Group Survival Quotes

When a cow lives with the butcher, sooner or later he gets eaten unless he helps the other cows off to their slaughter. (Nick)

When a number of animals live in a group, herd or flock, they carry on the struggle for existence in common against the outside world … The animals which live socially no longer wage a struggle against each other, wherein the weak succumb; just the reverse, the weak enjoy the same advantages as the strong. When some animals have the advantage by means of greater strength, sharper smell, or experience in finding the best pasture or in warding off the enemy, this advantage does not accrue only to these better fitted, but also to the entire group. This combining of the animals’ separate powers into one unit gives to the group a new and much stronger power than any one individual possessed, even the strongest. It is owing to this united strength that the defenseless plant-eaters can ward off rapacious animals. It is only by means of this unity that some animals are able to protect their young.

Indeed, if our ancestors of millions of years ago hadn't learned how to care for one another and hunt in packs, they'd all have ended up being eaten by leopards.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.

The problem with Danity Kane is everybody wanted to play everybody's role, and when you're in a group like that, that can't survive.

Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we've had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is 'how to get along and mutually cope.'

We're smart enough to know we need to live in groups to survive, but we're still animals and we needs lots of room. In the case of the male of the species we also probably need that-guy-over-there's space. And his wife and cow, too.

Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.

I don't like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.

Independence is not a whim or an ambition. It is the necessary condition of our survival as an ethnic group.

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

Feelings are the fine instruments which shape decision-making in an animal cursed and blessed with intelligence, and the freedom which is its corollary. They are signals directing us toward goodness, safety, pleasure, and group survival.

People who study the way religions develop have shown that if you have a charismatic teacher, and you don't have an institution develop around that teacher within about a generation to transmit succession within the group, the movement just dies.

The main thing is that this band keeps going.

The Temptations still stand today, not in spite of those who left us, but because of them.

Every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. Each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. Yet the life of the group goes on.

All the members of the dog family - domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, dingoes - are very aware of territory. A group must control its own territory - you can't have others taking it from you, because then you won't have enough food.

The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs.

It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.

Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required.

All the particular moral judgments we intuitively make are likely to derive from discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions, or from customs necessary for the survival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant past.