Sloan Wilson Quotes

The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me.

Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.

Only masochists can get along without editing their own memories.

It is always necessary to jump up and down on the scaffold of knowledge to make sure it is solid. If you are skeptical about a scientific claim, then jump up and down on it as hard as you can until you expose a weakness or convince yourself that it is solid.

How smoothly one becomes, not a cheat, exactly, not really a liar, just a man who'll say anything for pay.

Believe me, I want you to have a good time,' he said gently, 'but people who have that primarily in mind rarely accomplish it.

Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone. —David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral

That had been the trouble with him and Betsy: what with his brooding about the past and worrying about the future, there had never been any present at all.

I could get a job in an advertising agency. I’ll write copy telling people to eat more cornflakes and smoke more and more cigarettes and buy more refrigerators and automobiles, until they explode with happiness.

Not only is religion thriving, but it is thriving because it helps people to adapt and survive in the world. In his book Darwin's Cathedral, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argues that religion provides something that secular society doesn't: a vision of transcendent purpose. Consequently, religious people have a zest for life that is, in a sense, unnatural. They exhibit a hopefulness about the future that may exceed what is warranted by how the world is going. And they forge principles of morality and charity that simply make them more cohesive, adaptive, and successful than groups whose members lack this binding and elevating force.

It doesn't really matter. Here goes nothing. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Things happen, he had decided; they happen and they happen again, and anybody who tries to make sense out of it goes out of his mind.

I really don’t know what I was looking for when I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in gray flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness – they were pursuing a routine. For a long while I thought I was on the sidelines watching that parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a gray flannel suit.

If “fast” and “slow” animals had parties, writes the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, “some of the fasts would bore everyone with their loud conversation, while others would mutter into their beer that they don’t get any respect.

If “fast” and “slow” animals had parties, writes the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, “some of the fasts would bore everyone with their loud conversation, while others would mutter into their beer that they don’t get any respect. Slow animals are best described as shy, sensitive types. They don’t assert themselves, but they are observant and notice things that are invisible to the bullies. They are the writers and artists at the party who have interesting conversations out of earshot of the bullies. They are the inventors who figure out new ways to behave, while the bullies steal their patents by copying their behavior.

A man who wants time to read and write lets the grass grow long.

A birth usually has more consequences than a death.

I only do what only I can do.

Art is the essential medium for the communication of a moral ideal.

Instead of getting the house like Mount Vernon, they had moved into the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, and Betsy had become pregnant, and he had thrown the vase against the wall, and the washing machine had broken down. And Grandmother had died and left her house to somebody, and instead of being made vice-president of J. H. Nottersby, Incorporated, he had finally arrived at a job where he tested mattresses, was uneasy when his boss said he wanted to see him without explaining why, and lived in fear of an elevator operator.

How curious it was to find that apparently nothing was ever really forgotten, that the past was never really gone, that it was always lurking, ready to destroy the present, or at least to make the present seem absurd.

Another statistical fact came to him then, a fact which he knew would be ridiculously melodramatic to put into an application for a job at the United Broadcasting Corporation, or to think about at all. He hadn’t thought about this for a long while. It wasn’t a thing he had deliberately tried to forget – he simply hadn’t thought about it for quite a few years. It was the unreal-sounding, probably irrelevant, but quite accurate fact that he had killed seventeen men.

Among believers, a supernatural authority is an ideal guarantor of cooperation, because supernatural beings can be omniscient and omnipotent, guaranteeing maximal rewards for cooperativeness and maximal punishments for uncooperativeness. As David Sloan Wilson has argued, religion may be a device that evolved through cultural evolution to enable cooperation in large groups. The idea that respect for God and being a good cooperator are related is not new, of course. Believers have long been, and continue to be, wary of people who are not “God-fearing.” From

Page 43: Natural selection is a multilevel process that operates among groups in addition to among individuals within groups. Any unit becomes endowed with the properties inherent in the word organism to the degree that it is a unit of selection. The history of life on earth has been marked by many transitions from groups of organisms to groups as organisms. Organismic groups achieve their unity with mechanisms that suppress selection within without themselves being overtly altruistic. Human evolution falls within the paradigm of multilevel selection and the major transitions of life. Moral systems provide many of the mechanisms that enable human groups to function as adaptive units.

You wouldn’t think this, but I almost never went to the beach as a kid, even though it was only a few miles away. The first time I ever went to the ocean I couldn’t believe it. My dad took us, and I was so scared at the size of the ocean. Also, I had light skin that burned easily and I didn’t like squinting against the sun for hours. Once I went with my friend Rich Sloan and I kept my jeans on so the sun couldn’t get to me. And there was barely any surfing either. I tried once and got conked on the head with the board. So Los Angeles and California were more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean. I liked to look at it, though. It was sort of like a piece of music: each of the waves was moving around by itself, but they were also moving together.

O problema não era o fato de ele não mais acreditar no sonho; o problema era ele nem sequer achar sua improbabilidade interessante ou triste. Como um velho, preocupava-se com o passado e não com o futuro.

Um ato a mais de brutalidade não faria o mundo acabar. Mas eu não vou fazer isso. Não posso fazer nada pelo mundo, mas posso colocar minha própria vida em ordem.

There's something wrong, he thought. There must be something wrong when a man starts wishing time away. Time was given us like jewels to spend, and it's the ultimate sacrilege to wish it away.

The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard.” —Sloan Wilson

ride gasoline into a major battle. To hell

In Christian thought, the belief that the universe was created by a benign and all-powerful god leads to a conundrum: If true, how can we explain the existence of evil? This is called the problem of evil and much ink has been spilled by theologians trying to resolve it—including Thomas Malthus’s belief that famine and disease are divinely imposed to teach virtuous behavior. The evolutionary worldview turns the problem of evil on its head. The behaviors that we associate with evil are easy to explain from an evolutionary perspective, because they typically benefit the evildoer at the expense of others. The problem is to explain how the behaviors that people associate with goodness, which typically benefit others and society as a whole, can evolve by a Darwinian process.

The regulatory mechanisms that operate in small human groups are pretty good at weeding out learned behaviors that are parasitic or benefit some individuals at the expense of others within the same group. However, these mechanisms were not designed to work on a larger scale. The first agricultural societies therefore became despotic, ironically more like many animal societies than small-scale human societies.

In one study that capitalized on a natural experiment, a genetically homogeneous human population straddles the national boundaries of Finland and Russia. The prevalence of type 1 diabetes is four times greater on the Finnish side than on the Russian side. This difference is accompanied by a striking difference in microbial diversity sampled from homes.

Many people (including myself) are willing to pay more for eggs from hens that are allowed to range more freely, but free-range social environments have their own problems. Fighting still takes place and dominant birds prevent subordinate birds from accessing food, water, and nesting sites, resulting in low productivity for the group as a whole.

Stress-adapted birds are more likely to discount behaviors learned from their parents in favor of behaviors learned from conspecifics or from personal experience. If your mother is stressed, maybe it’s because she doesn’t know things that other birds know or that you can learn for yourself!

Changing the world begins with adopting a whole earth ethic for ourselves and translating it into what we can do locally.

We therefore need to work with what evolution has provided us to cultivate a moral society that works for the benefit of all, in the same way that we cultivate a garden.

He steps back from the mic and jumps off the stage, standing in front of me, reaching out a hand to grip mine, pulling me to my feet. My nerves almost get the better of me when my legs shake slightly. “I love you, Sloan Wilson,” Nash confesses, and butterflies flutter in my chest. “There will never be anybody else again.

must

My work since 1981 has been to put that jigsaw puzzle together. Here’s how the picture looks once the various parts are snapped in place. Social animals are linked in networks of information exchange. Meanwhile, self-destruct mechanisms turn a creature on and off depending on his or her ability to get a handle on the tricks and traps of circumstance. The result is a complex adaptive system—a web of semi-independent operatives linked to form a learning machine. How effective is this collective learning mesh? As David Sloan Wilson discovered, a group usually solves problems better than the individuals within it. Pit one socially networked problem-solving web against another—a constant occurrence in nature—and the one which most successfully takes advantage of complex adaptive system rules, that which is the most powerful cooperative learning contraption, will almost always win.

Maybe they had no faith, Tom thought. Maybe they were like me, always expecting disaster, surprised only when it doesn't hit. Maybe we are all, the killers and the killed, equally damned; not guilty, not somehow made wise by war, not heroes, just men who are either dead or convinced that the world is insane.

Like Sloan Wilson’s hero in Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the ideal male was a hard striver, the ideal female a devoted nurturer.

The eternal struggle between good and evil takes place within our own bodies and has since the origin of multicellular organisms roughly a billion years ago.

根據懷特的形容，組織人徹頭徹尾毫無特色。組織人很保守、很親切、枯燥無味，除了努力工作以及跟別人一起盡責工作之外，他們沒有其他想法。這種一塵不染、令人尊敬的人物，一年前史隆．威爾森（Sloan Wilson）曾在小說《穿灰法蘭絨西裝的男子》（The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit）裡詳細剖析過。懷特鼓勵受測者把以下幾句話背起來，這樣無論碰到什麼題目，都能提供最「傳統、普通、平庸」的答案。 a. 我愛我的父母，但是愛父親稍微多一點。 b. 我對現況頗為滿意。 c. 我向來對任何事都不太擔心。 d. 我不太喜歡看書和聽音樂。 e. 我愛老婆跟孩子。 f. 我不讓他們阻礙公司的工作。 懷特的這張清單之所以可笑，第一個原因是這個人似乎毫無個性。

In 1955, the year my mom was pregnant with me, Bertolt Brecht voted Mao Zedong’s essay “On Contradiction” the “best book” he had read in the past twelve months, a period of time that saw the publication of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! Mao…a guy who never brushed his teeth, who just rinsed his mouth out with tea when he woke up…who, according to his personal physician, Li Zhisui, never cleaned his genitals. Instead, Mao said, “I wash myself inside the bodies of my women.” The Imaginary Intern and I were great admirers of Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art and we diligently tried to apply his dictum “Discard what is backward and develop what is revolutionary” to the production of Gone with the Mind, and although I agree with Mao that one should bathe infrequently, and that when one does, one should use the vaginal flora of other creatures instead of soap, I subscribe unswervingly to the conviction that a gentleman should never go out in public at night without pomaded hair and heavy cologne…