“[If we] give up on free will; no one really deserves blame or credit for anything; we are all slaves of biology.”

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“A huge majority—980 of the 1154 past or present societies for which anthropologists have data—have permitted a man to have more than one wife… [but] most marriages have been monogamous”

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“All the things we are commonly blamed or praised for—ranging from murder to theft to Darwin’s eminently Victorian politeness—are the result not of choices made by some immaterial 'I' but of physical necessity.”

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“An unmarried man 24-35 is about 3x as likely to murder another male as a married man of the same age… leaving lots of men without wives and children is not just inegalitarian; it’s dangerous…”

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“as political power became more widely disbursed, so did wives… one-man-one-vote and one-man-one-wife… monogamy is a straightforward expression of political [and economic] equality among men”

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“blame and punishment are as practically necessary as they are intellectually vacuous”

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“Brotherly love in the literal sense comes at the expense of brotherly love in the biblical sense; the more precisely we bestow unconditional kindness on relatives, the less of it is left over for others.”

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“Darwin took comfort in the hope that his insights would never become common.”

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“Darwin was one of our finest specimens. He did superbly what human beings are designed to do: manipulate social information to personal advantage.”

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“Divorce can happen in hunter-gatherer societies; men did up and leave after fathering a child or two... the lifestyle of the modern philandering bachelor–seducing and abandoning available women year after year... is just what happens when you take the male mind, with its preference for varied sex partners, and put it in a big city replete with contraceptive technology.”

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“emotions are just evolution’s executioners… stratagems of the genes… genetic weapons”

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“evolution not only invented romantic love, but, from the beginning, corrupted it.”

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“female reticence left males competing with one another for scarce reproductive opportunities... why males so often have built-in weapons... males not hereditarily equipped for combat with other males have been excluded from sex and their traits have thus been discarded by natural selection.”

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“Free will is an illusion, brought to us by evolution.”

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“giving men marriage tips is a little like offering Vikings a free booklet titled, 'How Not to Pillage.'”

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“If female infidelity weren't a long-standing part of life in this species, why would distinctly maniacal male jealousy have evolved?”

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“In one experiment, 3/4 of the men approached by an unknown woman on a college campus agreed to have sex with her, whereas none of the women approached by an unknown man were willing.”

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“lasting love is something a person has to decide to experience. Lifelong monogamous devotion is just not natural — not for women even, and emphatically not for men. It requires, for lack of a better term, what we can call an act of will.”

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“Luck is the thing that makes you fail and other people succeed; ability works the other way around.”

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“Monogamy is threatened by the relative wealth of the wealthy… one of the best ways to strengthen monogamous marriage s to more equally distribute income.”

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“most men are probably better off in a monogamous system and most women worse off... the only underprivileged citizens who should favor monogamy are men... it gives them access to a bevy of women that would otherwise drip up the social scale.”

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“Natural selection may favor males that are good at deceiving females about their future devotion and favor females that are good at spotting deception… the better one side gets, the better the other side gets.”

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“Natural selection's disdain for the principle of truth in advertising is widely evident... organisms may present themselves as whatever it is in their genetic interest to seem like. People appear to be no exception.”

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“Not only have males evolved to compete for scare female eggs; females have evolved to compete for scare male investment.”

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“One great spur to divorce is the belief of many men (and no few women) that somehow they just married the 'wrong' person and next time they'll get it 'right.' Not likely. Divorce statistics support Samuel Johnson's characterization of a man's decision to remarry as 'the triumph of hope over experience.'”

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“one way to ensure that male infidelity doesn't lead to desertion is to confine it to, well, whores... few Victorian men sat at the breakfast table daydreaming about leaving their wives for the prostitute they had enjoyed the night before.”

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“serial monogamy, de facto polygyny… the sort of country we already live in… is, in an important sense, the worst of all worlds… inequality among males is more socially destructive than inequality among women.”

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“The best friends are the ones who see each other least clearly… Friends engage in mutual inflation. Being a person’s true friend means endorsing the untruths he hold dearest… Self-love becomes a mutual admiration society.”

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“The choice [between monogamy and polygyny] isn’t between equality and inequality. It’s between equality among men and equality among women.”

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“The mental machinery that drives modern wars—patriotic fervor, mass self-righteousness, contagious rage—have their deepest roots in... conflicts among coalitions of males for status.”

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“The minds of men are an evolutionary record of the past behavior of women. And vice versa.”

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“The one thing harder on children than divorce is parents to stay together even though locked in mortal combat.”

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“The only potentially immortal organic entity is a gene — or, strictly speaking, the pattern of information encoded in the gene, since the physical gene itself will pass away after conveying the pattern through replication”

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“two studies have found that women going to a singles bar wear more jewelry and makeup when near ovulation.”

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“Understanding genetic control is understanding we’re all puppets and our best hope for even partial liberation is deciphering the logic of the puppeteer [who has] exactly zero regard for the happiness of the puppets.”

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“Victorianism went well beyond simple, general repression—the temptation of aging, affluent, or high-status men to desert their wives for a younger model—was met with great social firepower... The double standard may have bolstered monogamy, but these days it brings divorce.”

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“We are far from the only dishonest species, but we are surely the most dishonest… honesty can be a major blunder.”

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“We deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better… Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue”

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“women weren't designed to be suburban housewives”

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