Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Henry Harpending

71 quotes

“We've been almost indoctrinated with this notion that human evolution stopped long ago... Part of the problem was that in the 1950s, social science, in order to validate itself, needed a homogenous humanity, and if you read the literature, it's as if there was a truce. It seems biologists wouldn't even talk about it.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in The Guardian, 15 December 2007
“Dog breeds vary greatly in learning speed and capacity... The typical Border collie can learn a new command after 5 repetitions and respond correctly 95 percent of the time, whereas a basset hound takes 80-100 repetitions to achieve a 25 percent accuracy rate.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No Finn could be mistaken for a Zulu, no Zulu for a Finn.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ultimate cause of this accelerated evolution was the set of genetic changes that led to an increased ability of innovate. Sophisticated language abilities may well have been the key. We would say that new alleles... that led to this increase in creativity were gateway mutations”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Judging by outcomes, modern humans were competitively superior to Neanderthals, but we don't know what their key advantage was”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beginning in Africa, and continuing in the European archaeological record, we see signs of long-distance trade... The Neanderthals never did this”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It doesn't look as if being a modern human, in the sense of having ancestors who were anatomically modern and who originated in Africa, was enough, by itself, to trigger this change. We don't see this storm of innovation in Australia.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Biology keeps culture on a leash, which is why you can't teach a dog to lay poker”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Genetic changes allowed important human developments in 40,000 BC that hadn't been possible in 100,000 BC.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bonobos... branched off from common chimpanzees 800,000 years ago, but the two species can have fertile offspring. Most mammalian sister species retain the ability to interbreed for far longer periods. Sometimes zookeepers are surprised by this, as when a dolphin and a false killer whale produce viable offspring.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“even a few dozen half-Neanderthal babies over thousands of years would have allowed modern humans to acquire most of the Neanderthals' genetic strengths.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“maternal ancestry for most Mexicans is Amerindian, whereas most of their paternal ancestry is Spanish”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Introgression is hardly rare; in fact, it is ubiquitous among domesticated plants.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cows were domesticated at least twice... and possibly a third time”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Amerindians were almost entirely cut off from the rest of the world and had to domesticate their own crops.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The advent of agriculture changed life in many ways, not all of them obvious. It vastly increased food production, but the nutritional quality of the food was worse than it had been among hunter-gatherers. It did not materially increase the average standard of living for long, since population growth easily caught up with improvements in food production. Moreover, higher population density, permanent settlements, and close association with domesticated animals greatly increased the prevalence of infectious disease.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Protein quality decreased as well, since plant foods contained an undesirable mix of amino acids, the chemical building blocks of which proteins are made. Almost any kind of meat has the right mix, but plants often do not”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“90 percent of the Tutsi are lactose tolerant today. These mutations spread quite rapidly and must have been very advantageous.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since there is plenty of vitamin D in fresh meat, hunter-gatherers in Europe may not have suffered from vitamin D shortages and thus may have been able to get by with fairly dark skin. In fact, this must have been the case, since several of the major mutations causing light skin color appear to have originated after the birth of agriculture.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The big increase in carbohydrates, especially carbohydrates that are rapidly broken down in digestion, interfered with the control of blood sugar and appears to have caused metabolic problems such as diabetes. A high-carbohydrate diet also apparently causes acne and tooth decay, both of which are rare among hunter-gatherers. More exactly, both are caused by infectious organisms, but those organisms only cause trouble in the presence of a high-carbohydrate diet.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Australian Aborigines never domesticated plants at all.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“settlement bottlenecks and limited contacts between the populations of the far-flung Polynesian islands would have interfered with the spread of any favorable mutations that did occur.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“in a Malthusian world, something always limits population growth. In this case, fewer deaths by violence meant more deaths due to starvation and infectious disease. Moreover, hunter-gatherer societies do not appear to have been divided into well-fed elites and hungry lower classes, a situation that virtually guarantees malnourishment and/or famine among a significant fraction of the population, whereas agricultural societies did have divisions of this sort.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Malaria reshaped the human genome, but only in some peoples. It has been one of the forces differentiating human populations over the past few thousand years.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Amerindians, for example, experienced very little infectious disease. The story is similar in other isolated populations, such as the Australian Aborigines, Polynesians, and the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands: They didn’t experience millennia of infectious disease, didn’t evolve improved defenses as most Old Worlders did, and were decimated upon contact with the wider world.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes racial similarities are only skin-deep.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In most parts of the world, even in temperate regions, everyone has dark eyes and dark hair. To us these facts suggest that there was something fundamentally different in the selective forces affecting skin color in Europe and East Asia. If those forces were different, at least one of them was probably selecting for something other than vitamin D.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once elites became possible, elite reproductive advantage kicked in. This is the most basic kind of class struggle—the struggle for existence—but it has seldom been noticed by historians, or for that matter by the participants. It could take various forms. In some cases, tremendous advantage accrued to a single male lineage—it’s good to be the king! Researchers have found a surprisingly common form of Y chromosome in 8 percent of Ireland’s male population.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is evidence of an apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By “population sink,” we mean that city dwellers couldn’t manage to raise enough children to break even: Cities in the past, before modern medicine and civil engineering, could only maintain their population with a continuing flow of immigrants from the surrounding countryside.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“since births and deaths still balanced, every decrease in death by violence was counterbalanced by an increase in deaths caused by infectious disease (which hit everybody, including elites) and starvation (peasants only). Government, especially good government, eventually led to decreased standards of living, at least in terms of calories.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Farming led to elites, and there was no avoiding their power. Foragers could walk away from trouble, but farms were too valuable (too important to the farmers’ fitness) to abandon. So farmers had to submit to authority: The old-style, independent-minded personalities that had worked well among egalitarian hunter-gatherers (“A Man’s a Man for a’ That”) were obsolete. Even when some group had a chance to refound society on a more egalitarian basis, as in the case of the medieval Iceland republic, elites tended to reappear.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the well-known middleman minorities, such as Armenians, Jews, Lebanese, Parsees, Indians in East Africa, and Chinese in Southeast Asia, are all descended from long-established agricultural populations.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is also likely that some significant activities had effective thresholds, such that only individuals with atypical traits could perform them. It’s easy to imagine a boulder so heavy that only a few of the strongest men could lift it, but then it’s also easy to imagine a puzzle so difficult that only a few people could solve it, or a song with notes so high that only a few people could sing it. In such situations, outliers are important.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“both of these factors—social phase transitions and increases in the frequency of people with specific talents—may have played a part in the birth of modern science.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If a region or population produces major advances in knowledge, science there is real and alive, otherwise not. By that standard, science does not exist in sub-Saharan Africa or in the Islamic world today. As Pervez Hoodbhoy (head of the physics department in Islamabad) has written, “No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most mountain ranges affect gene flow but aren’t impassable enough to substantially block it. The Himalayas, however, are an exception. Judging from the limited information we have today, it seems that India shares a fair number of favored new alleles with Europe and the Middle East, but has mixed far less with China.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In addition to settling Greeks over much of the Middle East, his Alexander's legacy included Greek kingdoms that survived for several centuries in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those kingdoms didn’t just influence the artistic development of Buddhism; they also transmitted alleles... Local marriage could never have spread genes as rapidly as that—but Genghis and Alexander could.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it originated about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Blue eyes are most common in northern Europe, centered around the Baltic. The simplest assumption is that the allele originated in the center of the region, where its frequency is very high today, so our best guess is that it first occurred in a Lithuanian village about 6,000 years ago.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Bantu had iron tools and a set of domesticated plants adapted to Africa, which together gave them a pretty powerful advantage over the hunter-gatherers they encountered.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are important, well-understood examples of human biological inequality: Some populations can (on average) deal far more effectively with certain situations than others.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although Amerindians did develop agriculture independently—a very effective agriculture that included some of the world’s most important crops, such as maize and potatoes—they domesticated few animals, mostly because they had already wiped out most of the species suited to domestication.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“if infectious disease was so unimportant among Amerindians, selection most likely favored weaker immune systems, because people with weaker immune systems would be better able to avoid autoimmune disorders, in which the immune system misfires and attacks some organ or tissue. Type 1 diabetes, in which the immune system attacks the pancreatic cells that make insulin, and multiple sclerosis, where it attacks the myelin sheaths of the central nervous system, are well-known examples—both are rare among Amerindians. A less vigorous immune system would have been an advantage under those conditions.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Relatively few pathogens, however, traveled in the other direction, from the Americas to the Old World. Syphilis4 and tungiasis (a flea that burrows into the skin) are the only human pathogens we are aware of that originated in the New World and have spread to the Old, although there may be others we haven’t yet recognized—for example, some epidemiologists suspect that rheumatoid arthritis is caused by a cryptic New World pathogen.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some estimates suggest that the indigenous population of the Americas dropped by more than 90 percent over a few centuries, with almost all of the loss due to infectious diseases. This Amerindian vulnerability was a primary reason for European success in the Americas.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even during the twentieth century, first contacts between Amerindians and people of European descent killed one-third to one-half of the natives in the first five years unless there was high-quality medical care available. This was the case during a period in which some of the worst Eurasian diseases (smallpox, bubonic plague, and typhus) were no longer major threats. For example, of the 800 Surui contacted in 1980 in Brazil, 600 had died by 1986, most of tuberculosis.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whenever Europeans made contact with a long-isolated people, whether Amerindians or Australian Aborigines or Polynesians, there was a population crash. When Europeans conquered peoples who had already had extensive contact with other Old World populations, as the British did in India or the Dutch in Indonesia, there was no crash.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the largest of all known expansions—the spread of the Indo-Europeans—was likely driven by the mutation that conferred lactose tolerance, one of the most strongly selected alleles that Europeans possess.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In order to expand as much as they did, early Indo-Europeans must have had some kind of edge, and in order to expand again and again over millennia, they had to have an edge that was hard to copy.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We also know that that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were rather backward in the realms of technology and social complexity. Sumerians invented the wheel, writing, and arithmetic and had cities and extensive irrigation systems at a time when the Proto-Indo-Europeans had, at most, domesticated the horse.”
Henry Harpending (1944–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source