upcoming primary paradigm shift will be from biological thinking to a hybrid combining biological and nonbiological thinking (Epoch Five), which will include “biologically inspired” processes resulting from the reverse engineering of biological brains.