Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.
Interpretation
Humans have the ability to make choices that can go against natural evolutionary trends.
In this quote, Jared Diamond suggests that unlike other animals, humans possess a remarkable capability to make decisions and take actions that do not follow the dictates of natural evolution. This ability allows us to challenge and alter the course of our development, for better or worse, through conscious choices, ethics, culture, and technology, which can lead to both progress and potential pitfalls.
In practice
During a lecture on human evolution, you might cite this quote to discuss the unique decision-making abilities of humans.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean β once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
The true man of the past waited upon Heaven when dealing with people and did not wait upon people when dealing with Heaven.
More thinking is required, and we should all exercise our God-given right to think and be unafraid to express our opinions, with proper respect for those to whom we talk and proper acknowledgment of our own shortcomings. We must preserve freedom of the mind in the church and resist all efforts to suppress it. The church is not so much concerned with whether the thoughts of its members are orthodox or heterodox as it is that they shall have thoughts.
Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.
It forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations; or if a civilized people has ever given admission to any of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors.
All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage.
Fire and water may as well agree in the same vessel, as grace and sin in the same heart.
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