If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal Quotes

“Much like our capacity for causal inference, the human capacity for lying is one of the pillars that has shaped our success.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“I save slugs because it just seems sad to me to take away those things. To be indifferent to a mind that has miraculously sprung into existence after billions of years of nonexistence. What a miracle to exist here and now and have the capacity to experience this world.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“The absurdity of a narwhal experiencing an existential crisis is the key to understanding everything that is wrong about human thinking, and everything that is right about animal thinking.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“seeing into the situation before executing the behavior appears to be the most-parsimonious explanation to account for the result.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“Animals accumulate living facts relevant to their everyday lives: Bees remember the location of a good dandelion field, dogs remember the path through the woods that leads to their favorite pond, and crows remember which human fed them in a park. But humans accumulate a seemingly endless number of useless (i.e., dead) facts: the distance to the moon (384,400 km), the true identity of Luke Skywalker’s father (Darth Vader), or which Paula Abdul video starred Keanu Reeves (“Rush Rush”). Our heads are full of dead facts—both real and imagined. Most of them will never be of any use to us. But they are the lifeblood of our why specialist nature as they help us to imagine an infinite number of solutions to whatever problems we encounter—for good or ill.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“beneficial decisions all the time—and hardly any of it involves contemplating why the world is the way it is. Being human and a why specialist has obvious benefits, as we will see in this chapter. But if we look at decision-making across time and species, including our own, I propose we consider a provocative premise: Does asking why give us a biological advantage?”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“Humans are the why specialist species.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“Human nature likes order,” wrote the economist Burton Malkiel in his seminal book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. “People find it hard to accept the notion of randomness.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“What if we acknowledge that sometimes our so-called human achievements are actually rather shitty solutions, evolutionarily speaking?”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“A reality in which the Earth is bursting with animal species that have hit on solutions for how to live a good life in ways that put the human species to shame.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“In this regard, humans are nothing like narwhals. Narwhals do not build gas chambers.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“Was Nietzsche too smart for his own good? If we look at intelligence from an evolutionary perspective, there’s every reason to believe that complex thought, in all its forms throughout the animal kingdom, is often a liability. If there’s one lesson we can learn from the tortured life of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, it’s that thinking too hard about things isn’t necessarily doing anyone any favors.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“So instead of looking at the cows and chickens and narwhals in your life with pity because they lack human cognitive capacities, think first about the value of those capacities. Do you experience more pleasure than your pets because of them? Is the world a better place thanks to our species’ intelligence? If we are honest about the answers to those questions, then there’s good reason to tone down our smugness. Because, depending on where we go from here, human intelligence may just be the stupidest thing that has ever happened.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“There is really one reason that, forty millennia ago, our human ancestors would spend time creating art in the form of therianthropes. It symbolized something. When we see therianthropes represented in art from the past few thousand years, it’s typically associated with religious symbolism: like Horace (the falcon-headed Egyptian god), Lucifer (often depicted as half-human, half-goat in Christian art), or Ganesh (the elephant-headed Hindu god). The Sulawesian therianthropes are “the world’s earliest known evidence for our ability to conceive of the existence of supernatural beings,” Dr. Adam Brumm told the New York Times after he and his research team discovered the Sulawesian therianthropes in 2017.13 What is a supernatural being? It is a creature that has abilities and knowledge beyond what humans have. Some experts suggest that these therianthropes might be spirit guides, creatures giving us aid, answers, or advice.14 This assumes, then, that our ancestors had been asking questions that required supernatural answers. And what could these questions possibly be other than those that underpin all religions: Why does the world exist? Why am I here? And why do I have to die? These ancient therianthropes are the best evidence we have of why specialist questions swimming about in our ancestors’ heads.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

“There is really one reason that, forty millennia ago, our human ancestors would spend time creating art in the form of therianthropes. It symbolized something. When we see therianthropes represented in art from the past few thousand years, it’s typically associated with religious symbolism: like Horace (the falcon-headed Egyptian god), Lucifer (often depicted as half-human, half-goat in Christian art), or Ganesh (the elephant-headed Hindu god). The Sulawesian therianthropes are “the world’s earliest known evidence for our ability to conceive of the existence of supernatural beings,” Dr. Adam Brumm told the New York Times after he and his research team discovered the Sulawesian therianthropes in 2017.13 What is a supernatural being? It is a creature that has abilities and knowledge beyond what humans have. Some experts suggest that these therianthropes might be spirit guides, creatures giving us aid, answers, or advice.”
― Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity