Hominids Quotes

“There is no debt between people who are in love; there is only total forgiveness, and going forward.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“That is fine. Feeling a need to convince others that you are right also is something that comes from religion, I think; I am simply content to know that I am right, even if others do not know it.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“He hoped the experiment would indeed succeed today. The next Gray Council was coming up soon, and he and Adikor would have to explain again what they were giving back to the community through their work. Scientists usually got their proposals approved—everyone could clearly see how science had bettered their lives—but, still, it was always more satisfying to report positive results.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“What … what other species are still endangered?” asked Ponter. Mary shrugged a little. “Lots of kinds of birds. Giant tortoises, Panda bears. Sperm whales, Chim…” “Chim?” said Ponter. “What are---?” He tilted his head, perhaps listening to Hak providing its best guess at the word Mary had started to say. “Oh, no. No. Chimpanzees? But … these are our cousins. You hunt our cousins?” Mary felt all of two feet tall. How could she tell him that chimps were killed for food, that gorillas were murdered so their hands could be made into exotic ashtrays? “They are invaluable,” continued Ponter. “Surely you, as a geneticist, must know that. They are the only close living relatives we have; we can learn much about ourselves by studying them in wild, by examining their DNA.” “I know,” said Mary, softly. “I know.” Ponter looked at Reuben, then at Louise, and then at Mary, sizing them up, it seemed, as if he were seeing them—really seeing them—for the first time. “You kill with abandon,” he said. “You kill entire species. You even kill other primates.” He paused and looked from face to face again, as if giving them a chance to forestall what he was about to say, to come up with a logical explanation, a mitigating factor. But Mary said nothing, and neither did the other two, and so Ponter went on. “And, on this world, my kind is extinct.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“When Ponter’s quantum computer ran out of universes in which other versions of itself existed, what did it do? Why, it reached across to universes in which it didn’t exist. And, in doing so, it latched first onto the one that had initially split from the entire tree of those in which it did exist, the one that, forty thousand years previously, had started on another path, with another kind of humanity in charge. Of course, as soon as it reached a universe in which a quantum computer didn’t exist in the same spot, the factoring process crashed and the contact between the two worlds was broken. But if Ponter’s people repeat the exact process that led to him being marooned here, I think there’s a real chance that the portal to this specific universe, the one that first split from their timeline, will be re-created.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“And quantum events, by their very nature, have multiple possible outcomes,” said Louise. “Instead of that quantum fluctuation, or whatever it was, creating consciousness in Homo sapiens, the same thing might have happened in the other kind of humanity that existed 40,000 years ago—Neanderthal man! The first splitting of the universe was an accident, a quantum fluke. In one branch, thought and cognition arose in our ancestors; in another, it arose in Ponter’s ancestors. I read that Neanderthals had been around since maybe 200,000 years ago, right?” Mary nodded. “And they had even bigger brains than we did, right?” Mary nodded again. “But on this world,” said Louise, “in this timeline, those brains never sparked with consciousness. Ours did instead, and the edge that consciousness gave us—cunning and foresight—led to us absolutely triumphing over the Neanderthals, and becoming rulers of the world.” “Ah!” said Mary. “But in Ponter’s world—” Louise nodded. “In Ponter’s world, the opposite happened. It was Neanderthals who became conscious, developing art and culture—and cunning; they took the Great Leap Forward while we remained the dumb brutes we’d been for the preceding sixty thousand years.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“You ever read Roger Penrose? The Emperor’s New Mind?” Mary shook her head. “Penrose is an Oxford mathematician. He contends that human consciousness is quantum-mechanical in nature.” “Meaning what?” “Meaning that what we think of as intelligence, as sentience, doesn’t arise from some biochemical network of neurons, or anything as crude as that. Rather, it arises from quantum processes. Specifically, he and an anesthesiologist named Hameroff argue that quantum superposition of isolated electrons in the microtubules of brain cells creates the phenomenon of consciousness.” “Ah,” said Mary dubiously. Louise sipped some of her new coffee. “Well, don’t you see?” she said. “That explains the Great Leap Forward. Sure, our brains had been just as they are today since one hundred thousand years ago, but consciousness didn’t begin until a quantum-mechanical event occurred, presumably at random: the one and only spinning off of a new universe that happened the way Everett thinks it does.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“As Louise had said, modern-looking human beings had been around for six hundred centuries by that point, but they created no art, they didn’t adorn their bodies with jewelry, and they didn’t bury their dead with grave goods. But starting simultaneously 40,000 years ago, suddenly humans were painting beautiful pictures on cave walls, humans were wearing necklaces and bracelets, and humans were interring their loved ones with food and tools and other valuable objects that could only have been of use in a presumed afterlife. Art, fashion, and religion all appeared simultaneously; truly, a great leap forward. “So you’re saying that some Cro-Magnon 40,000 years ago suddenly started making choices, and the universe started splitting?” “Not exactly,” said Louise. She’d evidently finished her first coffee; she got up and bought a second one. “Think about this: what caused the Great Leap Forward?” “Nobody knows,” said Mary. “For all intents and purposes, it’s a marker, right there in the archeological record, showing the dawn of consciousness, wouldn’t you say?”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“But,” said Louise, “according to what I read, for sixty thousand years, they thought no thoughts. For sixty thousand years, they did nothing that wasn’t instinctual. But then, forty thousand years ago, everything changed.” Mary’s eyes went wide. “The Great Leap Forward.” “Exactly!” Mary felt her heart pounding. The Great Leap Forward was the term some anthropologists gave to the cultural awakening that occurred 40,000 years ago; others called it the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“But if there’s no consciousness at work,” said Louise, “you simply toss aside the better version as not fitting your mental template of what was supposed to be produced. Right? And that’s what happens with the tools in the archeological record: instead of gradual refinement over time, they just stay the same. And the only explanation I can think of for that is that there was no conscious selection of better variants: the toolmaker simply wasn’t aware; he couldn’t see that this particular way of hitting nodules produced something better than that way. The design was frozen.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“They made tools,” said Mary. “Oui,” said Louise. “But weren’t they repetitive, virtually identical tools, turned out over the centuries by the thousands? All made to the same mental template, the same design?” Mary nodded. “That’s true.” “Surely there has to be some natural variation among stone tools,” said Louise, “just based on chance accidents and random differences that occur when implements are chipped from stone. If there was consciousness at work, even without coming up with a better idea on their own, early humans should have seen that some tools happened to be better than others. It’s like you don’t have to think of the round wheel right off the bat; you might start with a five-sided one, then accidentally make a six-sided one—and note that it rolled slightly better. Eventually, you’d come up with the perfectly round one.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“There was lots of sophisticated behavior by earlier forms of humans,” said Mary. “Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, even the australopithecines and Kenyanthropus.” “Well, I realize this is your field, Professor Vaughan—” Had she really in all the time they’d spent quarantined together never volunteered that Louise could call her Mary?—“but I’ve been reading up on this on the web. As far as I can tell, those earlier kinds of man didn’t really have behavior any more sophisticated than a beaver building a dam.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“Yes, apparently Neanderthal scientists think the universe has always existed. They believe that on large scales, redshifts—which are our principal evidence for an expanding universe—are proportional to age, rather than distance; that is, that mass varies over time. And they think the gross structure of galaxies and galactic clusters are caused by monopoles and plasma-pinching magnetic vortex filaments. Ponter says the cosmic microwave background—which we take as the residue of the big-bang fireball—is really the result of electrons trapped in these strong magnetic fields absorbing and emitting microwaves. Repeated absorption and emission by billions of galaxies smoothed out the effect, he says, producing the uniform background we detect now.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“Ponter’s people have a single theory of quantum mechanics that’s sort of a synthesis of our two theories. It allows for many worlds—that is, for parallel universes—but the creation of such universes doesn’t result from random quantum events. Rather, it only happens through the actions of conscious observers.” “Why don’t we have the same single theory, then?” asked Mary, munching on a particularly large chip. “Partly because there’s a lot of math that seems irreconcilable between the two interpretations,” said Louise. “And, of course, there’s that old problem of politics in science: those physicists who favor the Copenhagen interpretation have devoted their careers to proving that it’s right; same thing for the guys on Everett’s side. For them all to sit down and say, ‘Maybe we’re both partly right—and both partly wrong’ just isn’t going to happen.” “Ah,” said Mary. “It’s like the Regional Continuity versus Replacement debate in anthropology.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“Okay,” said Mary, not because she really understood, but because the alternative seemed to be an even longer lecture.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“Feeling a need to convince others that you are right also is something that comes from religion, I think; I am simply content to know that I am right, even if others do not know it.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“Maybe that was the real problem—the predicament that Ponter’s people had avoided: having too many possible suspects, too much crowding, too much anonymity, too many vicious, aggressive ... men, she thought. Men. Every academic of her generation had been sensitized to the issue of gender-neutral language. But violent crimes were indeed overwhelmingly caused by males. And, yet, she’d spent her life surrounded by good, decent men. Her father; her two brothers; so many supportive colleagues; Father Caldicott, and Father Belfontaine before him; many good friends; a handful of lovers. What proportion of men really were the problem? What fraction were violent, angry, unable to control their emotions, unable to resist their impulses? Was it so vast a group that it couldn’t have been—“cleansed” was Ponter’s word, a nurturing word, a hopeful word—from the gene pool generations ago?”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“Mary had expected that bleep, at least. If you had no religion, no list of things that didn’t actually hurt somebody else but were still proscribed behaviors—recreational drug use, masturbation, adultery, watching porno videos—then you might indeed not be so fanatic about privacy. People insisted on it at least in part because there were things they did that they’d be mortified to have others know about. But in a permissive society, an open society, a society where the only crimes are crimes that have specific victims, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a big deal. And, of course, Ponter had shown no nudity taboo—a religious idea, again—and no desire for seclusion while using the bathroom.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“Our assertion is straightforward, and congruent with all observed fact: a person’s life is completely finished at death; there is no possibility of reconciling with them, or making amends after they are gone, and no possibility that, because they lived a moral life, they are now in a paradise, with the cares of this existence forgotten.” He paused, and his eyes flicked left and right across Mary’s face, apparently looking for signs she understood what he was getting at. “Do you not see?” Ponter went on. “If I wrong someone—if I say something mean to them, or, I do not know, perhaps take something that belongs to them—under your worldview I can console myself with the knowledge that, after they are dead, they can still be contacted; amends can be made. But in my worldview, once a person is gone—which could happen for any of us at any moment, through accident or heart attack or so on—then you who did the wrong must live knowing that that person’s entire existence ended without you ever having made peace with him or her.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“He thought briefly that it might have been convenient if there were people who specialized in dealing with legal matters on behalf of others; that, it seemed, would be a useful contribution. He’d have gladly exchanged labor with someone familiar with this field who could do this research for him. But no; it was surely a bad idea. The mere existence of people who worked full-time on things legal would doubtless increase the number of such matters instigated, and—”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“For prior cases to have legal significance, he read off his datapad, they had to date from within the last ten generations; society always advanced, said the Code of Civilization, and what people had done long ago had no bearing on the sensibilities of today.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“In my world,” said Ponter, “to hit is to kill. And so we never hit each other. Because any violence can be fatal, we simply cannot allow it.” “But you were hit,” said Mary. Ponter nodded. “It happened long ago, while I was a student at the Science Academy. I was arguing as only a youth can, as if winning mattered. I could see that the person I was arguing with was growing angry, but I continued to press my point. And he reacted in an ... unfortunate manner. But I forgave him.” Mary looked at Ponter, imagining him turning the other long, angular cheek toward the person who had hit him.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“you must know that your brains are smaller than ours.” Mary nodded. “About 10 percent smaller, on average, if I remember correctly.” “And you seemed physically weaker. Judging by attachment scars on your bones, your kind was believed to have had only half our muscle mass.” “I’d say that’s about right,” said Mary, nodding. “And,” continued Ponter, “you have spoken of your inability to get along, even with others of your own kind.” Mary nodded again. “There is some archeological evidence for this among your kind on my world, too,” said Ponter. “A popular theory is that you wiped each other out ... what with being not all that intelligent, you see”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“One can vote at the age of forty-nine; a traditional lifespan averaged seventy-three years, although many live much longer than that these days.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“I’m told that most serious diseases that affect us started in domesticated animals, and then transferred to people. Measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox all came from cattle; the flu came from pigs and ducks; and whooping cough came from pigs and dogs.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“If you are hallucinating,” the Companion said, “then my telling you that you are not could just be part of that hallucination. So there’s really no point in me trying to disabuse you of that notion, is there?”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“looked at the series of indicator lights on his board; they were all red, the color of blood, the color of health. “Yes.”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

“The southern forests provide the message that it didn’t have to be this way, that there is room on the earth for a species biologically committed to the moral aspects of what, ironically, we like to call “humanity": respect for others, personal restraint, and turning aside from violence as a solution to conflicting interests. The appearance of these traits in bonobos hints at what might have been among Homo sapiens, if evolutionary history had been just slightly different. —Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids