James J. Gibson Quotes

From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.

Many foxes grow gray but few grow good.

Experience is the cane of the blind.

Man is a recording animal.

When the ancestors of the cheetah first began pursuing the ancestors of the gazelle, neither of them could run as fast as they can today.

Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.

The laws of animality govern almost the whole of history.

These are the animals that are the reason why you don't see old animals in the wild. You don't see sick animals in the wild. You don't see lame animals in the wild, and its all because of the predator: the lion, the tiger, the leopard, all the cats.

One way to compensate for a tiny brain is to pretend to be dead.

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

In a world in which the total of human knowledge is doubling about every ten years, our security can rest only on our ability to learn.

The torrent of centuries rolling over the human race, has continually brought new perfections, the cause of which, ever active though unseen, is found in the demands made by our senses, which always in their turns demand to be occupied.

What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.

When a lion doesn't get its prey, it remains hungry. When the prey saves himself, he has not won, but has saved his life.

All nature's creatures join to express nature's purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself.

Yet otters have not been hunters in water long enough for the habit to become an instinct.

People mature at different stages and I feel I'm learning a lot.

Young pigs grunt as old pigs grunted before them.

People are violent by nature. That’s why we rule the earth; we beat the crap out of everyone else.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

I am a student of evolution and adaptation.

The point of human evolution is adapting to circumstance. Not letting go of the old, but adapting it, is necessary.

Evolution doesn't just look for things that are fun; if it did, we'd know how to fly.

Basically, we are all chimps. The human side is at the front of our forehead, but the chimp is the part that lashes out. When I play, I am completely chimp-orientated.