An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that our perception of beauty is linked to traits that indicate health and fertility, which may have evolved to aid in mate selection.
Steven Pinker's quote explores the evolutionary roots of our concept of beauty, proposing that our attraction to certain physical traits is largely influenced by indicators of health and fertility. This perspective suggests that what we consider beautiful is not merely subjective, but rather tied to biological imperatives that help guide our choices in partners, leading to healthier offspring and continued survival of our traits.
In practice
During a lecture on evolutionary psychology, one might use this quote to illustrate how human perceptions are shaped by biological factors.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart...
A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.
For mortal men there is but one hell, and that is the folly and wickedness and spite of his fellows; but once his life is over, there's an end to it: his annihilation is final and entire, of him nothing survives.
Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.
When resources become skimpy, human beings don't suddenly cooperate to conserve what's left. They fight to the last scrap for possession of a diminishing resource.
Only within yourself exists the other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul.
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