Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 67

People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are [confused]. They have mixed up ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now). [A] good way to understand the logic of natural selection is to imagine that genes are agents with selfish motives. [T]he genes have metaphorical motives — making copies of themselves — and the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish motives into a human brain — heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow unselfishness. The love of children (who carry one's genes into posterity), a faithful spouse (whose genetic fate is identical to one's own), and friends and allies (who trust you if you're trustworthy) can be bottomless and unimpeachable as far as we humans are concerned (proximate level), even if it is metaphorically self-serving as far as the genes are concerned (ultimate level). Combine this with the common misconception that the genes are a kind of essence or core of the person, and you get a mongrel of Dawkins and Freud: the idea that the metaphorical motives of the genes are the deep, unconscious, ulterior motives of the person. That is an error.
Steven Pinker
In the last 25 years, criticism of most theories advanced by Darwin and the neo-Darwinians has increased considerably, and so did their defense. Darwinism has become an ideology, while the most significant theories of Darwin were proven unsupportable. The critics advanced other theories instead of 'natural selection' and the survival of the fittest'. 'Saltatory ontogeny' and 'epigenesis' are such new theories proposed to explain how variations in ontogeny and novelties in evolution are created. They are reviewed again in the present essay that also tries to explain how Darwinians, artificially kept dominant in academia and in granting agencies, are preventing their acceptance. Epigenesis, the mechanism of ontogenies, creates in every generation alternative variations in a saltatory way that enable the organisms to survive in the changing environments as either altricial or precocial forms. The constant production of two such forms and their survival in different environments makes it possible, over a sequence of generations, to introduce changes and establish novelties--the true phenomena of evolution. The saltatory units of evolution remain far-from-stable structures capable of self-organization and self-maintenance (autopoiesis).[Evolution by epigenesis: farewell to Darwinism, neo- and otherwise.]
Eugene K. Balon
Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion -- a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint -- and Mr. Gish [Duane T. Gish the Creation Scientist] is but one of many to make it -- the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.
Michael Ruse
So, if someone like Richard Dawkins indignantly protests that his passion about these sorts of things -- the passion that drives the "God Delusion" -- should not be taken as a religious passion, I am happy to accept that. I do nevertheless think that often Dawkins and company show the sociological characteristics of the religious. This comes across particularly in what Freud calls the narcissism of small differences, the hatred of those who are close to them but not quite close enough. Just as evangelicals can differ bitterly over the true meaning of the host, so the New Atheists loathe people like me who (like them) have no religious belief but who think that science as such does not refute religion.[Is Darwinism a Religion? - Michael Ruse]
Michael Ruse
Evolution is no longer just a theory; it has been proven true beyond a reasonable doubt. The problem is, even people who believe evolution is true disassociate themselves from the process. They somehow skipped all the lower forms of animal life and just started out at the top of the evolutionary ladder.The evidence says we evolved as life evolved.Human beings did not just appear at the top of the evolutionary ladder to reap the benefits of those millions of years of evolution without having to live through it.In other words, you were those other animals. Someone had to be them.You had to be lower animals to be a human now. You lived as all the different animals in your evolutionary line. You lived through millions of years, and millions of lives and deaths to get to where you are now. That's what Darwin's book means.
Michael Smith
A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others.
Steven Pinker
There are animals we haven't stopped by. Don't think they're harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
Yann Martel
...avacados, prickly pears and papayas used to be gulped down whole, seeds and all, by fridge-sized armadillos called glyptodonts.
Adam Leith Gollner
Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination.
Steven Pinker
In evolutionary terms, that means we asked for it.
Sharon Moalem
It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation).
Steven Pinker
Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.
Steven Pinker
He that has learned to feel his sins, and to trust Christ as a Saviour, has learned the two hardest and greatest lessons in Christianity.
J.I. Packer
Our Christian faith - and correlatively, our account of apologetics - is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in the recognition of truth.
James K.A. Smith
...I committed a sin the day I refused you - I discovered metal inside me where my heart should be - forgive me, Love, for acting on principles...
John Geddes
Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged.
J.I. Packer
A rebellion against God, even as believers, is fueled by the toxic fumes of unbelief.
James MacDonald
When we worry, we are telling God, "You are neither trustworthy nor in control, so I need to worry and scheme as I take matters into my own hands." In this way unbelief drives worry, for it is impossible to worry when we are trusting in the provision of our sovereign God.
James MacDonald
Whether you realize it or not, your ongoing battle with unbelief drives all your sinful thoughts, emotions, desires, and actions.
James MacDonald
Our view of human problems determines who is qualified to speak to them. If sin is the primary human problem, then those with the theological and practical expertise in dealing with sin – in its varied and complex forms – should lead the way in the field of people-helping. Unless we have an accurate and robust conception of sin, the church will concede much of its work to outside professional and will be ill-equipped to cooperate with them when needed.
James MacDonald
What causes all this?""Pride. What else?
W.P. Kinsella
Love can’t cover over the sins we cover up…If you want God and others to cover over your sin, stop covering it up.
Mark Buchanan
Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside. It's not my purpose to punish it; it's my joy to cure it.
William Paul Young
His sins seemed to be so few that he was alarmed and groped anxiously for more, knowing he could not be without guilt.
Morley Callaghan
The last confession he heard was from a young hysterical girl who seemed to him to be making up a chain of small sins so that she could imagine herself full of remorse.
Morley Callaghan
You can count the bruises on your heart easily enough, but numbering sins is a far tricker matter. Men are eternally forgetting for their benefit. They leave it to the World to remeber, and to the Outside to call them to harsh accout. One hundred Heavens . . . for one thousand Hells.
R. Scott Bakker
The Church is composed of people, and people do terrible things and commit sin - it's what the Church has been telling us for two thousand years and continues to tell us, which is why the Church is here and essentially one of the major reasons why people hate it so much.
Michael Coren
Where do you go with your broken heart in tow? What do you do with the left over you? And how do you know, when to let go? Where does the good go, where does the good go?
Tegan Quin
Money isn't the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have good value: good turns and gifts must flow and circulate . . . for any social system to remain in balance.
Margaret Atwood
happiness is a choice. If you choose to mope and be glum, you shall be; but if you wish to be happy and determine to enjoy what life has to offer, then you can have that as well.“She said that nothing is all good or all bad, that life offers everyone a mix of both—though sometimes it does not seem so, and bad is all we can see in our lives, while in the lives of others we see only good and feel envy. She said we must enjoy the good despite the bad, else life can beat us down and leave us hopeless, and that is no way to live.
Lynsay Sands
Most of didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.
Rachel Cusk
There’s a good reason for everything, ain’t there?
Rebecca McNutt
No man ever truly possesses a woman, anyhow," said Gidas moodily. "He has her body for a time if he's lucky, but only the most fleeting glimpse into her soul." Gidas was a poet, or wanted to be.
Guy Gavriel Kay
I understand her immediately. She is an instigator, a fire starter, an accelerant of a human being, throwing herself into the middle of a crowd and lighting it up. She is fucking lighter fluid.
Marjorie Celona
Just be the strong woman you are, like me. If the guys can't handle us, it's their problem.
Amanda Sun
A bodyguard for a pretty socialite, I was moving up in the world. Like all idiots I naturally assumed she was pretty because she was rich. You can buy anything with money, even people, even... beauty.
Bruce Crown
A man can work from sun to sun, But a woman's work is never done.
Jean Little
Vaheguru, forgive me, but a woman must choose the wisdom of lies over the dangers of truth.
Shauna Singh Baldwin
I wouldn't wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.
Lawrence Hill
A woman carries her inner life - lugs it around or holds it in fumes that both poison and bless her - while nourishing another's inner life, many others actually, while never revealing too much madness, or, possibly, never revealing where she stores it: her island of lost mind.
Durga Chew-Bose
...a woman not yet seen, but whose perfume accumulates on the horizon like a storm cloud.
Fernand Dumont
A lot of self-help methods are based on mental discipline or on working through emotional issues. What these approaches lack in an awareness of how the body is an integral part of the equation. The health of your body influences what you experience in your mind. There is no split. If you can engage your whole spirit in the pursuit of fitness--not just your intellect, not just your emotions-- but instead everything inside you that is truly you, you'll discover what it is to be a whole person.
David Patchell-Evans
Sustenance! Your health is always the best prescription.
Lorii Myers
Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made—on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.
Malcolm Gladwell
A well-made turtleneck sweater will keep you warm, cozy, and protected from the cold. Your gums do the same thing for your teeth.
Nadine Artemis
Teeth are alive, and given the proper environment, they can regenerate; this is why internal factors that nourish the teeth are so important.
Nadine Artemis
Brave out-of-the-box thinkers are transforming and renewing the conventional practice of dentistry. While most of their work is still not mainstream, these dentists and medical doctors have paved the way to healthy, nontoxic dentistry.
Nadine Artemis
And there’s one other matter I must raise. The epidemic of domestic sexual violence that lacerates the soul of South Africa is mirrored in the pattern of grotesque raping in areas of outright conflict from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in areas of contested electoral turbulence from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Inevitably, a certain percentage of the rapes transmits the AIDS virus. We don’t know how high that percentage is. We know only that women are subjected to the most dreadful double jeopardy.The point must also be made that there’s no such thing as the enjoyment of good health for women who live in constant fear of rape. Countless strong women survive the sexual assaults that occur in the millions every year, but every rape leaves a scar; no one ever fully heals.This business of discrimination against and oppression of women is the world’s most poisonous curse. Nowhere is it felt with greater catastrophic force than in the AIDS pandemic. This audience knows the statistics full well: you’ve chronicled them, you’ve measured them, the epidemiologists amongst you have disaggregated them. What has to happen, with one unified voice, is that the scientific community tells the political community that it must understand one incontrovertible fact of health: bringing an end to sexual violence is a vital component in bringing an end to AIDS.The brave groups of women who dare to speak up on the ground, in country after country, should not have to wage this fight in despairing and lonely isolation. They should hear the voices of scientific thunder. You understand the connections between violence against women and vulnerability to the virus. No one can challenge your understanding. Use it, I beg you, use it.
Stephen Lewis
She felt her strong young body that she had never appreciated when she had it, constantly worrying that she didn't meet standards of beauty and not understanding how standards of health were so much more important.
Jo Walton
I used to jog but it's bad for the knees. Too much beta carotene turns you orange, too much calcium gives you kidney stones. Health kills.
Margaret Atwood
I'd rather be rich and healthy than poor and sick.
kevin mcpherson eckhoff
But I hate being a grandfather. It's indecent. In my mind's eye, I'm still twenty-five. Thirty-three max. Certainly not sixty-seven, reeking of decay and dashed hopes. My breath sour. My limbs in dire need of a lube job. And now that I've been blessed with a plastic hip-socket replacement, I'm no longer even biodegradable. Environmentalists will protest my burial.
Mordecai Richler
Can these foods [low-fat, vitamin-enriched, etc] even be called "healthy"? Perhaps we should think about it this way: If you cut a batch of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine with chai, you could say with some degree of honesty that it is "healthier," "less addictive," and "now with chai!" But would you say it's "good for you"?
Mark Schatzker
Their [plant secondary compounds] healthful effects in humans, however, are not well understood, in part because things in nature like coriander and basil can't be patented so there isn't a lot of money being thrown at them, and in part because long-term studies that measure small effects of low doses are expensive and don't yield the kind of unambiguous, major effects you get with pharmaceuticals, but mainly because preventions are never as exciting as cures.
Mark Schatzker
Our body hears whatever is in our minds and responds.
Akiroq Brost
Our body hears whatever is in our minds and responds.
Akiroq Brost
The word antimicrobrial is a sales feature in soaps, skin lotions, cleaning supplies, food perspectives, plastics, and even fabrics. However, only about one hundred species of microbes are known to actually cause diseases in humans; the vast majority of the thousands of species that inhabit us do not cause any problems, and, in fact, seem to come with serious benefits.
B. Brett Finlay
Lyme disease is preventable, but only if Canadians have the information they need to prevent it.
Vanessa Farnsworth
For everything that's known about Lyme disease, there are still an extraordinary number of unknowns in some fairly fundamental areas.
Vanessa Farnsworth
Our body hears whatever is in our minds and responds.
Akiroq Brost