David Omar

“We’re all in favor of moral rules that prevent others from doing things that harm our own interests. Just look at the Seven Deadly Sins, a list of all those things we don’t want other people to do, though we might well have an interest in doing them all ourselves. (Symmetrically, “virtues” are traits you want other people to possess—altruism, modesty, chastity —even if you yourself are better off avoiding them.)”
― Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind

“If we know the mass of a black hole and how fast it spins, then from Einstein’s relativistic laws we can deduce all the hole’s other properties: its size, the strength of its gravitational pull, how much its event horizon is stretched outward near the equator by centrifugal forces, the details of the gravitational lensing of objects behind it. Everything. This is amazing. So different from everyday experience. It is as though knowing my weight and how fast I can run, you could deduce everything about me: the color of my eyes, the length of my nose, my IQ, . . .”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“They were after the one thing so primal that it could make a man forget Allah and act in implosive, desultory ways, no matter what prophecy held for him: sex.”
― Thomas Peele, Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism's Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist

“The modules that cause behavior are different from the ones that cause people to voice agreement with moral rules. Because condemnation and conscience are caused by different modules, it is no wonder that speech and action often conflict.”
― Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind