Steve Stewart-Williams Quotes

Whether a trait is natural or unnatural is irrelevant to the question of whether it’s good. Moral worth should be judged not in terms of the naturalness of a trait, but rather in terms of how that trait impacts the wellbeing of everyone affected by it. Thus, violence is natural but bad, medicine unnatural but good.

To a hypothetical alien with a vastly superior intellect to our own, human minds would be classed as intermediate forms between the mindless and the fully minded.

For much of the 20th century, the blank slate view was the dominant view in the social sciences. With the popularization of sociobiology in the 1970s, however, evolutionary approaches to human behavior became the locus of an academic culture war between biologically minded thinkers and advocates of the traditional social science model.

Around 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, and almost four billion years since life first evolved, something strange began to happen: Tiny parts of the universe became conscious, and came to know something about themselves and the universe of which they are a part... Eventually, some of these tiny parts of the universe - the parts we call ‘scientists’ and ‘scientifically-informed laypeople’ - came to understand the Big Bang and the evolutionary process through which they had come to exist. After an eternity of unconsciousness, the universe now had some glimmering awareness that it existed and some understanding of where it had come from.

It is therefore a curious fact that our dominant mating system is more like the typical mating system of birds than that of most mammals, including our nearest relatives, the Great Apes.

It’s often a good idea to adopt the practices and beliefs of the people around you. For one thing, the people around you aren’t dead. If you do what they do – eat what they eat; avoid the dark alleys they avoid – you might continue not being dead as well.

Why should we put a statistical, collective goal – i.e., more equal sex ratios in STEM – above the happiness and autonomy of the flesh-and-blood individuals who constitute those collectives? Why should policy makers’ preference for gender parity take precedence over individual men and women’s preferences regarding their own careers and lives?

The distinction between central and peripheral claims is applicable to many aspects of human sexuality. Consider, for instance, the emotion of jealousy. Evolutionary psychologists place a strong emphasis on sex differences in this domain. The standard claim is that men are more worried by a partner’s sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity, whereas women are more worried by a partner’s emotional infidelity... [However] the overwhelming trend is that most men and most women are extremely upset by both sexual and emotional infidelity. This suggests that the central EP claim regarding jealousy should be “Human beings evolved to experience jealousy in romantic relationships” rather than “Men and women evolved different patterns of jealousy.” The latter statement is true but should be considered a qualification to the former: a peripheral rather than a central claim. To stress the sex difference alone would be like observing that male elephants are bigger than females while steadfastly neglecting to mention that all adult elephants are large compared to most terrestrial animals. It would almost certainly foster an inaccurate view.

The Nurture Only theory asks us to believe not only that selection eliminated the [sex] differences for reasons unknown, but that learning and culture then coincidentally reproduced exactly the same differences in every culture on record. This is not a compelling thesis.

A danger in emphasizing mean values for each sex is that these values may be projected onto all or most normally developing men and women. The mean may be treated as a description of the typical group member, despite the fact that the majority of individuals fall above or below it. Psychologists do make some effort to stress that means cannot be attributed to all members of any group, as evidenced by the fact that we often append the phrase “on average” to our descriptions of mean differences. But is this enough? Consider again the robust sex difference in willingness to engage in casual sex: The mean SO [sociosexuality] score for men is higher than that for women. What does this tell us, though, about individual men and women? It clearly does not tell us that all men are interested in casual sex and that all women are not. However, given the degree of overlap between the male and female distributions, it also does not tell us that a large majority of men are more interested in casual sex than a large majority of women. That is, it is not accurate to say even that “men are typically more interested in casual sex than women, but there are of course exceptions.” Here is what the data that the means are drawn from actually tell us:

[A]mong the minority of people who possess exceptional mathematical abilities, the women are more likely to possess exceptional language abilities as well. This means that mathematically gifted women have more vocational options than their male counterparts, and consequently that fewer mathematically gifted women end up pursuing a STEM career. To the extent that this explains the gender gap in maths-intensive fields, the gap results not from mathematically gifted women having fewer options, but rather from them having more.

Members of both sexes can be found at every point on the things vs. people continuum; however, more men than women exhibit a stronger interest in things, whereas more women than men exhibit a stronger interest in people... To get an intuitive sense of the magnitude of the difference, if one were to pick pairs of people at random, one man and one woman, the man would be more things-oriented than the woman around 75% of the time.

As a result of cumulative culture, we have ideas in our heads that are orders of magnitude smarter than we are.

The idea that the Biblical stories are symbolic is charitable to the point of absurdity. What would we think of a university professor who, happening upon unambiguous errors in a favourite student’s work, concluded that the student was speaking symbolically and awarded top marks?

Thus, a curious fact about natural selection is that, even though it’s a completely mindless process – a process without foresight or understanding – it has given rise to creatures that have minds, that have foresight, and that even have some basic understanding of the universe of which they’re a part.